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Overview
Brian Griffin grew up in the country near Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, in a family he describes as "infested by preachers, all Southern Baptists of the fundamentalist sort." He earned his B.A. in English from Middle Tennessee State Universityand his M.F.A. from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Griffin teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee. He lives with his wife and children in Knoxville and works closely with a group there to promote interracial harmony in the inner city. Griffin's stories and poems have been well published in journals including Shenandoah, New Delta Review, Clockwatch Review, Snake Nation Review, and Southern Poetry Review. In addition to various short stories and poems, Griffin is currently at work on a novel.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781889330068 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Sarabande Books |
| Publication date: | 09/01/1997 |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
Sparkman in the Sky
Let no man claim to know the mind of God, how He makes things collide or diverge, or what is His design—this is the kind of statement Sparkman scribbles on the pages of the Reverend Grandfather's morning paper. This is Sparkman's war. "Let no man fly higher than his purpose, which may be lower than mud," he wrote in a Nancy comic strip, inside Sluggo's thought balloon. "The man who has no grave is covered by the sky."
Each morning before sunrise, even before the delivery boy flings the Chattanooga Times against the side of the trailer, Sparkman is lying awake in bed, waiting naked in the moonglow. A ceiling fan slices above him, pushing heat against his skin. His fingers run along his belly and thighs, up along the pocked scars of surgery that cross his white chest like iced trails. Somehow he always knows when the delivery boy turns the curve near the catfish pond and begins to pedal up the driveway. Maybe the sound of the crickets gives it away, a slight drag in their rhythm. Maybe it's something vaguely electric that tickles across the air into the trailer itself, coming to rest in Sparkman's skull. Maybe it's magic. But always he knows. If he chooses, he can snap his finger in the split second before the newspaper thumps against the door.
So each morning when he senses the approach of the delivery boy, Sparkman limps down the tiny hallway, his right leg sweeping across the linoleum, balling up puffs of dust. The Reverend Grandfather's snores tumble along the walls, grumpy little spirits oozing through the stale air, little pious growls. The walls of the hallway arelined with black-and-white pictures of tents, the revival tents the Reverend used back in his younger days. There were three different tents over a period of thirty-one years but they all look the same, and for years Sparkman has had an urge to add paint to those pictures, to make them glow a bright vivid orange the way he remembers them. He remembers the sawdust, the musk of it in the air, the grit of it on his skin. The sawdust sometimes stuck in his hair or filled his mouth when he fell on his face. Lots of times he would fall without warning. One minute he'd be at the piano playing "I'll Fly Away" or "The Old Rugged Cross," or maybe he'd be sitting stiff in the amen corner, Bible in hand, watching the Reverend Grandfather's squeezing red face spew out the word of God for all to bathe in; and suddenly he would find himself on his back in the sawdust with a spoon in his mouth and tense arch-browed old ladies waving funeral-home fans in his face, cardboard fans shaped like turkeys or peacocks, or maybe with faces of famous dead men printed on them, and those funeral fans seemed to push him to the earth, pinning him down, as if to keep him from drifting too high above the sawdust and the aluminum chairs and the round-eyed quivering ladies. And beyond those ladies and their pulsing fans, high above them in a milky haze of dust and ill-light, stretched the orange underside of the tent, a musty canvas sky. Beyond that sky were stars or moon or sun or blue air, the very heavens—while all that orbited for Sparkman, he thought, were those blabbering faces adrift in their orange sky, and perhaps a flash of the Reverend: eyes closed, arms spread high toward the orange canvas of heaven, his lips churning out packets of magic for all under the big top to fondle. He was a healer all right, and Sparkman was his most valuable asset. All that's left of those tents now, years after the Reverend Grandfather's retirement, is a muddy fragment of tarp over the woodpile behind the trailer—and, of course, the pictures in the hallway, along which Sparkman creeps each morning. "The benevolence of God? The fruits of His labor?" Sparkman once scribbled in the Society section. "Luck is everything."
Sparkman always knows what he will write in the Reverend Grandfather's newspaper. It just takes a second. The door swings out and he snatches the paper from beside the potted banana tree on the porch. He stands naked in the open door, bone-thin and white in the first glow of dawn, his lame right leg twisted beneath him. In the thin light he can see the stone chimney of the home place rising from the depression where the house once stood, a few feet in front of where the trailer is now. The house burned when Sparkman was ten years old, while he and the Reverend Grandfather were in Pulaski preaching to coal miners under the orange tent, making them sweat.
Sparkman slides the rubber band down the rolled newspaper. It makes a plinking noise, the sound of a slackened harp string. He folds out the paper, opens to a random page, and writes his message quickly with his left hand. He rolls the paper again, strums the rubber band to its place, returns to bed. It's become easy, second nature; the way one might toss out a tired old cat.
Sparkman has started a revolution. The biggest step, of course, was his decision to attend college, the new community college on Buckton Pike. It's walking distance for Sparkman, along a narrow countryroad. It was built on land once owned by Sparkman's family, part of a huge farm settled and cleared and built by the Reverend Grandfather's father. Most of the land has long since been frittered away, though. All they have left is a tiny lot surrounded by someone else's cows.
Sparkman studies music, philosophy, but mostly accounting; has his eye on hang-gliding. Big Al keeps turning him down for hang gliding, though, citing his medical history, claiming his body won't fit the harness, claiming he doesn't weigh enough, whatever he can think of. "I'm sorry," says Big Al. He reaches down and slaps Sparkman's shoulder, popping his gum. His teeth glow like piano keys. "Sorry, big guy. Really."
Big Al is never really sorry, though; Sparkman knows that. Big Al, he thinks, is a health Nazi, a Specimen, blond-haired, blue-eyed, full of raging Wheaties and muscled sperm. The kind of guy who could have modeled for Hitler's sculptors if Hitler hadn't lost the war. Big Al runs the bike shop, eats lots of fiber, gives weekend hang gliding lessons through the college. He teaches the basics in a pasture near Sparkman's trailer and then has everybody jump from Rebel's Roost on Lookout Mountain, site of the Battle Above the Clouds. If General Bragg had had hang gliders, says Big Al, the Rebels never would've lost Missionary Ridge.
Sparkman's been bent like a question mark since birth. He blacks out frequently, takes lots of medicine, walks with a limp. He keeps showing up at the hang gliding lessons, though, waiting for some magic chance, hoping Big-Al might change his mind. Sparkman was elated the first time he saw hang gliders in the pasture. They flew with a grace he could feel, like a chill running along his spine. He limped across the yard to the pasture, flapping his arms gently in the warm July air, trying to imagine what it would be like to fly. When he got closer, though, he was surprised. They didn't have wheels. He'd seen pictures of gliders with wheels, like flying chariots, but these were more like butterflies.
*
Sometimes Big Al lets Sparkman take the glider parts from their long nylon bags, helping him assemble the gliders on the crest of the grassy hill. From there Sparkman can see cattle on the rolling hills below, the curving road as it ducks into the thin stand of hickory, the community college on the other side of the trees, and of course the trailer, which looks small next to the stone chimney of the home place; he can see the dark green of Walden's Ridge and, on a clear day, even Lookout Mountain to the south, blue in the distance. Big Al winks as Sparkman hands him the thin aluminum poles, the nylon sails, the harness strapping. "It's a beauty," Big Al says. "A real beaut."
After the assembly, Sparkman leans against a fencepost at the bottom of the hill as the bright orange gliders lift their pilots into the air, gently, like dandelion seed. Sometimes the wind takes them high, frames them against the clouds. Sparkman always watches alone, from a distance. He clutches his philosophy textbook to his chest, curling around it as the gliders drift across the pasture. And Big Al always comes to Sparkman afterward. "How's it, Sparky?" he would say. "How's studies? How's life treating you?"
Sparkman just stares at his text.
Big Al reaches down, plucks a blade of grass, puts it in the corner of his mouth. "Well then," he says. "How's the Old Man?"
"Older," Sparkman says. He adjusts his glasses and looks up at Big Al, at his twinkly blue eyes.
Big Al laughs. "Easier to fool?"
Sparkman shrugs.
Sometimes Sparkman helps load the nylon glider bags into the van and rides to the college with Big Al. Big Al smiles, talks about vegetables and jogging. He offers Sparkman apples or sun-dried apricots. Sparkman refuses, sullen as always, looking out the window. They store the bagged gliders on shelves beneath the gymnasium bleachers, and Sparkman returns to his books.
Sparkman spends hours with his books. That in itself is revolutionary. These days the Reverend Grandfather seems to have forgotten the college, the blasphemy of it; the way it teaches alien values; the way it has usurped some of the old family land. With time he has grown distant, estranged, as if he has merged with the trailer, oozed across it one too many times and blended into the wall like an old photograph. He hardly seems to care anymore that people are going to hell all around him—or to heaven without his blessing. He's signed over the bank accounts to Sparkman, and he's relinquished his control over Sparkman's Social Security checks. He no longer goes to church. He no longer burns Sparkman's books. He no longer preaches to Sparkman about the evils of secular humanism. All these things are revolutions in Sparkman's world. Dismantlings. Unthinkables. In fact, the Reverend Grandfather seems totally uninterested in Sparkman these days. Almost as if he doesn't know him anymore.
So after thirty-one years of mute, unquestioning awe—awe of God, awe of Reverend Grandfather, awe of the lilting, levitating pulpit of Bucktooth Haven Baptist Church—Sparkman has begun asking questions. He sits for hours with his philosophy textbook and wonders about things. Was it all illusion, shadows of the mind? Is there nothing but matter, mind, self? Does the buck stop here, in this squiggly body and churning skull? The questions come thick and fast as he reads Plato and Sartre; just asking such questions is gratifying for Sparkman in a deep physical way, like his first massage from a professional masseuse (a massage which came, incidentally, after reading Camus) and for a while it seems he's found old beams of light that had been hidden and scattered and diminished in a long eclipse; a cluster of desiccated truths, like old fruit that was kept from him, left to parch and wrinkle and shrink. What might have happened, he asks, had he found them succulent and whole, in some earlier time? What might have happened had he known?
So, almost without realizing it, Sparkman has set for himself what once had seemed an unthinkable task: the deconstruction, the demystification, the reeducation of the Reverend Grandfather. The most powerful man in Sparkman's world. The man with The Plan, the man they call Eli. The man whose mouth makes the shapes, whose arms make the moves, as if God is a ventriloquist. "Sod for the harrow, feed for the sparrow, no special passage," Sparkman writes in a Sunday edition, above a photo of Charlton Heston. "The road to heaven is equally short from all places." He circles it, makes it into a thought balloon emerging from the actor's forehead. A kind of revenge.
At breakfast the Reverend Grandfather sits at the kitchen table with his newspaper and Bible. "Elijah!" the Reverend Grandfather says. A matter-of-fact statement, not directed at anyone in particular. His voice is harsh, like steam from a valve.
Sparkman stands beside him with the syringe. He pokes it under the powdery skin. The Reverend is wide-eyed, oblivious. He scrunches up his nose and puffs air through his nostrils.
The Sunday paper is open on the table before the Reverend Grandfather. A full bottle of insulin sits on the table beside the salt and pepper. The Reverend clutches his damp, warm Bible under the pit of his right arm, the injection arm. Tiny black eyes look up at Sparkman.
"Elijah!" says the Reverend Grandfather. His horn-rimmed glasses slide down his nose, resting even with his cheeks.
"Would you like some strawberry jam?" Sparkman says.
The Reverend's eyebrows arch, hairy tepees form on his forehead.
"More sugar in your coffee, Reverend Grandfather?"
The Reverend Grandfather's face narrows, his forehead stretches upward. He is thin. "Skin and bones," the church ladies say when they bring plate lunches in the afternoons. Mrs. Thrasher always remembers to wind the wooden clock that hangs above the kitchen table.
Sparkman smiles at the Reverend Grandfather. The Reverend rubs his gums together, licks his lips. The ticking of the clock makes his temples pulse. His skin is a sail; dry fabric stretched across segments of bone.
"Elijah!"
"A very lucky man," says Sparkman.
Sparkman rises from the table and walks to the television. He puts a tape in the VCR, turns on the set, rolls it up to the table. He lifts the set, places it on the table in front of the Reverend, and turns off the volume. The Reverend spits, a long trail of spittle dangling above his coffee cup. He lifts his head, his mouth hangs open. His eyes fix on the set. It's a movie about airplanes: fuzzy black-and-white films of planes that never got off the ground. Some have multilayered wings that flap and break themselves to pieces like caged birds. Some are thin frameworks of wood and canvas that fall from cliffs like stone. A goggled man in a dark suit and tie runs along a field, wings strapped to his arms. The wings flap, the man runs, the man jumps from a cliff to the ocean.
The Reverend Grandfather floats above his coffee cup.
