Also

Can you speak about the experience of mystery in your childhood? There was a sealed-up cistern outside my grandparents’ kitchen, with a small crack in its side, through which my brothers and I dropped pebbles and listened to the small silence before the faint splash when the stones struck the water. Also once I climbed an apple tree and found a flicker’s nest with baby flickers in it. Also in fifth grade Joe and Charles who were my friends drowned in New River, and I saw each of them pulled up out of the brown water by rescue squad men out in boats who’d dragged the bottom with hooks on ropes. Also, on my grandfather’s desk in the back of his tool shed was a paperweight that contained a black and white photograph of an entirely unclothed woman. Also when I was an acolyte, I saw sweat break out on the priest’s forehead when he lifted the cup of wine and said, This is my blood.

To what extent was fear a part of your childhood? A recurring nightmare was of a man breaking through the walls of my bedroom to do harm to me, though the man’s features were not clear to me, nor was the nature of the harm he intended to do. From this nightmare I woke crying and calling for my mother. You see I wasn’t ever afraid she wouldn’t be there if I called. You see I wasn’t ever afraid my father would stop going to work in the morning and coming home in time for supper. I was a little bit afraid of my white-haired Aunt Inez, who looked like a man, who’d been in the asylum and who stared at me but wouldn’t talk. Also the staircase in Grandma Lawson’s house frightened me–it had no banisters.

What about your childhood made you who you are now? My mother’s beauty and vanity, the cats I grew up with (Hooker, Blackie, and Short Circuit), my intense desire to have a hummingbird for a pet, and a sequence of seven or eight days in a row that I was bee-stung while walking across the field to my grandparents’ house and my mother heard my crying and ran to fetch me, pulled out the stinger, and dabbed the stinging place with Witch Hazel. Also Rose, Rose, I Love You over the radio in the car as we drove over the mountain to Hester’s Drive-in. Also I think my mother felt ashamed of being vain over her beauty. Also my older brother gave us nicknames–our father was Doodles, my younger brother was Vladimir, I was Spider-nose. Mother was Mother.