Midnight Ramblings
When my father took off his clothes and got in bed, there he'd be until farmer Jim came on the radio at five. Any variance from this schedule meant that something cool was happening, or something terrible.
When Daddy put on his pants and left shortly after midnight without saying why, I knew I was on deck. One brother couldn't make a coherent thought through his schizophrenia, and the other no longer lived at home, so I put on my pants.
Had it been a midnight sweet tooth, he would have taken my sister for a secret daddy-daughter ice cream date. Had it been a fire or an explosion, he would have taken me, which was miles cooler than ice cream.
A boy at Millsaps had very graphically and very assuredly taken his life under the window of his lady faire in the women's dormitory. I knew his family. Young people, I would learn, regularly faced existential questions they couldn't answer. Some succeeded in crossing over, some survived. How common it is would frighten you.
I had to study writing in clandestine ways. My father insisted that writers drank themselves to death. Of the writers who hung around Jackson, he may have had a point. Miss Eudora looked like a lady, but she drank like an Irishman, a really smart one, like Joyce.
I became obsessed with Quentin Compson, a fictional character who took his life by stuffing his pockets with fishing weights and jumping off a bridge. There's a plaque at Harvard where this imaginary person died.
Faulkner was a cousin through some extractions. My grandmother referred to him as "that man." She played bridge with Miss Eudora but took exception to some of Faulkner's imaginary creations, although they seemed perfectly real to me.
Faulkner had a love/hate relationship with Hemingway. I always believed Papa spent his youth trying to destroy himself, but finally went through with it when he was old and sick and finding it hard to draw water from the well.
Having cleaned the result of a suicide before, that always comes to my mind when this happens. The next morning at Millsaps, a fire hose was employed after the chief of police signed off on the scene. I never knew the woman who witnessed it. I always wondered about the impact it had on her.
Every day, I ask the existential question. I think most of us do. Every day I have the same answer. I think most of us do. People have always worried that one day I will have a different answer. Having cleaned this up several times, I assure them that's unlikely.
