Crazy in Alabama - Softcover

Childress, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345389247 ISBN 13: 9780345389244

Verlag: Random House LCC US, 1994

Inhaltsangabe

Comic and tragic, unique and outlandish, CRAZY IN ALABAMA is the story of two journeys--Lucille's from Industry, Alabama, to Los Angeles, to star on 'THE BEVERLY HILL BILLIES' and her 12-year-old nephew Peejoe's, who is about to discover two kinds of Southern justice, and what that means about the stories he's heard and the people he knows.
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
A FEATURED ALTERNATE SELECTION OF THE LITERARY GUILD

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Childress was born in Monroeville, Alabama. He is also the author of A World Made of Fire, V for Victor, Tender, and Gone for Good.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Peter Joseph

San Francisco, 1993

I am out here in California waiting for the walls to come tumbling down. We have had omens. Ten years of plague. Seven years of drought. Firestorms. Mudslides. Floods. Pestilence. Riots. Tremors. Visions of the Virgin.

The millennium is bearing down on us fast. Nobody knows if 1999 will bring the end of everything, or the beginning of something else.

I kick back in my junior-one-bedroom apartment and look out at the shimmering night-lights of Telegraph Hill and the East Bay. I wonder how it will look when it all falls down.

Remember Jimmy Stewart's house in Vertigo, where he takes Kim Novak to dry out after he's fished her out of San Francisco Bay? I live up the hill from that house. They've painted it slate-blue and the shrubs have grown up. Otherwise it looks the same.

I sit by the window in my rocking chair, where I can see Jimmy Stewart's house and my TV at the same time. I freeze the laserdisc on the wide shot of the house: Cool blond Kim Novak strides to her car, forsaking Jimmy on the front porch.

I compare the scene as it is now, in real life, to the forty-year-old view through Hitchcock's camera. I drink bourbon and sit for hours, studying the subtle differences.

Everyone else is worried about the future. I have this thing about the past.

One night I was running Kim on a continuous slow-motion loop from Jimmy's front door to her green sedan and back again, when the telephone rang.

A quavery voice said "Peejoe?"

Nobody calls me Peejoe anymore. "Aunt Lucille?"

"God, it sure takes me back, just to hear you," she said.

"Me too, Aunt Lucille." I hadn't heard her voice in years, except on late-night reruns. I glanced up at my face on the cover of that old Life magazine, framed and hanging on the wall, and suddenly I was back in the deepest summer of my life, the summer of 1965, when everybody went crazy in Alabama.


1

Peejoe

Pigeon Creek, Alabama, 1965

My grandmother used an old embalming fluid bottle at the ironing board. She said the rocket-shaped tip put out just the right amount of water for sprinkling clothes.

I loved to be in Meemaw's room while she ironed, that big friendly room with a four-poster bed and framed pictures of Jesus and George Wallace and Grandpa Joe Wiley. Meemaw didn't mind my climbing up in her bed with my red-stained feet. I loved the hiss and suck of the steam iron, the moist rising fragrance of starch when the iron's hot face met the fabric. I loved the mysteries of the ritual: wet the clothes to wash them, dry them in the sun, wet them with the sprinkler bottle, dry them with the iron--a ceaseless baptism of dresses and white cotton shirts.

Meemaw hummed "O, My Papa" while I sprawled among her pillows, sketching floor plans for the funeral home I dreamed of building one day.

"Looka here, Meemaw, look at this one." I clambered down from the bed. "See, this is the front door where people come in, and here's the casket parlor, and these are the laying-out rooms."

She pointed the bottle at a corner of my sketch. "What's this part with the cow?"

I rolled my eyes. "That's not a cow, it's a dog. That's the kennel."

"The kennel?"

"So people can bring their dogs to funerals."

"You've thought of most everything," Meemaw said. "What's this squiggly-looking thing out back?"

"A swimming pool."

"Well now what would they need with a swimming pool?" She smoothed a white shirt on the ironing board. "Folks coming to a funeral, seems like swimming would be about the last thing on their minds."

"It's not for them," I explained. "It's for me. I'm gonna be living upstairs. On my day off, I can go swimming."

"Oh. Well. That makes sense," she said. "Will you let me stay up there with you, Peejoe?"

"Sure. You can have the room over the casket parlor, see? It's the nicest one."

"You're an angel," she said.


Funerals run in our family.

My grandfather, Joe Wiley Bullis, was a gravedigger. One day he was standing at the back edge of a funeral, trying not to laugh at some wisecrack another gravedigger had made, when a grief-crazed mourner grabbed his shovel away and hit him in the head with it. That put an end to the joke, and to Grandpa Joe Wiley.

He left Meemaw with three sons and one daughter.

The daughter, my Aunt Lucille, dreamed of becoming a Hollywood movie star but wound up instead in Cornelia, Alabama, with six children and a husband who didn't understand her.

All three of her brothers went into the funeral business.

Uncle Franklin was a traveling casket salesman. Uncle Dove ran a funeral home in the town of Industry. The baby of the family was my father, John Lewis Bullis, who introduced the concept of Perpetual Care to south Alabama. He set up memorial parks from Andalusia to Wolf Bay. He and Mama were driving home from a cemetery convention in Mobile when Daddy fell asleep at the wheel and ran up under a log truck, making orphans of my brother Wiley and me.

Wiley was five when they died. I was three. I have only the haziest soft-lap recollection of Mama, and none at all of our daddy. Wiley said he was a big man who smelled of beer and Lucky Strikes, and slapped his knees when he told a joke. Wiley said Mama was pretty and sweet with the loudest sneeze you ever heard, but he didn't remember much more than that.

After the accident Meemaw took us in. I know now she couldn't afford us. Apparently Daddy felt he was too young for life insurance and left us without a nickel. Uncle Dove did the embalming himself, and the plots at Shady Acres Memorial Park were free, of course, since Daddy had been responsible for carving the place out of piney woods. Uncle Franklin got the caskets at cost. Preacher Lambert donated his sermon.

Meemaw sold off five acres at the back of her property to buy a fine marble headstone. When it was over she was left with us two little boys and a falling-down house on two hundred ninety-five acres of scrub pine. She started taking in ironing from the other white ladies of Pigeon Creek. That's how I remember her, humming, and sighing, and ironing.

"Listen, Sweet Pea," she said, "when Lucille comes with your cousins, I think maybe you ought not show 'em your little drawings, all right?"

"Howcome?"

Meemaw bore down on the shirtsleeve. "Well, now, it hasn't even been a year since their Grandma Vinson passed away. It might bring back a sad memory. Not everybody thinks about funerals the way you do."

I was twelve years old that summer. I knew everything about everything. "You mean they're crybabies," I said.

"No, not exactly.... You don't want to make 'em feel bad, do you?"

"I don't know why they should feel bad." I toyed with the fringe on the chenille bedspread. "So what if their grandmother's dead. My mama and daddy are both dead but I don't go around crying about it."

Meemaw blinked and pushed a strand of silver hair from her eyes. "That's 'cause you don't remember," she said.

Wiley's .22 went crack in the woods.

"Meemaw, what do you think happens to you when you die?"

She whipped the shirt off the ironing board and nudged a wire hanger into the sleeves. "Why don't you go out and shoot some with Wiley."

"I hate that gun."

"Well go on out anyway." Her voice was hoarse. "Beautiful a day as this is, and you in here messin' around with old me."

"I wish I could...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House LCC US
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1994
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0345389247
• ISBN 13: 9780345389244
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar