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  SWINGING THROUGH DIXIE

  Swinging Through Dixie

  LEON ROOKE

  A JOHN METCALF BOOK

  BIBLIOASIS

  WINDSOR, ONTARIO

  Copyright © Leon Rooke, 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Rooke, Leon, author

  Swinging through Dixie / Leon Rooke.

  Short stories.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77196-103-5 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-77196-104-2 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS8585.O64S95 2016 C813’.54 C2016-901856-3

  C2016-901857-1

  Edited by John Metcalf

  Copy-edited by Kathryn Hayward

  Typeset by Chris Andrechek

  Cover designed by Gordon Robertson

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  For Tim and Elke

  —and Fran

  Swinging Through Dixie 9

  Sara Mago et al 141

  Slain by a Madman 155

  The Historian 171

  Trading with Mexico 191

  SWINGING THROUGH DIXIE

  Old man Hubbard has made his appearance. He breakfasts daily on a stool at the Dinette, always one cheese biscuit, one sausage biscuit, grits, a slab of country ham, two runny fried eggs—if his stomach is considered reliable—jelly. He hovers at the café through morning, padding in knee-high boots from one stool to the other in the receipt and giving of news—which family had fights the previous night, who has come down with broken bones, who got laid off, which mill super is the flaming bastard to work for, which one of those on hand suffers worse rheumatism, how long will this dry spell continue, what is intended with all those confounded nearby acres some fanatic has cleared and has now set a’fire.

  What fire? Where is it? What are you talking about?

  Fire is today’s hot topic at the Dinette. A barn at the town’s edge has come down, trees have been felled, and now stumps blaze day and night. No one knows why. Is a maniac meaning to burn up the town? All except Hubbard agree the burning makes no sense. Hubbard says, “Everything makes sense if a sensible person chooses to bring sense to it.” The others say to him, “You don’t make no sense either. Hubbard, you’ve gone and got old! Your marbles have disappeared downstream.”

  Today a news item heard at eight a.m. at 1220 on your radio dial, has aroused strong speculation about the other fire: “Before daylight this a.m., an early-vintage Ford automobile was discovered in fiery blaze on the road shoulder this side of State Line. Occupants alive or dead, if any, unknown at this hour. Slick Jess Helms, on the fiery spot, reporting. Tune in next news hour.”

  “That bastard won’t on no spot. I seen him in the studio flirting with—”

  “Guy thinks he’s Gabriel Heatter on the Mutual Radio Network. Thinks he’s the Eyes and Ears of the World.”

  “Gabriel Heatter ain’t on Mutual.”

  “Is.”

  “‘Adolph come right down Main Street paddling his U-boat. Enemy subs spotted off Kill Devil Hills.’ That’s Mutual and Slick for you. Trying to keep us on our toes.”

  “The war’s done over.”

  “Gabriel Heatter done good on that Lindbergh kidnap mess, didn’t he, Hubbard?”

  “When was that?”

  “Sixteen years ago come June. You wrote more editorials opposing that baby-killer’s execution than you did arguing the cotton mills ought not to come here.”

  Shhhhh. Hubbard’s asleep.

  The burning car: several Dinette patrons have exercised their God-given right, as well as satisfied their curiosity, by driving out to State Line to view the vehicle. “It was still blazing when I come upon it,” all reported. “Tires, you know, will take a man’s lifetime to burn. What Slick said about occupants living or dead, I’d be bound to agree with. What looked to be a skull turned out to be the gear shift shot into the roof, if that crate had any roof left. I got right singed, looking. But if that buggy wasn’t Grey’s, you can boil me in your onion soup like you would a housefly.”

  “Naw. Can’t be Grey’s.”

  “Why in tarnation not?”

  “He ain’t never coming back here. His wife would kill ’m.”

  “I might myself.”

  “You and me both.”

  “All I am saying is was it looked like his car. I seen what looked like burnt cue sticks. That damn fool would save his pool sticks before he saved his own self.”

