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stood only a commode covered in pink terry cloth. That was her house so she went up and sat down on the commode, and we went through everything all over again. In the midst of all this a small dog ran up and licked her foot. The reunion was joyous for a time until she decided she did not want the dog since she no longer had a house. She got positively belligerent about the issue, so in exasperation I offered to bludgeon it and put it in the ground next to the other one. The issue dropped as a sudden heavy shower sent us scurrying through the rubble to the protection of the nearest roof still standing. Once inside she spied the only shelf remaining in what was once a closet. The shelf held numerous liquor bottles still miraculously standing in place. She removed a bottle of Jack Daniels Black Label and replaced it with the bag of flour. She told me she was trading not looting. Her mood was decidely merrier by the time the squall ended.
I saw a deuce-and-a-half pull up to the yacht. Joe Bob yelled for me. I went and the woman tagged along. We were going home. The woman wanted to know where she was to go. No one knew, so we boosted her up on the yacht and handed her the dog and bottle. She waved through the porthole as we drove away. I nudged Joe Bob and said, “Don’t be surprised if you read in the newspaper that the wind blew so hard it turned a bottle of Jack Daniels into a bag of Jim Dandy. ’
After three days of shoveling mud out of the streets of Wiggins, my unit was demobilized and I went to Ole Miss. After registration I went out and bought a registered beagle puppy. His sire’s name was “Archie Manning,” his dame “Billie Jo,” and I named him “Faulkner. ’ I left the library only once that year to go to the Ole Miss-U.S.M. game. As I sat in the stands waving two rebel flags, a Black kid named Willy Heidelberg from Southern ran out on the field and single handedly bombed Ole Miss into the Stone Age. The next week, I told everybody I saw, “Boy they sure beat the daylights out of us, didn’t they,” and grinned.
The earth circled the sun ten times before another hurricane targeted the Mississippi Gulf Coast for destruction. Realizing that my students had been only eight years old the last time it had happened, I jumped my classes from Cleopatra to Camille. With the aid of the Mobile Oil Comapny thirty minute epic, “Camille Was No Lady," narrated by Glen Ford, I think I woke up some of them
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for the first time in six weeks. By the end of the day, refugees were pouring into my room so I just nailed my flag to the mast and kept on talking and running my video tape until the wind of Frederic knocked out the power. That paragon of American education, Thomas E. Dewey, taught that one should “learn by doing,” but I believe that a person learns best by getting it done to him.
I am getting ready now for the next one. In my storage bunker I already have one hundred and seventy flashlight batteries, six flashlights, one trans-Atlantic radio, six cases of Coke, one first aid kit, two fire extinguishers, one rubber raft, an assortment of knives, matches, axes, and hatchets, two cases of granola bars, six packs of White Owl cigars, and I’m looking for a used L.A.R.C. Let’er rip!
FESTIVAL Anne Carsley Gumbo, crawfish, shrimp, po-boys, strawberries, fudge, shortcake, azaleas, rain, and beer forever.
Take a chance on the hundred pound cake?
Stick a pin in the inflated twenty foot Miller bottle?
That your kid squalling down yonder?
Move to that Cajun wail. Shake it on over.
In the whirl the fat lady dances.
Her flesh goes in ridges and bumps over hipbones, around the stomach, down the thighs. Her beer is about to spill as she holds it high.
She catches up the young man in one old hold and bounces with him. His headband is loose and his grin changes. He steps with her. Faster. Fast.
Shaking.
Her scalp is pale as a pink azalea in the shifting sun.
Arms that sag and face split by time.
Eyes that see now And mouth red with berries, with joy in now.
She is invincible.
Glory.
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