[SIDE CONVERSATION]
I want to thank everybody for coming.
I'm Mark Wunderlich, and I'm the acting director
of the Poetry Center.
And one announcement-- copies of David Lee's book
are for sale compliments of ASUA Bookstore.
And I'm sure he'd be happy to sign copies for you
after the reading.
David Lee is the author of seven volumes
of poetry, the most recent of which, the book My Town,
received the 1995 Western States Book Award for poetry.
Lee has received numerous awards, including fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Arts
and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Utah State
Governor's Award, and was recently
named one of the top 12 writers throughout the history of Utah.
His books, which chronicle the life of a small farming town,
have earned him the title of "pig poet"
and made him the subject of a recent PBS documentary
of the same name.
He currently serves as chairman of the Department of Language
and Literature at Southern Utah University
and lives in St. George, Utah.
When speaking of David Lee, one is led inevitably to livestock
in general and hogs specifically.
As the nation's pig poet, he has proved himself the master
of the self-created genre, adding to the world
of contemporary poetry a vocabulary familiar to any
former FFA or 4-H member but largely unknown to the rest
of the world and therefore sometimes mysterious and even
Baroque.
Durocs, Hampshires, spotted Poland Chinas, shoats, barrows,
and the lovely verb "to farrow" are all invoked within
Lee's poetry about animal husbandry.
David Lee is also a master of vernacular,
spending more than a decade crafting four linked
books of poems mapping the lives of the inhabitants
of a rural farming town in the West.
As a writer of monologue, he has definitely
captured the cadences of speech of his town's inhabitants,
proving himself the kind of poet who
listens to the voices around him,
going outward for the strands and scraps of voice that inspire
his poems, making him a poet of the community
rather than a poet of the interior.
This is not to say David Lee's work
lacks depth or, because of its hard-bitten humor,
is not serious.
On the contrary, and to quote Woody Allen,
"beneath all comedy is tragedy."
Lee succeeds in creating a lasting document
of a way of life that fewer people will know and experience.
I am pleased to introduce David Lee.
[APPLAUSE]
I don't want to read.
I want to listen to that.
[LAUGHTER]
That's the best introduction I have ever received.
Thank you.
I don't listen to introductions because they just
scare the shit out of me.
And thank you.
Hi, Jane.
Hi.
She came to our campus last year.
Wow.
And you said then, you have to come to ours someday.
Well, I don't know if you had anything to do with this.
But if you did, thank you.
And I'm very pleased to be here.
Am I doing this right?
If I put it on that way, it's upside down.
How about there?
That'll work.
Is that going to be OK?
Yeah.
OK, I'll pick it up.
I really am delighted to be here.
How's the volume?
Is that OK?
More?
OK.
I don't think it's a mic.
I think it's just a tape recorder.
So let's play like I do when I go to junior high schools.
If you can't hear me, raise one hand.
And if you get through listening before I get through talking,
raise to then wave them.
And that'll be OK.
[LAUGHTER]
I am very, very pleased to be here.
This is my first trip ever to Tucson.
I've wanted to visit Dick's digs for a long, long, long time.
He's a big brother since 1952.
Can you believe that?
I used to go down to a gymnasium in Abilene, Texas,
and watch this guy who was captain of the Flying Cats
gymnastic team at Abilene Christian College.
First person I ever knew in my life who jumped on a trampoline
and could do flips on it.
And I thought that was just spectacular.
Now that I'm fat, I think it's even more spectacular.
But I don't think he can do it anymore.
And now that I've said that, he'll take me out this afternoon
and show me.
I know better than that.
But I'm really pleased to be here.
And I'm going to start with a new poem that's
not in the oral tradition.
And I think it's a poem of joy.
At least, I hope so.
It's a psalm.
Dick came to our house this summer.
We spent a week talking a million things, including
Cormac McCarthy.
And he told me I was wrong and I had to go back
and reread Cormac McCarthy and that All the Pretty
Horses really wasn't a very good book and Blood Meridian was.
And I read them, and I found out he was right.
And so I wrote a poem about it.
And I also, in late summer, I was trying to prove
I wasn't pregnant.
I wanted to get 15 pounds off.
So I went on a Marine Corps diet.
And I also started climbing to the top of Pine Valley Mountain
every afternoon.
It was a three-hour round trip.
And I wrote this after the first trip
up when I discovered it would have
been best if I had done this in increments-- you know,
one hour, one day, and an hour and 10 minutes.
I did it all the first day.
And of course, I died.
So this is a psalm written after reading Cormac McCarthy
and taking a three-hour climb to the top of Pine Valley Mountain.
And it has an epigraph.
"Laughter is also a form of prayer."
Soren Kierkegaard.
"Right here, Lord, tether me to my shadow
like a fat, stabbing mule stuck sideways in tank mud,
bawling for eternity.
At midnight, when the stars slip their traces
and race the moon like wild horses
to their death in the darkness, let my hoarse song twine
with the night wind.
May the bray of today's laughter fall like a pitchy top branch
from a tall yellow pine straight down like winter sleet
to the mountains' bent and trembling knees."
Well, joy.
There it is.
I do want to spend most of the time
this afternoon on the new book.
It's just out.
Came out October 1.
So I've had about, what, a month and a half,
I suppose, looking at the book, touring the book,
reading from the book.
And that's what Copper Canyon asked me to do on the tour
was feature the book everywhere.
So here we go with My Town.
I've picked several of the poems to read.
I was told before I came out here,
feel free to talk about the poems as I'm reading from them.
Well, when I leave home, I get two pieces of advice
from my wife and daughter.
First, I better check now.
Jodi always says, stand behind the podium and check your fly.
All right, I can't, because it doesn't show.
And then Jen always says, as I'm going out the door-- she really
says two things.
She says, remember, you're out there to work, not have fun.
So don't enjoy yourself.
But number two, she said, and remember,
don't talk between the poems.
They're not dull.
All right.
So I want to talk about My Town a little bit.
And then I'm not going to talk about the poems
anymore about it.
My Town began when I was finishing up
the Day's Work book.
I don't like to finish one book without starting another one,
so you have to hear this again, don't you?
Sorry, Jennifer.
But I was searching around looking for a new book,
looking for a [AUDIO OUT] And Jen suggested an Ellis Britton
book.
Ellis Britton is in my old books.
I describe him as the meanest man who ever lived.
And she's always liked him.
And I tell her it's because he reminds me of her.
She said, write one about him.
And I said, I don't know enough about him to write a book.
And then she said, well, what about minor characters
in the other books?
And that was the click.
That's what started the whole process of My Town.
Then in a phone conversation with a friend about a year
later, I discovered the structure
while I was talking of a journey through a cemetery or a ghost
town.
And then the idea fell on me to go back
on my theological background and structure
this as a formal requiem.
So the book has a prelude, an interlude, a postlude,
a benediction as I work through.
And maybe that's all I really want
to say for now, although again, you can't offend me
if you want to stop me in the reading anywhere
and ask questions or whatever.
As I like to say, I have two living teenage children.
And that proves I can be interrupted on a regular basis.
I can be argued with.
I can be criticized.
It doesn't bother me.
I'm going to start with the prelude poem
just because it's first.
It has two epigraphs.
The first, I have been told on numerous occasions,
is the most immediately identifiable line in American
literature in the second half of the 20th century.
I think that's probably right.
I've never gone into a junior high school
restroom where I haven't seen this written on a bathroom wall.
"You can't go home again."
Thomas Wolfe.
And then the second epigraph is from one of my favorite poets,
the Minnesota poet, the Viking Bill Holm,
6'6" by 300 pound with his bushy red hair and his bulging
eyeballs.
And he once upon a time told me he
thought this was the best line he had ever written.
So I scooped it.
"You can't go home again."
Thomas Wolfe.
"But shit."
Bill Holm.
All right.
"Who said that?
Did somebody say that?
Or was that in one of them damn books you read?
Better.
It's a pile of crap.
I go home every day.
Don't matter where I am.
I'm the prodigal son.
I don't need a Greyhound bus to get me there.
I can go to my town right now, right here,
talking to you because this is everywhere I've ever been."
Then from that, I go into a poem called "Terrace Mound."
It's really not a poem.
It's an incompletion.
It's just Virgil giving the directions through hell
to Dante, I suppose.
It's getting us into the cemetery.
I'll just read it just for the background,
and then I'll move into the poems themselves.
"Go through them gates and turn left.
Now, them's the Rushings.
Had the little grocery store after he quit farming.
And there's Maloufs, these immigrants.
I suppose most of us are.
They took a later boat.
Had this boy Tommy with the cancer in high school
that played football.
