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  • Driftwood, and: The Mysterious Bar-B-Q Grill of Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, and: Lord, Make Me a Sheep
  • Greg Alan Brownderville (bio)

Driftwood

Sister Law, a one-hundred-year-old preacherwomanand folk sculptor, walks to Cache River. Cypress kneesgather like silent monks around her. A daughterof the forest and the river, she's at peaceamong her holy men. Kneeling beside the water,speckled with red haws and tea-colored from leaf tannin,she waits for driftwood. Her first find looks like a rabbitin blurry mid-air stride, the next like fighting bears,a third like her young face not yet crosshatched with years.She lets them go. Breathing to still her imagination,she knows the hardest thing to make now is the habitof saying amen to the river, amen, amen.

The Mysterious Bar-B-Q Grill of Turkey Scratch, Arkansas

Picture a gas tank rigged up as a grilland mounted on a push mower. Cole sawit aiming at the road-black, mean, and mobileas a homemade cannon for a country feud.His grandpa'd left it to his Uncle Bill,who grinned, "Daddy's contraption makes me feelsorta white trash, but surely one of y'allwill keep it, Sam." Sam passed it off on Ray,who kept it. Bill and Sam dropped graveyard deadin days, and one time Ray fell gravely ill [End Page 159] himself when someone borrowed it for a day.After that, Ray said, "Man, I'm plumb afraidto store it in the backyard or the shed.It's smack dab in the front or it gets mad."

Home for Thanksgiving, Cole had come to seehis Uncle Ray. Pulling in, he thought, I mayjust move home, rent some lakeside property.He'd savored the bright blur of his college years,music, museums, the dash and zoom of the city.Now Turkey Scratch felt like the fantasy,one church, one bait shop, a blink on the highwayas he drove southward to the deerwoods. Beingback here, he thought of vertical frontiers,of dreaming in the arms of the pawpaw tree.As a boy, he'd peeled the pale green fruit, feastingand finger-painting the rough trunk in smearsof creamy yellow flesh he used in beersand puddings not sold at the grocery stores.

When Cole was still in high school, Ray had quitthe farm and gone to work at Farm Bureauas a claims specialist. Since then, he'd cutthe pawpaw down and made Aunt Essie happyby adding on a new wing where the fruitonce fell. No more did dominickers strutabout as if they owned the place, and nowthe yard resembled AstroTurf, though onceit doubled as a basketball court, nappyfrom the glad slaps of tennies and bare feet.Some Christmas lights remained, but not the onesthat Cole remembered-multicolored, gappyfire hazards. He would miss the canopyof pawpaw leaves and Essie's mangy puppy.

They'd thrown some killer cookouts on that lawn.Ray would say, "Go 'head on and get you a bite!" [End Page 160] Cole could still see it, meat loose on the boneand charcoal smoldering like hearts in jail.The tire-swing exclamation mark was gone,but the images had never needed one:There's time within time, many thens insideone now. The fireflies blow like neon snowforever, a boy ghosts through a dirt devilin every joy of your imagination.Go love the world, the past's a future ago.Whatever fruit, whatever fire, you'll feelus meaning in the middle of it all.We're yours. A pawpaw tree. A homemade grill.

Lord, Make Me a Sheep

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Brother Langston's sermon over, we all stood.Every head bowed, every eye closed.A flannel-shirted lumberjack of a deacon named Joe Paul Jameswas bawling and squalling as usual:O Lowered, Jayzus, Lowered, move in our midst, Lowered.

Brother Langston said, I don't keerif you're a sinner man or woman or a holy saint of God,we all need to get in the Spirit! Come on, people...

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