The Pugilist's Wife: A Novel

September 2 1987

September 2 1987 The village of Sun Louisiana is flanked on the west by Enon, on the north by Bogalusa and on the east by Mississippi. Where Highway 21 intersects with Highway 16, leading into the village, a long embankment slopes down toward the Bogue Chitto River, which is shaded by tall and heaving pines, their long thin shadows like a row of sentinels watching over the white sandshores and the translucent goldbrown water, through which fat and lethargic catfish, graybrown and silt-covered, languish at the cool riverbottom. Also where these highways intersect is Shorty’s—a convenience store where you can buy anything from baitworms to chocolate milk, lawnmower belts to pantyhose—and there is a string of white gravel road which snakes down the grass and clay embankment to the store’s entrance, in front of which is an island bearing two antiquated gas pumps that thud and whorl as they pull the fuel from the storage tanks beneath the earth. Turning west down 16 and into the village of Sun puts into view the Post Office on the right, its redbrick facade faded and glare-hot in the white September sun. Just past the Post Office is the Marshal’s 71 Office, a small square building built of faded pink cinderblocks with a cracked brown door and an old hitchingrail beneath the window where the Marshal’s car is parked. Across the street from the Marshal is the City Hall with its still-hanging Confederate flag, windtorn, flapping lugubriously against its rusty and decrepit pole. The Big Hammock Baptist Church is planted at the far western end of the village, a good mile past the last manmade structure and separated from town by the high and serried pines which stand in rows as if a cornfield. The side door of the church gives way to a narrow peagravel walkway which leads from the building and to a white and brown mobile home belonging to Pastor Varner, one of the first charismatics to enter the Southern Baptist Church as such and who came in from Mobile Alabama some twenty-five years ago to start up his church and build a congregation of Godfearing Christians. The steeple, at whose peak sits a high white steel cross which casts its shadow over Varner’s trailer every afternoon, can be seen from almost any point in town, save for the places whose view is limited by pines or weedgrowth. The steeple’s height is challenged only by the rise of the village’s watertower which juts above the pines some hundred and seventy two feet, a large metal dome, gray-white, with the words Sun Louisiana painted across its riveted facade. The residents of Sun live off clay and gravel roads which jut out from Highway 16 and into the woods which surround the town and separate it from Enon and Bogalusa and Mississippi. The oldtimers who sit out front of Shorty’s all day, who watch the comings and goings of everyone in town and those who are just passing through, while smoking from corncob pipes, who talk about the folks who live here as if they’re all related, say it’s nice to be cut off like this. That they like it. But the drought has been causing a problem. A big one. The Mayor Slocum has begun to warn the townsfolk that this thing might not end for a while yet and they might want to consider other options. But for most of the residents of Sun there are no options. There is only this place. And if it dies they must die with it. 72 Doyle It’s raining in New Orleans now.But not hard.The steam rises from the streets and there’s a thin veil-like mist over everything, and the people walk faster, their clothes damp, hair dripping. Sweat and rain. It’s quiet and the sun hangs high in the sky as if hung by strings there, beating through the few rainclouds that are moving southward now, across the Mississippi River, away from where they’re needed further north, their gray-white tendrils whisping behind them like chimneysmoke as they float, drawing odd shadows over the bright brown surface of the water. The noise from the riverfront has not ceased either—the steam organs on the...