Chopped him off a part at a time till he only
had a thumb and a little finger left on that hand.
Then they took his thumb and a leg.
He'd give it up.
Kay Stokes down there with the big fence and the Patricks
next door, them's the expensive people.
Bryant Williams a little further down there, turn.
Here's Edna Mae and Rufus Garner.
Way down there at the end with the white picket fence is
Lela's.
And over there in that flat place in the sun
is Ellis Britton.
Should have planted a tree there.
Be shade for the whole block.
My Lord, I couldn't have told you
what Buck Gossip's name was if I'd have
thought of him two minutes ago.
And down to the left at the end of that street, a gypsy come
in with the carnival, got in a knife fight
over one of the women.
So he stayed.
And across that street right down there, see, was a man
I love.
That's Mr. Cummings' place.
And then up from him--
in 1956, the Baptists got a new preacher, the Reverend Pastor
Brother Strayhan from the Southern Tennessee Preacher
School Seminary.
He had a Bible they'd give him for graduating,
had about 40 ribbons marking his page numbers hanging out
the back, every color you could imagine.
After he'd been there about a year,
he'd still tell them how they didn't appreciate
him enough because he was awarded them ribbons for being
outstanding in his field.
One day, Mizrez Bouchier, who was old enough
to not care no more, said after church she
wished to hell he'd go out and stand in his field some more.
She'd had enough of him already.
He'd preach swinging that thing around like a Chinaman's cat.
By the end of the sermon, he'd took out
the ribbons marking spots, all worked up
to give the invitation, swung it so hard once he chopped off
the top of an incarnation in the pulpit flower pot.
He loved to preach on how he got called by the Lord
to be his servant when he's only 16, met his lovely wife
that same summer.
My mama says she figured he's right.
All boys that age get called, some of them
even on the telephone.
But she thought the Lord got a wrong number that time.
We all screwed up now and then.
He had about nine kids, said it was the Lord's will.
Oldest one, not even 12.
His wife looked like an inner tube with about half its air.
You'd hear her in the grocery store two aisles over,
her feet drug so.
She's wore out.
Not even 30 and known it was her by the sound.
Even if he got his preacher pay and a house
and a car and his electric and the water, with all them kids,
he thought it wasn't enough to get by on.
Every third Sunday, the sermon was on the collection plate
and the bread on the water.
He'd go around town asking all the business
for a preacher discount.
Wouldn't buy nothing in a store if they didn't mark it down
for him.
When they didn't, he could make them sorry for it.
He'd find some way to get it in one of his sermons,
and the whole congregation would go somewheres else
after that whether they believed it or not.
His kids got in the picture show half price and free meals
at the school lunchroom and the ball games
without paying because it was the Lord's will.
So once, he went to Lela's cafe.
Stood there at the counter before he had sat down
with his whole family, said, how much is your minister
discount to eat there?
Customers listening, too, waiting to pay.
Says, I need at least 20%.
Lela says, why?
She wasn't even a Baptist but a Presbyter.
Says, my family and I get discounts
of up to one half at most places because of I
am the Baptist Reverend.
One of the people eating there, Clovis Robinson,
I think back then, said, yes, ma'am.
That's a fact.
He's a Baptist deacon.
Had to back him up without no choice.
Wasn't nothing she could do.
Everybody watching, listening, waiting
to see whether they'd all walk out.
Lela said, sit down.
I will do my 20% one time.
All them kids standing there with their mouths hanging open,
three of them didn't even have their britches zipped up.
He ordered tuna fish sandwiches and a glass of water
for all them kids because that was the cheapest, fried chicken
for his wife because that was the most for the money,
and told this waitress to bring him a steak to eat.
How you want that cooked, she said.
Scriptural, he said.
She said, what?
He said, well done, my good and faithful servant, leaned back
and grinned, proud of himself like
he thought she ought to bring him a dish of ice cream for free
for thinking that one up.
Lela heard it, hollered through the window
from the cash register to the cook, whole cafe listening.
Fix that preacher's kids hamburgers and French fries.
Make his wife shrimps and white fish.
Put him on a steak from bottom of the pile.
I'll pay the difference.
Cook says, how you want that steak?
She says, scriptural.
Burn that son of a bitch to hell.
He never did come back there to eat again after that.
And it never hurt Lela's business, not even one bit."
This is a poem that has an allusion in it.