  “You’re saying Grey’s kicked the bucket?”

  “He’s kicked the bucket and all hell loose if he was in that inferno.”

  “Grey and Essie couldn’t drive that Ford to the corner store without something befalling it.”

  “Well that’s a Ford for you.”

  “Now hold on. He was a good man to work for.”

  “Who?”

  “Henry.”

  ‘My pappy says Henry Ford was good to women and black people and Chinamen but couldn’t abide Jews. It was his paper—”

  “Everybody gots to hate someone.”

  “—published them…”

  “Pappy’d go hysterics he saw anybody driving anything except—”

  “—them Protocols made your hair stand up.”

  “Jesus Christ and save matches, what are you talking about? We got only one Jew in town and that’s Sam at the shoe store. Sam don’t drive a Ford.”

  “Five. Sam’s wife, Vitria, and three offshoots.”

  “Vitria is First Baptist.”

  “Henry and Adoph were good buddies. They had snapshots of each other on their desks. Ask Hubbard. He’ll tell you.”

  “Hubbard?”

  “How would I know? I’ve not seen my own desk in twenty years. And I sure as fire never saw theirs. Sorrel is right about those Protocols, though. And it may or may not have been Grey’s scorched auto. If so, he would have got his butt flying. He’s too dad-blamed ornery to git hisself burnt.”

  “I won’t come near a Ford my own self.”

  “Not mine you won’t.”

  “Damn. I can’t open my trap around here without one of you jaspers putting your foot in it.”

  Amarantha came through with more coffee for Hubbard, should he want it. The others she was inclined to treat with total disregard. They were too garrulous. They were stupid. They were sex fiends. They didn’t tip. Hubbard always left a dime. A few pennies more, if his pockets rattled with too many. “Here you loungers sit,” she said to them. “Bunch of useless buzzards.”

  Now Mandy, they said. Buzzards ain’t useless. Buzzards are the salt of the earth.

  Mandy—Hubbard called her Sunshine when not employing her actual name—held that all men were sex fiends. She had no interest in the business herself—most were stupid, and so cheap they wouldn’t hold out a bone to a starving dog, which in this town many were.
She had been at the eatery through all its rebirths. The original building, a barn midst scrappy farmland before the town became one, finally surrendered to rot. For decades, the rot remained as it had fallen, in the town centre, threaded through with crab grass, dandelion, and finally overtaken by kudzu. Hubbard, through that period publisher, editor, and owner of the Weekly Herald, had written countless editorials bemoaning the eyesore. When the new building went up, a board-and-batten structure imprecisely plumbed, Mandy came with it. She was by then a hundred pounds heavier and looked a good deal shorter. She’s put on the weight herself, she said, but marriage to Finn had done the rest. You married Finn? No, he got me drunk and married me. That was on a Thursday. By Saturday noon the marriage was over. In and out like a coo-coo bird, as she told it. Finn was told she never wanted to see him again, but she’d seen him every day since, Finn being a Dinette regular. It was Finn opting for Grey’s death by fire out by State Line.

  Amarantha was going through the place now, thumb-tacking Today’s Menu on various uneven walls. Everyone, including Hubbard, was interested in that.

  “What’s your special today?” he asked.

  “Okra in slime,” she said. “Everything today comes ladled in slime.”

  Hubbard laughed. It was sometimes difficult getting the truth out of Amarantha. She liked having fights with the kitchen. She thought the kitchen received entirely too much praise. Praise made her uncomfortable.

  “The onliest way to git slime off okra,” Finn said, “is to take a blow torch to it.” This statement, containing a whiff of truth, elicited strong opinion.

  “The hog jowls with collard greens is good if you got your teeth in and have a hankering for grease,” Amarantha said. Her mood was foul.

