I’d reshelve the few books checked out but spent most of my shift paging through old yearbooks. I liked yearbooks from the smaller, outer-county schools best, back before consolidation: M. C. Mattox in Hollins, Purvis Manual in Shortridge, and Faulkner itself, the edge of tobacco country, where shipments piled with steaming coal still sped through on the five A.M. CSX train.
Faulkner was always more interesting to me in the past tense. Dad was class of ’75, Mom ’76, a time when girls in our part of the country were just beginning to stop ratting their hair. There were, in fact, precious few changes between the 1976 Eagle and the 2001 Pride of the Tribe: the White Dot became a Dairy Queen, wide-bottomed coupes were replaced with RAV4s. But the open, unfettered expressions of kids in portraits remained, as did the zeal for FFA and FCA (there were as many cows and Christians in 1976 as in 2001). The same twenty surnames are ubiquitous. Everyone is kin to everyone else, tributaries joining in marriage and forking off into nieces and nephews and cousins and step-cousins. The prom queen Mom’s year was Denise Falwell, mother of my chief high school tormentor, Karly Ingram, who ended up leaving our senior prom because her boyfriend, Travis Cotter, got hammered and unsheathed the pimp cane he’d bought to match his tuxedo, revealing it to be a sword, which he swung around the gym to the strains of AC/DC until the police took him away.
I was from the town, like everyone else, but I could never shake the suspicion that I was merely a spectator. I haunted the yearbooks of the past yet failed to show up for my own senior portrait. Not pictured: Sharon Kay Kisses.
I was the only student from Faulkner to go to college out-of-state in ten years. When I got the Ballister scholarship, a frantically excited Mrs. Horsemuller called the newspaper and got me a front-page article.
Upon seeing the article, my father didn’t say anything, but reached out and grabbed my head, something between an embrace and a noogie. This, coming from the man who typically responded to anything I said with a creased brow and some irritated head-shaking, who once, when my parents refused to send me to a gifted-and-talented program at Duke on the argument that it was too far away, turned and hissed, “You think you’re too good to work this summer?” The article was clipped and thumbtacked to the bulletin board in his garage, where it was found when he died. The ladies at the laundromat where my mother worked had it laminated, and it was affixed to our fridge at home, where I was gratified to see how much it bugged Shauna. Though Mom did mutter, releasing me from a rare hug, “They did not get your best side, hon.”
It seemed Mrs. Horsemuller was the happiest of all that I was leaving. When she heard the news, she hugged me hard, her skinny little limbs hot beneath the fabric of her sweater; then she dabbed at her eyes with the edge of a Kleenex, smiling.
Before I left for the last time, she grabbed my face with sudden ferocity. “Don’t you come back here,” she said. “Don’t you dare.”
When I said nothing, she shook my face for emphasis. “This place,” she said, “is a bucket of sand crabs. One tries to climb out, the others’ll reach up and pull him back down. Climb out of here. Don’t you dare come back.”
—
I’m the youngest of three. My brother Jared’s a mechanic. He is sometimes called Red because of his hair, copper before it started to recede, but also because of his temper and his booziness. The red hair is a recessive trait; the Kisses crazy is dominant. He started going to bars when he was sixteen, stumbling home at four on a school night stinking of Budweiser, a problem of debatable size when our parents were waging war on each other. The town’s sheriff was Mom’s second cousin, and he found the idea of Jared kicking the shit out of people largely funny until Jared sent a guy to the hospital. The sheriff got Jared out of it, despite the brain swelling caused by my brother banging the guy’s head against the concrete.
Jared settled down, had kids, started doing his drinking in the shed where no one else could see it (his wife is Britney, class of ’98, a sly, mean girl with a moon face). Earning his good luck with quiet living. He and I have not had a conversation that lasted more than sixty seconds in a decade.