There is a piece of comic patter used by Catskill stand-up comedians who tell one quick joke after another: Take my wife . . . Please! You didn’t like that joke? No problem. There’s a new one coming every two minutes.
This volume, by writers who have appeared at the Fairhope gatherings over the years, contains 56 pieces of fiction and nonfiction in 206 pages. But only a few are comic. The funniest is, as always, by George Singleton who has the ability to take a small, ridiculous premise and build a story around it. The narrator and his new bride live in a dying town. There is really nothing to do. Most businesses—movie, bowling alley etc.—have closed. The town has even “made cruising back and forth from Wal-Mart to the Sonic a misdemeanor.” These people are really, really bored.
The speaker learns that burglars watch for a piling up of mail and newspapers and then rob the houses of folks on vacation. So he and his wife scatter newspapers on their driveway, load their box with mail, then hide in the bushes drinking until the would-be burglars arrive. Then they shoot them in the legs. The wounded men of course don’t go to the police or hospital. The narrator reminds us “Like I said, we’d gotten bored.”
Rick Bragg’s piece on brown liquor—not moonshine—is maybe funnier than he meant. Bragg actually doesn’t drink, and never did drink much. The best bourbon tasted “like green persimmons” to him and the vermouth in a martini reminded him of the time he “accidentally ate a wet nap at the Kentucky Fried Chicken in Sylacauga.” “Sherry tasted like cough drops.” Nevertheless, since he is a Southern writer, and a good old boy, people always assumed he drank like Faulkner. No way to talk them out of it.
Beth Ann Fennelly, who can be very serious indeed, has a terrific little entry entitled “Married Love.” She used to date a man named Colin, a successful architect. In each of her husband’s novels, she tells us, Tom Franklin has a minor character named Colin suffer a horrible death. Many of the short pieces, while strong and affecting, are pretty dark.
This group of writers is aging. The sixties, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War are for them living memories. Bev Marshall has two excerpts from her memoir of being a Vietnam veteran’s wife. In one, a young couple marry in haste. Dave, a pilot, is shot down and seriously wounded. Kelly, his bride, goes to his hospital room, sees him in bandages with tubes everywhere and leaves, saying “I can’t do this.”
There are, of course, in this quintessentially, purposefully Southern collection, several pieces about dogs. The strongest is Dayne Sherman’s “Snakebit.” A neighbor kills the speaker’s beloved dog for peeing on his rosebushes. Well, you know what happens next, what has to happen.