  All ears were tuned to 1220 on the radio dial when the next news flash came, Slick Jess Helms reporting. “Fire by burning automobile, now said to be a 1942 Ford coupe, still rages out by a notorious State Line Nitespot, there apparently being no fire brigade servicing the area. A local resident of some repute is rumoured to be the vehicle owner. Body or bodies have not yet been discovered. Nitespot resident, entrepreneur, and entertainer Debora Doon refused comment. Next report on the Farm Digest, high noon. Stay tuned.”

  “‘Ill repute,’ he meant saying. Ain’t that so, Hubbard?”

  “That puerile loudmouth Slick don’t consult with me,” Hubbard said.

  The regulars knew the lecture they would be in for if they asked what puerile meant.

  The Dinette cat, Douglas MacArthur, nicknamed the General, had hopped onto Hubbard’s lap. It was trying to dislodge the hearing aid from the old man’s ear. It satisfied the Dinette regulars to watch that.

  At noon when the Dinette begins to swell, Hubbard will parlay the cane chair known as his personal property, either by dint of his own hand or another’s, to the sunny spot outside the café, where it and he will lean against the charred wall between two stumpy barrels in which half-rooted evergreens vainly seek longevity. The bushes are less nourished than is Hubbard, more threadbare and decrepit, while seeming to reflect Hubbard’s calm outlook on a world into which he has been unwillingly cast and against which he stubbornly persists. Dogs familiar to him will nose his crotch and prod his hands for food and settle into sleep around his legs if they are so disposed. On hotter days, if his old bones allow a pittance of relief, he will nod off himself, deaf to those passing who murmur, “How are y’all today, Grandpa?” or some such inane civility. He’s a likeable old man, kind to dogs and children and polite to those who demonstrate the same to him. For sixty years he ran, honourably, it may be supposed, the local “weekly rag.” On his seventieth year he had sold the paper to a consortium of citizens for fifty cents, a fifth of Gentleman Jack, a free subscription for the remainder of his years, a country ham cured for one full year, and the promise of a crippling defamation suit if ever they editorialized favourably for the Republican Party. Then he had walked the Gentleman Jack home in a paper sack. His wife of 47 years, Ruth by name, reminded him to remove, please, his shoes at the front door, and to take off his hat. It was an invitation to bad luck for a man to wear a hat indoors. What hat? He had forgotten the hat was on his head, having already sipped plentifully at Gentleman Jack. He wanted to know why bad luck haunted only mens’ hats. She said only imbeciles asked such naïve, if not plain foolish, questions. She wanted to know, had he put the promise of a suit in iron-clad lawyerly writing? He had. She wanted assurance that the free subscription continued if he chanced to predecease her. It did. Where is the ham? she asked. Still hanging, he said. I hope it’s a genuine Smithfield, she said. Our own are every bit equal to a Smithfield, he said. Possibly, she said. She wanted to see the fifty cents. He put the five dimes into her hand. “All right,” she said. “Now let’s sit on the back porch with a bowl of these roasted peanuts I pulled fresh from the ground this morning, and have a go at that bottle.”

  They did.

  She said, “A sane man would have demanded two bottles.”

  He said, “I didn’t want to sound greedy.”

  She said, “I feel I must personally acknowledge that while Gentleman Jack is delicious beyond all human reckoning it has never been a personal favourite. It hails from Tennessee, a backwards state.”

  “You prefer the Kentucky offerings?”

  “Never mind. Jack will do nicely. Now that you are an unemployed journalist, what do you intend doing with yourself? Are you just going to sit there and age gracefully?”

  Ruth now was, unhappily, gone. Few disputed that she’d been a better wife than Hubbard deserved. He’d been a wilful, opinionated young man, and had no doubt these absurdities still clung to him. He’d often been stubbornly cranky, too quick to take offense, and still was. When he’d proposed, Ruth said, “Why on earth would I want to marry a man who keeps shooting himself in the foot?” But she smiled, kissed his lips, and did.

