Brighten Corner Where You Are (The Kirkman Family Cycle, 2, Band 2) - Softcover

Chappell, Fred

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312050577 ISBN 13: 9780312050573

Verlag: SMP Paperback, 1990

Inhaltsangabe

This story of a day in the life of Joe Robert Kirkman, a North Carolina mountain schoolteacher, sly prankster, country philosopher, and family man, won the hearts of readers and reviewers across the country.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Fred Chappell is the award-winning author of over twenty books of poetry and fiction. His previous novels include I Am One of You Forever and Look Back All the Green Valley. He teaches at the University of North Carolina in Grennsboro, where he lives with his wife Susan.

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Brighten The Corner Where You Are

By Fred Chappell

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 1989 Fred Chappell
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-312-05057-3

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
MOON, 
1: The Devil-Possum, 
2: Morning Ablutions, 
3: Medal of Honor, 
4: General Science, 
5: The Rehearsal, 
SHARES, 
6: The Memorial, 
7: Bacchus, 
8: Socrates, 
9: Prometheus Unbound, 
10: Foxfire, 
DARWIN, 
Readers across the country praise Fred Chappell and Brighten the Corner, 
Where You Are, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

THE DEVIL-POSSUM

Who can tell us what my father was doing at three o'clock in the morning of a balmy May Friday in 1946?

Why, he was climbing a medium-sized intricate poplar tree, hugging himself up the trunk and clambering among the limbs like a child dazed by dreams of pirate mizzenmasts. A muddy old totesack he clenched in his teeth, and a savor of the burlap was to remain in his mouth through all this long day to come. The four hounds leaping and yapping below had treed the fearful devil-possum and Joe Robert Kirkman was all fixed to capture the animal and take him home and put him to some private use not virtuous in the least.

This was no dignified impulse for a thirty-six-year-old country schoolteacher to act upon, a grown man with a family and serious responsibilities, but it was the sort of adventure he was always eagerly into, Satan take the world and all its prune-faced disapproval. And it was only impulse on his part, because the settled tradition among his houndy associates was never to lay eyes upon any game the dogs stirred up. The creatures in the trees and thickets and pungent dens were assigned to the dogs; the men's big task was to loll by the campfire and nurse their conversation.

Which is what they'd been doing, old Pauley Mackail and Wylie Hazel and Broomsedge Tommy Fowler, and my father familiar among them and just as easy as they, until the notion occurred that he could do something with that possum they could hear the dogs had treed, that he could pack it home and cause interesting events to take place in our family life. He could — well, he might pop it into the cookstove and when my grandmother went to bake her biscuits, there would be a live possum in the oven, and that would give her something to think about. He was just certain that his strict-souled mother-in-law needed something to think about.

But it went rudely against the grain of the Crazy Creek Wildlife Appreciation Committee — which was the resonant title the four men had given their brotherhood — to rise up and depart the cozy flames and plunge down the briary mountainside in the dark, risking precious life and limb, to maybe catch a glimpse of the fox's brush disappearing or the possum's tail as bald as a rat's.

No-no. Their time-honored habit was to sit by the fire and pass a moderation jug of moon and listen to the singing of the hounds and watch the red sparks rise among the silver stars and jaw jaw jaw.

You can just hear them running on.

Old Pauley Mackail blips a sizzle of tobacco juice into the fire and continues his account of the bravest bear dog he's ever known, which was old Setback Williams's little dog, part bull and part feist and all mean, "and wasn't no bigger than a middling-size wharf rat, swear he wasn't. Ole Setback would bring his other fine dogs out on the leash, but this littlun, Whizzer was what they called him, he'd bring along in his jacket pocket. They'd find the scent and he'd turn the others loose, then he'd fetch little Whizzer out of his pocket and set him on the ground like a windup toy. Caught us by surprise every time; that dog was too little to remember. Touch his feet to the ground and he was gone from sight, didn't waste no time trailing by scent. Like he was part bear hisself if he wasn't only so little, and already knowed where the bear was laying at. Plumb disdained any help from the other dogs, go off and bring that bear to bay all by his lonesome; and could do it too, him being so fierce. He was so mean he shone out in the dark, a red-orangy glimmer in a dark room. EyeGod, I've seen him just like that in a hunting cabin at night many's the time." Then he folds his arms across his chest and leans back, daring the others to question his veracity.

They're too canny for that, seasoned hands at the campfire powwow.

"Whizzer, you say?" Broomsedge Tommy is talking now in his halt high-pitched twang, shifting his signature sprig of broomsedge to the side of his mouth. He's got a mean dog that tops old Pauley's; Tommy will always have a topper, but hard for him to get a story told, the way he flounders about in petty detail and soon sinks over his head. "Tillyard Crowe had him a dog so mean it one time took a bite out of Santy Claus. His name was Whizzer, too. … No wait now. Seems like he called him Wizard and not Whizzer. Because he had him this beagle bitch he called Witch, so he had him a Witch and a Wizard. … Maybe that's wrong, though, now I think. Might be Tillyard was the one had him one dog called Woolybooger and another one called Tallywhacker —"

So Wylie Hazel interrupts to tell his mean dog story because it has become obvious that Broomsedge Tommy is never going to reach the fascinating part of his account, the morbid attack on Santa Claus. Wylie chronicles Swann Dillard's German shepherd that was so mean and strong that Swann taught it to bite his logging chains in two and would've saved hisself a bait of money on boltcutters and hacksaws except that the dog got in the habit of crawling under the trucks and nibbling through the tie-rods.

And so forth and so on till the end of time.

My father rarely competed in the rivalries of quaint drollery. Maybe he felt outclassed. He lay stretched full out, his large square fleshy face propped on the heels of his hands. A handsome face, by most account, his boyish dimples and the humor crinkles of his middle years showing the tender alloy of his character. His eyes were dark gray but yellowed now by the fire he peered into, staring into the heart of the blaze as if some secret nested there, some message to tell him why the world he lived in must be so poky, so matter-of-fact, so lacking in spice.

He might rouse now and tell a mean dog stretcher that would cover his friends with scarlet shame, but to what purpose? It conferred no grand and permanent distinction to tell a whopping lie on the side of a mountain in western North Carolina in the pitchdark. Derring-do was what was needed, some heroic feat that would encourage the spirits of hound dog men for generations to come.

Then they all fell silent to hear the hounds way off in the blackness. It sounded like they were down in a holler somewhere to the left, and they were excited. Joe Robert was no expert; he left the interpretation of these howls and barks to the others. He didn't own a hunting dog, and no longer even Queenie, our friendly collie who had worked the cattle and patrolled the barns. He was a member of the Committee only by courtesy. Hadn't paid his dues yet this year. It cost an annual five hundred dollars to belong to the Crazy Creek Wildlife Appreciation Committee, the money being refunded when a member sighted his first fox of the year. So they each reported spotting a fox while driving in to the first meeting. But my father had missed this initial get-together and was in arrears that amounted to about two months' worth of his school-teaching salary.

The music of the dogs was to him only...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: SMP Paperback
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1990
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312050577
• ISBN 13: 9780312050573
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 222
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland