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Elizabeth Madox Roberts 337 Hollis Summers “Herschell” Hollis Summers wrote short stories, novels, and poems and wrote them very well— with humor, irony, and master craftsmanship. The son of a Baptist minister, he grew up in parsonages all over Kentucky, from Eminence, his birthplace in 1916, to Louisville and Campbellsville and Madisonville. Much of the subject matter of his fiction and poetry is taken from his own life as a preacher’s boy and as a high school teacher and college professor at Georgetown College, the University of Kentucky, and Ohio University. Brighten the Corner (1952) is about the motley members of a Baptist church, from the former minister who still wants to run the church to the congregant who is always backsliding from one misdemeanor to another. Summers wrote until his death in 1987. “Herschell” is a haunting, subtle story of two close boyhood friends; one narrates the story with honesty and innocent longing, and the other is charming, handsome, and illegitimate. They eventually go their own unhappy ways. h I come from old Kentucky families. I have been told since I was old enough to listen that I come from old families, my father’s family, the Baxters, with a land grant in 1799; my mother’s, the Archers, in 1832. Mother never forgave the Baxters for their earlier arrival. “They were farmers. They worked other people’s lands after they lost their own,” Mother said and said. “But they were God-fearing people. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in your father’s lineage. It’s just that he never took any interest in his forebears. I must admit, Archie Lee, I consider that a character flaw. But I’m not speaking against your father. I’ve never spoken against him. Isn’t that true, Archie?” “Yeah. Sure,” I said and said, not wanting the conversation to continue. The Archers were professional people, ministers, professors, lawyers, even a judge. “But you aren’t to be vain about your inheritance on my side. Inheritance , like grace, is something we don’t deserve. It’s something to thank God for, but quietly.” The portrait of Great Great Great Grandmother Phoebe Essex is my earliest memory. Always, in the variously miserable houses we rented through my youth, Grandmother stood above a fireplace, over a couch, between win337 338 The Kentucky Anthology dows, watching me. She is a young girl with an old woman’s face. Her hands rest on a pedestal. Her background is blue and gray fog. She is contained within a frame of gold curlicues bumping into each other. Beneath her is a museum light. Every dusk of my life in those rented houses Mother turned on the light under Grandmother Phoebe’s picture. The last person to bed was supposed to turn Grandmother out. “Have you turned Grandmother out?” Mother called from her bedroom. More often than I fumbled down dark stairs to make sure the water heater was turned off I went to check on Grandmother Phoebe. Grandmother seemed to look at me, even after the light was out. It was only a trick of the moon or a streetlight, a trick of twelve-year-old eyes, my twenty-one-year-old eyes, twenty-five, the eyes of a man who lived in a house with his mother for thirty-five years. As a child I often studied the picture. I stood on a chair to look at her. I lay with my head hanging over the edge of a couch, making the world upside down, imagining the light fixture a candelabra on the white floor of the ceiling, Grandmother and her pedestal standing on their heads. There was something wrong with Grandmother from every angle. Her right arm and hand were good enough, but her left arm didn’t belong to her body. The left arm wasn’t long enough to reach the pedestal, but it reached the pedestal. I worried about Grandmother. Perhaps, with her young body and her old face, she was a dwarf. Perhaps she was painfully crippled. Perhaps I would inherit her body. Maybe I would never grow tall enough to be a man. Maybe my arm, my right arm—inheritances changed from women to men—would be so crippled I could never catch a baseball. Often, looking at her, I clenched my fists, imagining baseballs. It did not once enter my mind to ask Mother about Grandmother Phoebe’s deformity. h h h h h h h h h...

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