This episode of 7 Minutes With features Jedidiah Ayres talking about movies, Chris Holm on music, and Holly West on scatology.
The final half-hour of the show is a chat I had at Fountain Bookstore with author Caleb Johnson, who was launching his debut novel, Treeborne.
Listen to the podcast here
Music
Bird Streets review
The Dirty Nil Master Volume
Restorations first listen
Noname Tiny Desk
Movie
Mandy review
Small screen viewing
Amercian Vandal
Bonus author chat
Caleb Johnson's Treeborne ->
Excerpt
TODAY
The
water was coming, but Janie Treeborne would not leave. She’d lived alone in
this house perched on the edge of a roadside peach orchard in Elberta, Alabama,
ever since Lee Malone sold it to her. Sold maybe not the right
word for the price she paid, the price he would take. But it was hers and she
would not leave. Rather the water take her too.
She’d
been telling her visitor exactly how she came to own the house, which once was
Lee’s office and, before that, his boyhood home. A complicated matter. To tell
how this house and the surrounding property became hers she needed to tell how
it became Lee’s, and to do that she needed to first tell about a man named Mr.
Prince.
“See,
back then folks thought Mr. Prince wasn’t but a rumor and a last name,” she
continued. “But he was real. Lived in one of them mansions down on the river.
Anyhow, Lee started working at The Peach Pit not long after the storm.
“Worked
here for years. Then one day Mr. Prince carried him to lunch out at Woodrow’s.
The Hills would of been about the only place they could eat together. They
ordered and sat down and Mr. Prince said he was selling the orchard, the old
cannery, and a little cottage he owned in town for whatever was in Lee’s
billfold right that moment. Can you imagine? Mr. Prince died not too long
after. Most of my growing up, folks still thought Lee wasn’t nothing but the
orchard manager. Would of got to a certain kind of person. Not him, not to Lee
Malone.”
Janie
Treeborne’d come to own the peach orchard—and the other properties once
belonging to Mr. Prince—the same way as Lee Malone. She sat at a greasy
tabletop inside Woodrow’s Pit Cook Bar-B-Q where, years before, Lee’d counted
out of his billfold two-dollar-five-cent and a receipt for a bag of dog food,
and she searched for what money she had in the depths of a purse she felt
foolish toting around. Lee’s heart was weak by then. He had considered turning
the land over to Janie for a long long time.
She
thought she would of handed everything down to her visitor, this young man
sitting with a tape recorder on his lap and a long microphone gripped in his
hand. So why’d she not? Janie couldn’t remember. Did it matter? He was here, he
was home. Had her same big forehead and freckled nose, her granddaddy Hugh’s
thick black hair and high-cut cheeks. A Treeborne, she thought, through and
through, right down to the bone.
“Do
you remember how much it was you paid?” he asked.
“Foot
yes, I do,” she said. “You reckon your grandmomma’d up and forget something
like that? It was sixteen dollar and a pack of chewing gum.”
“Did
you ever regret not paying him more?”
“Regret,
foot,” she said. No amount would of been sufficient. This place was priceless.
But how to explain that? “Lee’s body might of blunted,” she went on, “but his
mind stayed sharp till the end. I always tell that if mine ain’t then somebody
please shove a gun right here and fire that sucker twice. There’s one right yonder
in the dresser drawer. I don’t give a rip if it sounds morbid! Life’s morbid!
Love sure enough is.
“Lee
Malone taught me everything about the peach-growing business. Everything. Even
helped run the fruit stand through his last good summer on earth. Could still
sing his head off too. Them trees yonder, we planted them together. Look out
thataway you’ll see where the house he died in once stood. Wasn’t much to the
place itself, but it was in Elberta and belonged to him, and there was a time
that meant something. See? Other side the road there, just below the water
tower Ricky Birdsong fell off of.”
“Are
there any pictures of Mr. Malone?” the young man asked.
Janie
got up from her recliner chair and took one of the dozens of photo albums
shelved in the living room and stacked in cardboard boxes pushed against the
wall. She opened to a picture of the old Elberta water tower. Pointed, turned
the page. Black-and-whites of folks standing by water, with dogs, by log houses
and woodpiles, next to pickup trucks and wagons, at school, at church, in
decorated cemeteries, along fencelines and unidentifiable roadsides and
hedgerows. Somehow not one picture of Lee Malone.
She
turned the page again and pointed at a girl with straight black hair touching
bony shoulders. “There’s me,” she said, squinting as if to be sure. “Would of
been the year before MawMaw May died—if I’m right.”
“Do
you still think about it?” the young man asked.
No comments:
Post a Comment