"Can I get you a glazed doughnut, Reverend Grandfather?"
The Reverend's pale skin glows in the light of the television. "Luck?" he says. His tongue seems to stick to his lips.
"How about a nice slice of cheesecake?"
The Reverend's head swivels around toward Sparkman. "Elijah," he says. "ELI-JAH!"
As the tape rewinds, Sparkman decides to leave. Often Sparkman sits with his books on the wooden bleachers in the college gymnasium. Sometimes Big Al shows up, does a few push-ups, runs a few laps. Other times groups of girls would be there, playing volleyball. Sparkman likes the bounce and sweat and grace of the girls' bodies, the way they fly into the air to swat the ball, the way their arms swing wide to embrace the air, the way their voices echo across the gym floor like the cries of seabirds. Sparkman likes to imagine how they might feel if he touched them. He imagines them soft, hot, and light to the touch, able to float high into the sky if he simply pushed. A tiny push would do it.
The gym is full of girls when Sparkman arrives. Even a few boyfriends are standing around. Sparkman sits on the bleachers and begins to read, but soon he's staring at the girls. He can't help it. After a while the boyfriends stare at Sparkman. Finally one of them walks toward him, his boots sharp and crisp on the wooden gym floor. Sparkman hears the boyfriends snicker. He leaves his books and walks beneath the bleachers, and he can hear the boots. He can hear the sounds of the girls at volleyball, and he can hear the boots much closer now. Sparkman squats beside the shelves where the gliders are stored and leans back on his heels as the boots get very close. Sparkman closes his eyes, and the sound of the boots stops. Sparkman waits, his hands clenched across his knees. His head hurts from the reading, his leg aches, he's covered in sweat. After a minute Sparkman hears the boots walk away, and he leans against the smooth nylon of a glider bag, cool against his arm like a gentle lick across the skin.
He rubs his fingers along the bag, his face pressed against the orange fabric. Then he puts his arms around the glider and slides it to the very edge of its shelf. He looks quickly over his shoulder, then bends his knees. He can feel the beat of his heart even in his wrists as he lifts the orange glider bag and balances it on his right shoulder. He stands for a second, steadying himself. Aluminum rods bulge beneath the fabric like hollow bones, hard against his skin. Sparkman turns slightly and looks behind him; then slowly, carefully, he walks toward the gym floor. The boyfriends talk among themselves; the girls bounce around the net. Giggles are everywhere, but nobody notices him. Bold, audacious, in broad daylight, Sparkman walks across the gym floor toward the door. He simply walks out of the gymnasium, carrying the glider out into the heat. He crosses a parking lot and enters woods, limping along, the long glider balanced on his shoulder. He leans under its weight, his right arm flexed around it.
The shade is a gentle sigh. He smiles, giddy at the ease of it, the surprise of it. He finds a faint footpath that runs beside a dry streambed. After a minute, he sets the glider down and rests on a stone. He's breathing hard, his chest hurts. He looks at the glider, runs his hands across the smooth nylon bag, and looks toward the sky. Chunks of sunlight tumble through the branches, and Sparkman can almost feel the licks of gentle air that would loft him up, etching him into the sky above the wide green pasture. He would wear a cloak, flapping behind him in rippling waves. Below him would be the trailer, and he would circle it, lifting, spiraling upward. Then he would dive swiftly toward the old chimney, arcing up just before colliding with stone. At that instant he would see the birds' nests on the chimneytop, the speckles and cracks of the eggs, the tiny bits of fluff that line the nests. And below him would be the Reverend Grandfather, standing outside the trailer door in the shadow of the stone chimney, his neck bent back, his long face shining red, his eyes blinking white and round into the sky, a beacon. Sparkman would loop around the trailer once and then descend toward the Reverend's face. Perhaps he would grab him by the shoulders with his feet, plucking him from the earth like a plant, pulling up whatever root might be there and letting it dangle. Or perhaps he would drop his cloak, letting it flutter through the air, letting it drape the shining face. Then the air would lift him up again. Very high up. Above the clouds, perhaps. Sparkman grins. He stands, lifts the glider, and begins to walk. The weight of the glider rubs hot against his shoulder.
