High Lonesome

The Ice Storm

MOST OF THE LEAVES ARE FALLEN AND THIS PLACE LOOKS bombed all over again. Last February the ice storm of the century passed through the Arkansas delta into north Mississippi and lower Tennessee up to Nashville. Eleven at night, I was out in the front yard waiting for it, led by a special alarm, even horror, in the voice of the television weather-caster. Like a Jeremiah just miles ahead of the storm and pointing backwards down the road, raving. The edge of the storm came on in feather-light little BB’s, then began to drive and pile. The glass on the west of the house went pecking as if attacked by a gale of birds. Under the streetlights the swirls of white-silver turned almost opaque. It was a determined blizzard. A Southerner doesn’t see such driving ice more than twice in a lifetime. But at one I went to bed pleasantly aroused, rich as a caveman with the weather outside.

When my wife and I awoke, civilization as we knew it had mainly shut down. Luckily we had gas heaters. All electricity and water were gone; no telephone, all local radio stations kaput. Outside, the trees were draped sculptures in white, but in their quietness, a whole new storm of ghouls.

I am an addict of great weathers. Had I been in Hurricane Camille, which struck the Mississippi coast in 1969, I would be dead. I would have been the leading fool in some motel party hoisting a silver mug, crying havoc, hailing and adoring the wind until blasted off like a kite. Twelve years ago I decided I wanted Oxford for my home when I was having coffee at the Hoka, a café in a warehouse with a tin roof. A violent rainstorm came up. The sound of it thrashing on the tin moved something deep within me, a memory of another storm, my pals and me in a barn sleeping on hay when I was a boy: That tin roof was the margin against everything dangerous.

But at noon when limbs and then whole trees began falling around me, nothing was nice. The picturesque had turned into terror. Whatever we were, whatever good and rotten had transpired in this, our little jewel of a city, these trees had witnessed it. Now they were splitting apart and falling wholesale with mournful cracks and awful thuds. They were coming in the window glass like dead uncles. Next door, an eighty-foot tree fell on a neighbor woman’s Mercedes, the fetish of her life. She came out into the driveway wailing as I’ve never heard a white person wail. But you see a whole tree go over like that, and your grip on the universe goes. A small mob of slackers came down the block and stood around the big tree over the Mercedes. They grinned, sort of worshiping the event. But the woods running down a hill to the east went into an exploding mutual collapse too much like the end of the world, and everyone fled back inside.

All these old trees were like family in the act of dying; their agony was more terrible than the storm itself. We had been confident, even arrogant, with them around us, I realized. They’d been comforting brothers and sisters. Now the town was suddenly half as tall.

In the next weeks, trucks and electricians from four states poured into town. You would drive around very stupidly and like a zombie point to another great oak down, another smashed roof: Look at that, Sue. A vast pile of debris burned like the end of a war out on the west edge of town.

You hear a fatuous volume about growing, nurturing, and blossoming as a person nowadays. But great subtractions must be granted too. There is not always more of us, growing, flapping leaves around like idiot vines.

Here under a rare storm of ice we got our come-uppance. The leaves are gone, and we see it all over again. Lessness rules.

In the spring, I saw a histrionic young woman, the daughter of a highway patrolman, who had starred in one of Hood’s cheap movies. She was on her way to San Francisco. Enough of small-town life. I asked if she’d seen Hood. He hadn’t been on the courts this season. He was a decent player with a nice chopped approach shot. Hood too was Nordic and barely had an expression when he played. Once somebody asked me who was that frozen Swede I’d just played. But he had certain aggressions about his work and attended workshops for playwrights all over the country.

You didn’t hear? asked Shannon.

Hood had been in California during the earthquake last January. His apartment was all thrown around. For a while he tried to hang on in Los Angeles, but his nerves kept getting to him, so he moved back here to exercise his art on firm land. A generator came with his house, out a bit from town, and he was whistling about his luck after the ice storm, because most had no water and there were long lines of country and town folks down at the ice house, which had a natural spring under it. Hood was whistling in his shower, all loose in an orgy of steam, when an oak tree about the age of the Civil War fell down through the roof into the shower and broke his leg. He lay in his house for two days, phones out, until a neighbor’s dog came through the broken wall and the neighbor right after it. By then Hood was hoarse from screaming. His body, not just the leg, was poisoned green, black, and yellow.

In the fall, though, I saw him at the courts with another chum, and he seemed to be moving all right. Somebody had printed up T-shirts about the ice storm of ’94 and I was wearing one. Hood was not amused. We did play one night, but after just a few games he called it off. There was a real whine in his voice and a difference in his eyes. I had been serving very well, but my serve hadn’t frightened anybody since I was thirty. He didn’t say much, yet I heard another whine and this: “I can’t, I just can’t.” He got in his Jeep and pulled away, fretting. I’d liked Hood’s peculiarity. It was a shame to see him wussed.

I bought a video camera, my first, because I felt like life was getting away from me and wanted to shoot scenes of my wife naked or nearly so in compromising positions. I know this is the act of an aging creep who cannot understand his good luck, but I had ceased to care. I paid a great deal for this thing but what I could not buy was any desire to use it once it was in my hands. The first time I raised it I felt like an idiot and my wife ran away raving into the backyard. I just toiled there, whispering about my tender aims. Maybe I was in Hood’s world, a deeply wretched place.

I visited my mother a good deal that last year of her life. I did not know she was in the act of dying, wracked by the worst arthritis. But I worked close by her so we could chat occasionally. I was on the back glassed porch to keep the cigarette smoke away from her. I was working very well, almost under a miracle burst.

We had got very honest with each other. The old black lady who spent the nights with her had seen the white horse of death in the sky after a recent funeral. We talked about this, Mother and I, and she told me the old woman had introduced herself by saying “Ma’am, I ain’t not rogue.” This was finally understood as thief. She was a true old-timey woman although a bit younger than my mother, in her early eighties. Each day now I watched the diminishing of my mother. She was tiny, that woman who had controlled so much.

I thought of Hood, just to speak of something.

In another playwrighting workshop at the university he had become an out-and-out bitch who led insurrections against the teacher. He never spoke in class but wrote notes of delicious scorn. The teacher knew nothing, nothing. The lively girls who had been in Hood’s movies avoided him, but Hood was unaware of this. The distance in his eyes was shortened. His art vision was gone, replaced by much sighing and staring at the floor.

A great Nordic bitch, I finished.

“Please don’t use that word,” my mother said, “What could it possibly mean in relation to a young man?”

“Well, the tree might have done him in.”

“That’s not a man, then, son. He would be grateful he survived, happy in his health, not angry he was hurt. Believe: Your mother knows whereof she speaks.”

Still, the biggest oak anywhere right through the shower.

Then we talked about the Mississippi flood of 1927. She was there, in Leland, about to leave for college. She was in it, child. Broken levees, bodies, rain and ruin. My poor daddy, responsible to everybody on the plantation. You can’t tell me.

Where I work men spent several months putting in a criss-cross graded walk for the handicapped in wheelchairs. It had blue iron rails and resting benches, very stylish. The thing was superior to the ordinary walks by far.

One afternoon I noticed a man in a cape and a beret rolling down in a chair. Across the arms, too, he held a cane.

This was a lot of costume for early fall or I’d not have noticed. Under the beret was a long blond face, very surly. It was Hood. Before I knew this, I’d had in mind one of the great wounded artists of the fin de siècle. He was enrolled in yet another workshop.

But I have it on witness by his last vixen, a nurse, that, in truth, there is nothing wrong with him.