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C H APTER 33 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 From Honey Island to Menard Chapel AT THIS POINT IN MY LIFE, HAVING JUST RETIRED FROM THE ACADEMIC WARS after ten years employment in an Illinois college, the truth of what Tolstoy once memorably said has powerfully kicked into my day-to-day existence. "Happy families are all alike; every tmhappy family is unhappy in its own way," he said, and I've taken that to mean that nolxxly sees any reason to write about hannonious and gladsome situations. To describe my happy life with Pat, the successes my children have earned professionally and personally after finishing college and starting careers and their own families, and the placidity ofmy existence would bore me to do and any potential reader ofsuch an accotlllt to suffer plowing through. We want to read about pain, disaster, fear, dashed hope, regret, disapJXlintment , bloodshed, betrayal, small-mindedness, and all other such flaws as flesh is heir to. Accomplishment, reward, success, compensation, pleasant maundering into peaceful old age-written account of all such even-keeled progress is naught but boredom and ennui. The last novel 1have published, though not the last one I've written, 1 called Coasters. 1wrote that one in Baltimore, too, and 1made use ofthe Texas Gulf Coast for setting and theme. Warren Murphy, myoid parmer in the electrical engineering lab during my pre-English major days at Lamar State College of Technology, 1 used as emblem of a man unable to break free from coasting and to achieve escape velocity from the Golden Triangle of Texas, try as he did to do so. Warren read the novel shortly before he succumbed to the wasting disease that t(X)k him, and he didn't recognize the ptotagonist as himself. "I like the old boy, Gerald," Warren told me, "but he sure doesn't know how to handle his heavy dependence on poem tang, does her' "No, he doesn't, Warren," 1told him. "But you got ro give him credit. He's not about to give in and quit." "No, he just keeps on sliding," Warren said. "Keeps on watching that big wheel turn." '47 148 HOME TRUTHS Warren had achieved the advantage that distance provides. The making and the reading of fiction provides that relief and perspective, and I have always depended on the aid and kindness of imagined characters in settings as fully realized as I can make them to give me that distance I have yearned to find. Menard Chapel is located in the far southeast comer of Polk County, just at the edge of the Big Thicket, an area now protected from development and change by the United States National Park Service. During the Civil War, deserters from the Confederate States ofAmerica and dodgers ofthe draft levied by that government lived deep in the Big Thicket on a bit of land elevated from the swamp. It was called Honey Island because ofthe supplies ofthat sugary substance fotllld in the hollows ofcypress and live oak and sweet gum growing there. These men who had fled a responsibility they would not accept swapped the honey they robbed from the hives to local residents for com and meat and whiskey. It was a fair trade. The Catter Lumber Company, quite able to cut all the virgin pine out of almost all that part of Texas, couldn't do anything profitable in the Big Thicket with teams of mules and horses and oxen, and later with trucks, because of the mud and water of the swamp, the presiding heat, the mosquitoes, and the general hellishness of the area. Some of my earliest memories come from trips with my father and mother to Menard Chapel for funerals throughout the year, and each summer for the graveyard working. Relatives of the dead would come with hoes, shovels , axes, and rakes to clean the graves of weeds and brush, and with covered dishes of food for the picnic on the grotllld. As I was growing up, I always thought my mother enjoyed going to Menard Chapel, at least for the graveyard-working, if not for the funerals. I remember her socializing with the Duffs and Murphys and Overstreets and Nowlens , and Richardsons, placing her contribution offood on one ofthe long tables, and listening to the gospel singing that always came after the cleaning of the graves and the eating of the picnic were at an end. My father, as Big Willie Duff, was in his element, telling stories and laughing and...

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