Letter from a Dogfighter’s Aunt, Deceased
HUMPY, THE STUCK-UP LIBRARIAN, ruined little Brody. There is a certain truth down in there allowing them a purchase, at least, upon what happened. For I must say that if I had not read so many books, I could only have seen Brody as a runaway and so would probably not have helped him. This is not to say, of course, that a more legitimate member of the family might not have come along, spotted him making his break, and helped him out of another motive: to teach him a lesson, let us say. His father would have done that, moral waste dump that he is.
Humpy’d turn over in her grave. They say that when a family member uses incorrect grammar — grammar so out of form, that is, that they, its chief torturers on earth, can recognize something awry. Don’t say ain’t, your Aunt Humpy she’d turn over in her grave if she couldn’t hardly hear you. The remonstrated child, if he has some spirit, will sneak outside and put his mouth to the ground and yell ain’t into the dirt, blowing ants and debris away from his dirty face. They have one of these, Brody’s wife’s sister’s child, for whom I am performing unbid the services of guardian angel, endeared more and more to the little delinquent with each lip-to-ground utterance he calls me with.
What does happen in heaven — heaven or hell, it is purely a matter of choice, and I have ever preferred, no matter the situation, the happier name for it — what does happen when one is alleged to turn in a grave is generally that one does spin, but in a kind of spiritual pirouette. Ain’t, yestiddy, spose to, and all precocious profanity comes shouted into the dirt and I do my tickled dance and love that child the more for daring to torture the dead.
You needn’t believe me, but that — a high quotient of daring — is what heaven (again, call it hell if you will) is all about, if I may speak in earthly parlance. Here we are the children we were born as, without the myriad prejudices and passions and myopias that made us the human beings we mortally became. And when you can see, from the vantage of correct vision restored, a young child yet unoccupied by teachings human, it will make you dance. All guardian angels are secured in the first six days of human life.
This is a bit specious-looking for you. You do not want to buy it. You wonder, I hope you do, how I inform you of Brody’s thoughts on picking damp bolls, the cruelty of having to pick damp cotton, the day he decided to run away. I tell you. Humpy, the dead egghead spinster librarian, tells you all they think and know on earth.
One night my special child, Lonnie, was involved in some ghost-story telling in a tent in the back yard. He went outside and squatted close and yelled haint. No one had corrected him against the word (or will); it was to him clearly guilty of association with ain’t. Inches from his straining face a startled copperhead drew back. I possessed that snake to simply smile.
While it occurs to me, Brody did not become a dogfighter, any more than I was a queer librarian, despite his acknowledged associations with real dogfighters and despite my developed habit of looking over reading glasses at ill-bred men.
Here’s Brody: I was going to be a big dogfighter. It’s something. The defenses. The dogs is still good. But… it’s not for me. It’s the people. The trash. It’s just not for me.
His old man, the preacher: My boy, I don’t know what he is, come specifically to it. I know he’s not a preacher. I know he’s got a hundred monsters on chains in a piece of swamp he bought. You tell me. I don’t know what he is. What does a man do with monsters on chains in a swamp, comes by in a new Buick or new panel truck all the time? To talk about nothing. Any old kid can just trying things out run away once, even leave his own mother picking cotton alone — me, I was at the Bible convention. But to turn out a common man, that tries me, that almost tries my faith.
A dogfighter: Ho! Dogfight’ll take ten years off your life. God, the yelling and swearing and … niggers! Nigger don’t know how to act no matter where you put him. And they ain’t all of it. I just go to cockfights now. Gentlemen still run a cockfight.
And dear Lonnie: My Aunt Humpy she is not buried very deep. She can hear talk. I think they don’t even know where she is buried, because if you say certain things, anywhere, like even in Darlington under the canopy for a race, they say she can hear it even though you can’t hear it yourself what your own self says. I want to be sure she hears it if she can get to turn over when she does.
My dear sister Cecelia: it’s hard to say your own sister was a queer, but I have to admit it. That’s the worst thing. Rescuing Brody from the brier patch with his tied-up suitcase was a drop in the bucket next to the main crimes, though that was about the first of the big ones. She was an intellectual. They say the library over at Pembert is still ahead of its time, even though they stopped spending money on it when she died. She had nothing to do with Brody staying gone four years, coming home married to a Mormon girl, of all things. They rolled up in a newish pickup, all sheepish looks at the ground, one sofa and about five of them dogs tied in the back, the dogs sitting on the sofa smiling at everything, like what a joke it all was.
Brody on the dogs: These dogs you read about eating babies don’t have a thing to do with it. I’ve sold three thousand dogs in ten years and not one of them has bit a child or I’d know. I’d know about it quick, buddyro. I sell these dogs to people who pay $300, and when they pay $300 they don’t expect something to eat their children. I don’t think most of my dogs would bite a man without proper training, to tell the truth. They don’t have to.
Ceece even says it: my picking up Brody and setting him on the road to ruin is minuscule. Queer. Ha. Or, Ho!
It is funny how folk can extrapolate aberrations ultimately all to the sexuaclass="underline" to say, the first child in a family of heathen to receive an education — to refine himself in virtually any way — will be sooner or later alleged homosexual. And naturally my relatives, my living relatives, were no different. Let me essay to classify us our clan directly, lest anyone waste energy on the very simplest of human taxonomy by my failure to state the obvious. We are white North Carolina Baptist — not the absolute worst run of trash on earth only because of a strange rubbing off of the otherwise bogus FIRST IN FREEDOM presumptions wafting out of the Research Triangle.
I am grateful to be able now to take the long view, as we say here. We see the earth many ways, time in its various dimensions — one of my favorites is the micrometer slice of a living life. It is possible to see Brody that day as if he is on a thin transparency cut from the waxen log that his whole life, and all lives around him, have come to be. The nice light of one pure moment shines easily through him as he stands, nervous, courage-screwed, hugging his suitcase, in the wet briers. He looks rather like an overgrown, beaten child. We can place a slice of a later Brody over this same setting: today, for example, he stands there waiting for me (not for me, for anyone) in blue polyester pants the color of the sky and an olive duck shirt he cannot keep tucked in, his crew cut a little shaggy, looking diffidently off to the ground near one of his hard shoes, still looking a little beat-up. That quality remains: though he did not become a dog-fighter, he did come close enough to share the common mark of the fraternity — the beaten-up. Dogfighters look, to a man (not to mention the ladies), beaten-up, despite brave cosmetics against it: buntline pistols, leather sport jackets, fancy boots, contractors’ jewelry, full bellies and pomaded hair, and many, many Mickey Gilley smiles. This is partly why they take the pleasure they do in watching a thoroughbred dog, conditioned to a point suggesting piano wires and marble, reduced by another sculpted cat to a soft red lump resembling bloody terry cloth.