Junior Ray. John Pritchard
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going home.” They thought he meant his mama’s house.
Unh–uh. Think again, muthafukka. That sumbich was talkin’ about St. Leo, the actual town itself. He, it seems, did not believe he was home. And that is partly what led to the whole buncha stuff that followed some time later.
You know a sumbich is crazy if he’s set’n right there in his mama’s house and don’t believe he’s home. But, get this, as it turned out, he not only did not believe he was home, he thought he was still over in Germany. How a sumbich could hang around here and swat these crow-size mosquitos and think he was in Europe is a mystery to me. I ain’t ever been to Europe, but I read about it and I seen plenty of things about it on cable, so I know that it ain’t nothin’ like it is here in Mhoon County, Mississippi, in the Delta.
Nevertheless, that’s the way he was. And on top of it, he believed they was some German soldiers following him around and was after him. Occasionally he would have a real spell of that, and he’d go hide. After a while, we got to where we would know where to look, and we usually was able to get him to go on back to his mama’s house, where he would disappear for quite some time.
But she died, and that’s when things really started to go from bad to worse. For a while, he seemed to get along okay. He worked up at the lumber company and wouldn’t never say nothing to nobody—he just come to work every day, did his job, and went home, back to his mama’s house. Nobody never paid him a whole lot of attention, although some people expressed concern, sayin’ they didn’t know how he was going to get along in the years to come, not havin’ anybody to look after him and all. I heard about it, but I didn’t give a damn what happened to him one way or another.
Why? I’ll tell you why. Here he is, a soldier home from the war. They give him a parade, such as might be called a parade in St. Leo, and had a buncha people make speeches—all about how Leland Shaw was a hero and had this and that medal give to him, and all the time that crazy sumbich is sit’n up there on the platform not believing for one moment that he has come home at all, and, at that point, nobody realized he was that way. Hell, first time I laid eyes on him when he got back, I knew he was nuts.
And what really gets away with me is that there he was, born with a silver spoon up his ass, his great-grandfather the founder of the town, and him, the asshole in question—the so-called hero—growing up a little clipped-dick sissy livin’ with his mama and daddy and them crazy old aunts of his next door. And the worst one of them was that gotdamn nigga-lovin’ Miss Helena Ferry. She was somethin’ else.
How can a sumbich like that turn out to be any crazier than he is in the first place, much less become a coksukkin overly decorated war hero who’s done got back home and don’t even know it? I mean, even though he seemed to recognize ever’thing, he still, somehow, didn’t know where the fuk he was and didn’t believe you when you’d tell him.
Anyhow, there it was, Leland Shaw livin’ what appeared to be an all-right life day to day, yet, unbeknownst to the town, at this point anyway, thinkin’ German soldiers was following him around trying to get him, and thinking, too, that he was still somewhere in Europe. “Silesia” he called it. Maybe that explains why he picked a gotdamn silo to hide out in when he run off. But there ain’t no explainin’ what a crazy person thinks. All I know is that sumbich ruined my life.
Well, maybe he didn’t do it directly, but I’m where I am today because of him. And I don’t know where, or even if, he is.
2
Shaw’s Notebooks — Bone Face — Shaw Runs Off — Sheep
Now I’ll say something about them “Note Books” we found in Shaw’s hidy-hole he had up there under the roof of Miss Helena’s silo. I’ll show you a little bit of what that crazy-ass muthafukka put in ’em, and I’ll show you some more as we go along. This’ll give you a better understanding of what I was up against*:
Call it day; it is the blinding and the time when one cannot navigate the farther [sic] of waters; it is the time when time as binder and as image cannot be seen shining in the night, for, as I recall, time is in the light, and I am called to find the point in all the scattered starburst where home is racing out of reach, where light cannot be caught except by theory and with sighs, to be held only and forever in the arms of infinite longing, which is where I, the lone and infinite longer, may have found my place.
About the myth, however, or the lack it,
it was in the flight and in the call of birds.
It lay in the shadows of the high grass,
and it thrummed at night
when the windows of the car were down.
It was in the silence of summer afternoons
and in the hands of Negroes who moved
like solitary dreams
above the rising heat.
I can see where it used to be,
though now, when I look,
it appears much like the exoskeleton
of a dead cicada.
And so the time and country that was pulled by beasts is gone, replaced by false weather, strange fields, and men with rubber skin.
All the mules, and horses too, are gone, burned in a fire at the edge of town, where constables stood on the road and shot at them and killed them with their Winchesters as they, both horse and mule, their manes, their flesh, their tails, all on fire, ran like living art, back and forth beneath the open shed and round and round, seeking haven in the safety of a burning barn.
I shall know my home by its indelible mark upon my longing, for it is the longing that is the plate on which the image is etched in distant light, where there are no angels, only the angelic.
There is no setting sun, only shadows for a time, and, then, it is that star again, whose light, itself, is shadow to all the rest, a screen to fool the eyes and hide the mystery, the distance, and the magnitude.
Surely in some land of pure form, the myth must still exist. I am not saying that it was good or that it was just or that it was right or that it was wrong. Myth has nothing to do with those things. Myth is, or was, and is what it is or was what it was. Unlike matter, It can be created, and destroyed.
The impossible is not attractive. Although, one can never know whether anything is impossible. And that is exactly what is attractive about Dostoyevsky’s mouse: it is the intolerable capacity to believe in infinite answers and unlimited options without, necessarily, making assumptions. Certainly, if I had been more the bullish “man of action” and less the mouse of thought, I would have been a better soldier. But soldier I am, and war this is. That I know. It is where that poses the problem. Where is all this effort, all this drama, going on? I think I am in Europe, the victim of a trick — the ambiguity here is acceptable because both Europe and I have fallen for the same deception. The question then becomes a matter of who is the trickster. However, all of that is too much a digression, and I must deal with the situation at hand, here and now, for it is I and not the larger framework — which has no blood and has no bones — that must live out my existence.
Still, just where is that? To be sure, there is nothing humdrum about escape. And I have found the game to be not one of escape and evasion so much as one of escape and search, partly because evading these Nazis does not appear very difficult, and that is why I am able to pursue my search, as all the while they, poor Teutons, bumble about the landscape in search of me, sweating — no doubt even on these clear, cold and brittle days that bathe the sleeping fields in noisy ice — inside their rubber skins.
That is when cotton undershirts become the enemy.
You can do whatever you want to