The woods grow thicker as he walks. Thick second growth. The long bag bumps against tree trunks, snags on branches. Sweat drenches his body in the still air. He hears rustlings and snappings in the trees and weeds, as though he is being followed. Sweat drips from his forehead, sprinkling the dry dirt of the trail. A rusty strand of barbed wire trips him, the trail fades away. He walks along the dry stones of the creekbed. Finally he emerges from the trees, dragging the bright orange glider along the road behind him. The weeds along the roadside rustle with insects.
But no one sees him, or if they see him they think nothing of it. When Sparkman arrives home he leans the glider against the chimney in front of the trailer and stands for a second, waiting. Nothing happens, so Sparkman enters and finds the Reverend Grandfather sitting at the kitchen table, staring at a blank television screen. Sparkman takes the Reverend Grandfather by the arm. The Reverend quivers as he stands. Both cold dry hands grasp hard to Sparkman's arm. The Reverend says nothing. His eyeglasses are covered in dust. Sparkman leads him out into the sunlight, and the Reverend blinks his eyes.
Sparkman leads him to the sunken grassy spot in front of the old chimney. He points to the sky. "Look up," Sparkman says. The Reverend Grandfather looks into the cloudless sky. His mouth falls open for a second, but Sparkman pushes on the jaw, and it stays shut.
Sparkman lifts the glider to his shoulder and carries it across the pasture toward the crest of the hill. The grass is thick, in big clumps, and Sparkman walks very slowly in the heat. The hill slopes gently for a long way before rising sharply to the summit.
About halfway up the steep part, Sparkman drops the glider to the grass and bends at his waist with his hands on his knees. Sweat drips silently from the tip of his nose into the dry grass. His sweat knocks a small grasshopper from its perch, and the grasshopper squirms in the lower grass before flying away with a buzzing sound. Sparkman hears thunder somewhere across the mountains, but no clouds are in sight. A slight breeze begins to stir. Sparkman rubs his hand along the calf of his right leg and drops to his knees in the grass. He's gone as far as he can go. He assembles the glider where he is, on a steep slope about twenty-five yards below the crest of the hill.
Thirty minutes later, Sparkman squats beneath the glider, his skin glowing orange in the filtered light. Puffs of wind make the glider feel alive, like some rebellious piece of skin tugging him up from the earth. His hands, slick with sweat, clutch hard to the control bar. He can't fit himself into the harness, so he figures he'll just have to hang on, dangling from the control bar by his arms. He knows he won't be able to steer very well, hanging there that way. If he goes through with this, he thinks, he'll just have to hold hard to the bar and hope. He'll just have to hope the breeze lifts him gently, not too high, and sends him in the right direction.
He can see the trailer below. Two dark birds fly from the ruined chimney, circle the trailer, then disappear back into the chimney, over and over again. The Reverend Grandfather stands where Sparkman left him, looking into the sky. There's a wide space between them, but Sparkman can see him fairly well: the violent crook of his neck, the upturned paleness of his face, the smallness of his body in the sunken patch of grass beside the chimney. Sparkman waves his arm in a wide loop, trying to catch his grandfather's attention, but the Reverend doesn't see him. It's as if he doesn't even see the hill, as if he is looking higher, much higher than Sparkman. But Sparkman continues to squat beneath the glider, waving, his left hand moving in wide arcs, his right hand grasping the control bar. Finally he begins to yell into the shifting air. The glider is a piece of his skin, teasing him, tugging at him with each breath of air. The breeze comes, then dies down, then comes again, and Sparkman feels each gust deep inside, as if the glider were attached by strings to something deep in his belly. And suddenly Sparkman realizes how easy it would be—how he could just stand up and lean into one of the gusts, and that would be it. He could just stand up and push forward and leave the earth, going up, across the open air. With a single step forward, he could fly.
Sparkman begins to tremble and his lips spread out in a smile, and his hands grip the control bar. The wind blows hard now, and he feels his legs tighten and his heart jump, and his smile goes away. Again Sparkman yells but the Reverend Grandfather stares into the air, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, and the wind keeps blowing.
There seems to be too much space. The birds fly in circles around the trailer, wide loops outside the Reverend's field of vision, around and around the trailer. Sparkman feels the gusting wind, harder, and the teasing again, almost violent now, and he sees the long wide slope covered with grass and the trailer far below. The Reverend Grandfather stands small beside the chimney, and there is that wide, wide space. There is that little man, and there is everything he knows. And he knows it's just too far away, much too far.
So Sparkman stands and steps into the wind.