The Earth Is Enough by Harry Middleton

Author:Harry Middleton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WestWinds Press

Readings at Dusk

Hell never welcomed two more kindly souls.

–The Reverend Conrad Biddle,

Mount Hebron First Primitive

Methodist Church, 1968

Everyone here ‘bouts knows about them old men up the creek. Not even tryin to make the land pay. Just fishin’ and huntin’ . Lord knows what-all. There hasn’t been a day of my sixty years that I haven’t curesed them and envied them.

–Big Joe Dunklin, chef, the Mount Hebron cafe, 1967

It had rained that night but when I woke up sunlight filled the room and it was cool. Sometime during the night, one of the old men had put a blanket over me. My duffel bag sat on the floor where I had dropped it. I stood at the open window for a long time. Birds fluttered excitedly in the woods beyond the barn. They too were on the move, heading south, following not so much the sun’s light as its warmth. Whether or not they would survive depended, to a great degree, on its heat.

One of the old men had left a note on the kitchen table, simple, to the point. “Eat, rest, and be merry, because at noon we go to work.”

I poured a glass of milk, walked anxiously about the creaking house, not knowing what oddity might wait at every turn, lurk in every shadow. I found little because there was little to find. No television. No telephone. No washing machine or dryer. Not even a toaster. It seemed they didn’t take to modern conveniences. “If I had a telephone,” Albert told me later in a moment of deep thought, “then I’d be listed, wouldn’t I? My whereabouts would be common knowledge. I cannot imagine a more desolate fate. Anyway, I’m not even sure I would know how to use the damn thing. Doesn’t it involve a lot of bells, numbers, and cackling static?”

There was, however, a radio, housed in a huge walnut cabinet that sat in one corner of the big room. Albert turned it on each Sunday night so he could listen to a blues station in Memphis. He would sit on the couch with his Hohner harmonica and play along, often departing from whatever song the radio blared out, going off on his own into some deep, intricate blues melody and riffs of his own invention. He played with his eyes closed tight and his right foot counting the beat. The gritty chords and bent notes flooded the room. It almost seemed to sway, feel the pain in the bottomless notes, the agonizing tension of the bent notes suddenly exhausting themselves in gasping moments of only temporary resolution. That was Albert’s brand of blues, touching the foul currents of tension and brief reconciliation. On warm nights, with every window in the house open, Albert’s music drifted on the wind, dissipating finally in the stentorious rush of Starlight Creek.

On that first full day, I walked cautiously from the kitchen to the big room. That’s when it first struck me, startled me. Books. Hundreds of them, everywhere. Stacked in teetering columns rising from the hardwood floors.

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