  In the fall of 1936, Hubbard drove his DeSoto over the rough roads to the adjoining county, Northampton, for a meeting with his friend and former advertiser, Owen Myles, who owned the Riteweigh Cotton Gin. Owen told him he had enough cash to keep the gin going another week, maybe two, if he skimped on salary payment to his single employee, a steady bastard with a wife and nine children.

  “Yes,” said Hubbard, “he certainly sounds steady.”

  Owen said, “If I had another hundred, with good luck and if hell don’t freeze over I can keep the gin going a whole ’nother month, by which time the wagonloads will be rattling in heaped with cotton. Then it will be Easy Street till this same time next year.”

  “By which time your steady will have ten children,” Hubbard said.”

  At this point Owen walked down to the spring behind his gin, returning with two bottles of homebrew. Uncapped, the foam caught both of them.

  Owen said, “I don’t suppose you’re in cahoots with any big-time bankers, are you?” Hubbard said his understanding was that the bankers in this neck of the woods were jumping out of high windows. Owen said he hoped to hold off on that solution just yet. “For that one hundred smackers,” he said, “I’ll give you ten per cent interest in the business, and make you comptroller with a desk bigger than mine.”

  “You don’t have a desk,” Hubbard said.

  “So you’re saying for one hundred I can get ten per cent of a business set to kick the bucket next week.”

  “That’s the size of it,” Owen said.

  Hubbard pulled out his wallet. He had twenty-eight dollars inside it. He said he could maybe raid Ruth’s purse for another ten. He could cash in his insurance policy, which had cost him fifty cents a week through the past three decades, and pull in another dollar or two that way.

  “You’re still short that hundred,” Owen said. “Let’s make the gin twenty per cent yours for whatever you can come up with.”

  They shook hands and had another cold home brew down by the spring where the water trickl
ed free, travelled a few few yards, then disappeared back into whence it came. Owen had set out two logs there, and the hired hand came out of the rusting gin to join them. The building set up high off the plain on which it stood, the aluminum siding boldly reflecting the afternoon sun, all three regarding it mournfully.

  “How are you?” Hubbard said to the new man.

  “Fair to middling,” the man said. “I be better come payday.”

  “What do those children of yours do?” Hubbard asked.

  “The best they can,” the man said.

  Hubbard and Owen agreed such was the best you could ask of them.

  Lawyer Allsbrook would draw up the papers, each further agreed. Assuming he hadn’t jumped town with everyone’s life’s savings.

  Sometimes when Hubbard is feeling talkative, or wants to brag about how he came to be co-owner of a cotton gin, or merely hopes to keep his memory in training, he tells this story. What he always leaves out, and has no need to tell because nearly everyone he is telling the story to knows that part, is what he found when he drove the DeSoto back home. The ironing board was up in the kitchen. The print dress she’d been ironing, one of their favourites, had been drying on the clothesline when he left. She’d been heating the iron on the stove. The iron had burned through the dress, through the ironing board, and lay on its side close by her body.

  Hubbard was blessed to have received from her loins three that lived: one lost in one war, a second in another, the third presently enduring her private combat in a foreign nation Hubbard can neither spell nor with ease pronounce any more than he can decipher the strange syntax employed in letters irregularly received, those letters bearing passages inked away in black oblong stripes, the envelopes a sea of obliterated stamps. The war was over but the War Department remained vigilant. Apparently, Nip Ears Still Listened, Loose Lips Still Sunk Ships, your home grease was still to be saved to make explosives. Hello dear father…I am well and hope to God you are, I am nowxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxmy boyfriend who is xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I commemorated my beloved brothers’ passing with shots of xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx miss you, your cronies, miss Mom, miss that oaf pool shark Grey, stalwart Essie, funny Grey Jr. etcxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx tell me who it is who writes that. Soc(i.e.)ty col. in your old weekly smut sheet?xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxYour loving xxxx next time whenxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx