“Where’d you find that, Mama?” Gary said.
“I had it,” she said. Her hair was coated with dust and it hung limply around the sides of her head so that her ears stuck through.
“How much you got?” the old man said. He was taking it off her knee and counting it. “Eight dollars? You got any more?” She shook her head.
He got up immediately, his leg forgotten, and put the bills in his pocket.
“I’ll go on over to the store,” he said. “See what I can buy.”
Gary got up. “Let me go with you,” he said.
“Ain’t no need for you to go. I can do it.”
“Go with him, Gary,” Fay said, nudging him.
“Just stay here. I’ll be back after while.”
“You gonna get some gas?” Gary said.
“Gas? What for?”
“For that wasp nest.”
Wade shook his head, already starting off. “I ain’t got nothin to carry it in.”
“We gonna have to rob that wasp nest before we can stay in there.”
“Well, if I find a jar to bring it back in I’ll buy some.” They stood and watched him stagger away through the hot woods. When he was out of hearing Fay turned on her mother.
“What’d you give him all that money for? He ain’t gonna do nothin but catch a ride to town and buy whiskey with it.”
“Leave her alone,” Gary said. “She don’t need you fussin at her.”
At nine that night they were gathered around a small fire in the middle of the yard, mute in the thunderous din of crickets. The grasses and weeds were beginning to look like a bedding ground. They were cooking a meal of pork and beans in opened cans, and the old man was halfway through a bottle of Old Crow. They had foraged for firewood and had a pile nearby.
The faces around the fire were pinched, the eyes a little big, a little dazed with hunger. They sat and watched the blaze burn the paper off the cans. When the beans began to sizzle, the woman stooped painfully on her bad hip and reached for the cans with a rag wrapped around her hand. Clotted strings of hair hung from her head. She took five paper plates, set them out on the ground, and dumped the beans onto them, shaking them as she went, the way a person might put out dog food for a pet. She dumped the largest portion into the plate intended for the old man.
The breadwinner was sitting crosslegged on the ravaged grass, the whiskey upright in the hole his legs formed. He was weaving a home-rolled cigarette back and forth from his lips, eyes bleary, red as fire. He was more than a little drunk. His head and chest would slump forward, then he’d jerk erect, his eyes sleepy. Grimed and furtive hands reached out for the plates quietly, took them back and drew away from the fire into darker regions of the yard. The old woman took two small bites and then rose and scraped the rest of her food into the boy’s plate.
The fire grew dimmer. The plate of beans before the old man steamed but he didn’t notice. A candlefly bored crazily in out of the night and landed in the hot sauce, struggled briefly and was still. The old man’s head went lower and lower onto his chest until the only thing they could see was the stained gray hat over the bib of his overalls. He snuffled, made some noise. His chest rose and fell. They watched him like wolves. The fire cracked and popped and white bits of ash fell away from the tree limbs burning in the coals. Sparks rose fragile and dying, orange as coon eyes in the gloom. The ash crumbled and the fading light threw darker shadows still. The old man toppled over slowly, a bit at a time like a rotten tree giving way, until the whiskey lay spilling between his legs. They watched him for a few minutes and then they got up and went to the fire and took his plate and carried it away into the dark.
A SHANNON RAVENEL BOOK
Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
WORKMAN PUBLISHING
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2007 by Mary Annie Brown.
All rights reserved.
“Larry Brown: Passion to Brilliance” by Barry Hannah first appeared in slightly different form in The Yalobusha Review, Vol. XI, 2006.
Copyright © 2006 by Barry Hannah. Reprinted by permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILBLE.
E-book ISBN 978-1-56512-696-1
Also by Larry Brown
ESSAYS
On Fire
Billy Ray’s Farm
STORIES
Facing the Music
Big Bad Love
NOVELS
Dirty Work
Joe
Father and Son
Fay
The Rabbit Factory
“Larry Brown has slapped his own fresh tattoo on the big right arm of Southern Lit.” — Washington Post Book World
PRAISE FOR FACING THE MUSIC
“A stunning debut short story collection.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“If his first book … were itself a fire, it would require five alarms. The stories are that strong.” —The Orlando Sentinel
“Larry Brown … is a choir of Southern voices, all by himself.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“Ten raw and strictly 100-proof stories make up one of the more exciting debuts of recent memory—fiction that’s gritty and genuine, and funny in a hard-luck way.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Like his profession, Larry Brown’s stories are not for the delicate or the fainthearted. His characters are limited people who are under siege… . Their stories manage to touch us in surprisingly potent ways.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer
PRAISE FOR DIRTY WORK
“There has been no anti-war novel … quite like Dirty Work.”
—The New York Times
“A novel of the first order… . A gem.” —The Washington Post
“Explodes like a land mine… . A marvelous book.”
—The Kansas City Star
“A real knockout.” —New York Newsday
“An unforgettable, unshakable novel.”
—The New York Times Book Review
PRAISE FOR BIG BAD LOVE
“Larry Brown is an American original.” —The Washington Post
“Larry Brown [is] a writer from Faulkner country who has the savvy to sound only like himself. His gift is the ability to capture convincing Southern voices and to allow them to tell their stories in their own words.” —Chicago Tribune
“The images are sharp; the sense of love lost reverberates, hard. Painfully, powerfully elegant.” —Detroit Free Press
“Big, bad and wonderful! … A stunning collection of stories about real people and real life.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A voice as true as a gun rack, unpretentious and uncorrupted. [In] a surprising combination of sharp wit and great sorrow … comes a sure sense of a compassionate writer deeply in touch with the sorrowful rhythms of not just Southern, but human, life.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
PRAISE FOR JOE
“Powerful… . In the whiskeyish, rascally Southern tradition of Faulkner.” —Time
“That rare kind of novel that features a full display of a writer’s gifts … Joe achieves the complete transparency and authenticity of great fiction, and ‘great’ is not a word to be used lightly.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A tragic, compelling new novel.” —The Associated Press
“Brown has quietly established himself as among the finest of the new generation of Southern writers. His latest work is absolutely riveting in its rawness. Brown has unleashed all his skills in this story.” —The Denver Po
st
“Demands to be read, reread, talked about, and relished.” —Booklist
PRAISE FOR ON FIRE
“He left the Oxford, Mississippi, fire department after his first novel was published. It paid off.” —Men’s Journal
“Brown brings to his first work of nonfiction the same no-nonsense style that makes his novels and short stories so powerful and intense.” —Kirkus Reviews
“He is blunt and abrasive about subjects that tend to cause flinching. He tells stories in plain language.” —The New Yorker
“The writing in On Fire is so good and simple that we can appreciate all the effort that went into making it appear so.”
—The Orlando Sentinel
“Larry Brown’s determination to be a writer has certainly paid off. On Fire is a sharp, perceptive, enormously readable autobiography. Never for a minute will a reader doubt the honesty of this clear, pared-down prose.” —The Dallas Morning News
PRAISE FOR FATHER AND SON
“Powerful, suspenseful and moving literary entertainment, the work of an enormously gifted natural writer.”
—The Washington Post
“The model is Faulkner, but his influence has been absorbed and transcended… . The work of a writer absolutely confident of his own voice.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Larry Brown is one of the great unsung heroes of American fiction … His work is a reminder of a reason to read.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“Father and Son is so vividly written it is almost cinematic.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Larry Brown is a master.” —New York Newsday
“Riveting.” —Vanity Fair
PRAISE FOR FAY
“Hard, true, and beautiful.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Larry Brown’s writing is beyond seductive—it’s addictive and nearly narcotic. His spare lines ring clear as single bell notes.”
—The Austin Chronicle
“Brown writes like a boxer—economical, crisp, wounding.”
—Men’s Journal
“Nobody does the seamy, boozy, violent side of the modern South better than Mr. Brown.” —The Cincinnati Enquirer
“Brown is a writer with the eye of a documentarian, his prose aiming for nothing short of ruthlessly capturing the truth of the world in which he has always lived.” —USA Today
PRAISE FOR BILLY RAY’S FARM
“‘Read this book.’ Read it for the clarity of its prose, the vividness of its imagery … its emotional honesty and its humor … its beauty and its wisdom and its grit. Just read it.” —The Roanoke Times
“Sometimes it doesn’t matter what a writer writes. It’s all good. Larry Brown has reached that point in his career.” —The Orlando Sentinel
“Brown’s essays are built out of small, often raw details. His matter-of-fact sentences are simple, even flat; but strung together, flow into rhythms worthy of his favorite blues guitarists.” —USA Today
“Balances pastoral odes with a clear-eyed accounting of the costs of country living… . These humble, personal essays … provide a glimpse at the long apprenticeship of a writer who came up the hard way.” —Publishers Weekly
“Brown is the real thing: a self-taught country boy … whose heart is obviously, and wholly, in the country he loves.”
—The Washington Post
Larry Brown, A Miracle of Catfish
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