The Best That I can Do
The pandemic year of 2020 coincided with my retirement, one
of the few things I’ve done without a second thought or a regret. Even with
helping keep grandkids the first two years of that time, I was gifted with an
enormous amount of writing time, more than I had allowed myself during working
years. I wrote the verse narrative series called The Life and Times of Jaysus
Christopher Duende and Darrell Cobb Runkle in late 2020 or early 2021.
Without looking at the year’s work, I would guess that it
was the fourth or fifth full length piece I wrote during that stretch of public
downtime. Jaysus was a joyful writing experience, a buddy story about two
misfits turned loose on the open country roads of my neighborhood. I remember
how good I felt about it when I finished. I had never had so much going on in
one of these little poetry stories. And I’d never had one to fall together so
well or so organically. I had no idea where the narrative was going until it
went. I couldn’t wait to get it into the hands of some readers just to see if
they got what I was doing.
In the early summer of 2021, still deep in the pandemic, Red
Hawk Publications, a boutique publisher at the school where I had worked for 28
years, came out with the volume, published in what appeared to be a blue horse
notebook, like a found artifact, Robert Canipe, the Red Hawk editor’s idea. To
me it was the perfect wrapper for the confection of ideas and oddball
characters that I had sent marauding through 21st Century Trump country.
When Jaysus landed, I sent copies to two of the people who
had in some way inspired what I’d written: Ron Rash and Fred Chappell. Both of
them replied enthusiastically. I think Fred was more amused than anything. Ron
said I was working without a wire.
The book sold poorly as expected. I had long since outlived
my shelf date as a relevant writer. The only books I’d ever had to sell much at
all were the ones I’d done about local and regional baseball history. And most
of the people who really liked my work had died over the past twenty years. I
had also been published a book nearly every year since the turn of the century,
a stupid but common mistake for poets.
I did receive a smattering of replies to Jaysus from the
smattering of readers who bought or received it. The closest I got to really
talking about what I’d done in the book was in some explanation that I gave to
Michel Stone, a writer buddy from Spartanburg, who is also a friend of Ron’s
and recognized the plot elements that had been “sampled” from his One Foot in
Eden. Otherwise, one reader spoke of it as a book about labor and economics,
which it is. I might add that in Chappell’s letter, he allowed that the roads
in Jaysus could have easily been the roads where he grew up in and around
Canton, NC.
Which brings me to one of the things I wanted to say. Life
and Times of Jaysus . . . is very much inspired by Midquest. There is a scene
where Jaysus, the protagonist descends into the Henry River gorge to clean up a
“mess” he has made. Much like the grandson must descend into the porch well to
clean it in Midquest. Jaysus, a former professional football player must
participate in a series of contests with his buddy and boss, Drunkle, in order
to win freedom for himself and eventually for his family. The contests which include
a swimming event in the nasty Henry River and daily motorcycle races on Old
Shelby Road are a kind of hero’s journey for Jaysus. When his wife Mary, a
former Canadian Football League cheerleader chastises him for letting Drunkle
beat him in the swimming contest, he knows that his situation has gone as far
wrong as it can and he must act.
In Ron Rash’s last two novels, I along with my buddy David
Dickson had made appearances as small time thieves of drug dealers, so in the
tradition of ball busting amongst friends, I knew I had to respond. In Jaysus,
not only is the title character rereading One Foot in Eden as he did when in
college at Duke, he is also unknowingly living some of the plot points.
Near the end of the book, the poems devolve into rhymes that
among other things poke fun at the company that made the Hunger Games movie at
the Henry River Mill Village site. I was in fact reading the selected poems of
WH Auden while I was writing Jaysus, and by the final section I could no longer
hold back the dam of formal poetics. Chappell said I’d thrown up a barricade of
rhyme. And he was right.
Finally, I dedicated this book to my longtime colleague
Jerry Sain, who was an All-American offensive lineman at Carolina. The Jaysus
character is not in any way like Jerry, but working closely with someone for
sixteen years does allow one an opportunity to hear all the stories. There was
one included that is perhaps a little too personal and for that I apologize.
So without just outright giving the story away, this is some
of what I wanted to say about The Life and Times of Jaysus Christopher Duende
and Darrell Cobb Runkle. The story contains murder, a body hidden better than
the one in One Foot in Eden, a biker gang called the Dusk Brothers, buried
treasure and Spanish Conquistadors, Trumpers, mill hill baseball, accidental
killings, and a surprise ending. It is probably the best that I can do.
