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Article Excerpt
On the way to eat venison chili at the home of one of his girlfriends, my father confessed that he and my mother couldn't stand the sight of each other any more and had decided to divorce. Whenever he had something important to tell me, Daddy'd say, "C'mon, baby," and hand me the car keys. He'd sip and give directions till the blacktop ended and we rode on dirt and gravel. I took a pull of whisky from the flask he offered, passed it back to him, and drove his Cadillac off the muddy road and into a muddier ditch. Fortunately, we both wore seat-belts and I was driving slowly, as it was nighttime and raining and I did not know how the hell to get to Lorreen's. Daddy pulled me out the passenger door since my side lay on the ground. Once he'd established that I had not been injured, we started trudging the mile to Lorreen's house, hand in hand. "You still gonna love me?"
"That won't never stop," he replied, knowing without my saying so that I meant after I wrecked his car rather than after the divorce. Long ago used to my here-today-gone-tomorrow father, I felt confident that not much would change.
I apologized about his prized Cadillac. That one was maroon with white leather upholstery. "Aw, hell, baby," he replied. "Won't be no harm done. Me and Fritz'll get Kenny's tractor tomorrow and pull it right out. Anybody asks tonight, I swerved to miss a deer." At the time I thought it the most gallant thing I had ever heard. In retrospect, I realize he said it because we were celebrating my eleventh birthday that night.
Most of my librarian colleagues at Duke University would probably be afraid of most of my relatives. To be honest, I can't blame them. Shaking hands with a couple of my cousins in broad daylight is enough to make you sleep with the lights on till Groundhog Day.
Daddy's a different story, though. Despite his occasional run-in with the authorities and his deep and abiding belief that all sentient beings should carry loaded pistols, the man could flat-out charm. So let's be fair. His legal problems usually had to do with guns and how he shot them; something he said when he got thanked for not smoking; or the way he drove cars and women--the former way too fast and the latter damn near crazy.
I thought about my father after I finished graduate school when big alligators wandered into the parking lot of my apartment building in Baton Rouge from the Bayou de Plantier across the road. You'd step on the little ones right often. It hurt me to see them, car-mashed, usually dead, about a foot long, max. I worked in the Special Collections Library at LSU then, and I would find what was left in the morning, dried flat and already soldered to sun-warmed Louisiana asphalt looking like retreads from a tricycle blowout.
Didn't see the big ones much. Adult alligators, unlike us, get smarter and shyer with time and experience. Once in a while, though, a big one would slither out of the mud and cross Lee Drive by night, seduced by a resident corgi's scent or by a three-day leftover etouffee ripening in the dumpster. There would be shouts, squeals, car lights, flashlights, and finally, blue lights. Men would come armed with darts, guns, long loops on sticks, and big ideas. A couple of times they actually managed to capture or kill the outraged creature without hurting themselves.
More often he'd lunge and his tormenters would shriek and cuss and jump back further than you'd think they could--hell, further than they thought they could--and then he'd take his time, lumbering on back to the bayou where he could be his reptilian self without getting in trouble.
And that's when I'd think about Daddy. Easy-going and slow-to-anger in his element, once in a while he'd just venture out too far, get caught in the headlights of more refined and genteel folks, and simply scare the living shit out of them. Don't get me wrong. The way he saw it, Daddy never actually broke the law. He simply never allowed it to break him. He tripped over it sometimes, the way he might an obstacle in his path. He looked at it--confused, annoyed, embarrassed if people were watching, maybe a little bruised if he stumbled hard enough--and wondered how the hell that got in his way. He might feel foolish for not avoiding it. Never once would it occur to him to blame himself.
After years of aggravation and surrender, my parents went down to the Tuscaloosa County courthouse and got divorced. My mother had always hated Daddy's hunting, hated the guts and the guns of it, hated the gamey roasts soaking in buttermilk in her white kitchen sink. Hated the sight of her curly-headed eldest daughter all bloody and laughing, holding a buck's hoof in her hand and yanking on the naked white tendon to watch it contract. Hated the call from the teacher when the girl took said hoof to show-and-tell.
Most of all she hated him leaving her alone for his woods and his wildness, and especially for the times he said he'd left her for them, but come back home with no carcass on the hood, humming a popular new song and how the hell could he have heard it down there in West Greene, Alabama, with no radio in the cabin or the goddamn truck? Hard to tell when it shifted, but before long it was the hunter she hated instead of the hunt.
But that took some time, and no damn wonder. My favorite picture of him hangs in my study. He was thirty-six years old when it was taken, tan as a hickory nut and pride nearly popping the buttons off his flannel shirt. He holds up the giant buck's lifeless head so lightly, like he's leading it in a dance, the animal more moose than deer. Some of his buddies say it still holds an Alabama record. Antlers spread out like banners in a breeze. And there's my father smiling with those pale green eyes, not...
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