I wrote it for one of my classes in 17th-century British
literature.
We had been looking at the Puritan writers.
And I had made them read any one of their choice of four works
by John Bunyan.
And if you've read John Bunyan, you
can see that was an ordeal in terror.
Most of them picked The Pilgrim's Progress
because it had a CliffsNotes.
One of them actually read The Death and Life of Mr Badman.
One of them started The Holy War between Diabolus and El Shaddai.
And several of them read Grace Abounding
to the Chief of Sinners because it did say in one work somewhere
that that was the finest prose allegory
in the English language.
So I wrote this for them.
It's called "Fast."
And it has an allusion at the end,
which you'll pick up on now.
"Janie Grace Gosset could outrun anybody in the high school
back then before she had that car wreck.
If she had been born a boy, she could
have been on the football team except she's probably
too little.
Her whole body was one piece of muscle,
like a carpenter's crowbar welded together without a joint.
You could have struck a match on her anywhere.
You don't believe me, go for a match.
She'd wear blue jeans to the school
on Fridays, like all the girls did once.
It looked like two boar hogs in there,
fighting it out-- in a chicken coop when she walked
past you with them britches on.
Edgar McMahon down to the gym said
if he could get cotton that tight, he'd
get 800 pounds in a toe sack.
Then she took up with--
sorry-- Harold Wayne Johnson before he went blind
and started being a gospel preacher.
He slobbered all over her for about half
a year until he ruined her reputation
so he'd have an excuse to move on to another one.
They said she's going 80 miles an hour
at least when she went off the cap rock after he'd done it all
and told.
There was one springtime they was having the high school
track meet.
Whole town come out to see if she could outrun Jimmy Ray
Gary, who was going to graduate and go to the college,
be on the team there.
They had all the other races first
so we'd have to wait and see.
Finally, come to the last one, and there she
was in it, wearing this tight pink running outfit.
That gun went off.
First half, she was out in front, good.
And then he pulled up, all the other ones left behind by then,
them two right beside each other the last part.
Everybody there was struck deaf and dumb,
like they was on the road to Damascus, their mouths hanging
open like it was a vision.
For just a second or two, that day turned into pear jelly.
Her body melted into that running suit
looked like she was bald naked, running wide open.
Only one other one besides them that was moving
was Harold Wayne Johnson, running down to the finish line
to grab her just like she was a Holstein cow
right in front of everybody.
Probably thought she let just for him.
I don't think anybody could tell you who won that foot race.
We lost that in the watching.
But we all had words for it that we'd known by heart.
I heard my mouth say, Amazing Grace.
R.B. Mcravey said, that there is poetry in motion.
Ollie McDugald said, oh, no, that is a religious experience.
But Leonard Tittle, who was already preaching on weekends
and had both of them in his class of algebra, said, no, sir,
gentlemen.
Right out loud, you are all wrong.
That there was Grace abounding to the chief of sinners."
Well, halfway through the poem, halfway through the book,
I come to Interlude.
And it does mark the halfway point.
And with this poem, I guess I try
to change the tenor of the book a little bit,
change the tension.
And the voice will shift a little bit.
"Help me right here, said John.
And I grasped the bottom rim.
We lifted that barrel into the pickup
and then sat down on the tailgate, hot.
A warm canyon breeze spilled across the yellow grass.
It was this one summer back home.
I was young, about the time most kids getting out of school,
but I'd done quit.
Old man Cummings had me helping him,
lifting all this heavy weight on a wagon load.
We made a tote and sat in the shade to rest.
He started remembering, commenced to talking, says,
summer clover.
Jingle, jangle.
He'd done taken and put his hand in his pocket, pulled
out this silver dollar.
He looked at it like he'd never seen it before.
Smooth, so you couldn't even tell the man on the side,
all the words rubbed off from being carried so long.
It was meadow clover all over, stretching out green and yellow.
I didn't say nothing.
He talked, said, I was 17.
They come in wagons, putting on gypsy carnivals.
Whole town wanted them to go on and on.
They'd steal what all was loose.
Everybody went to the tent anyway.
They paid me $1 to water horses.
I worked all afternoon, hard--
I was 17-- for $1.
She had eyes that laughed, same color as them fancy shoes,
laugh like silver baubles on a red and blue velvet dress.
Color of midnight.
Even in the dark, I seen me looking back
from those black eyes.
I wasn't scared.
She showed me slow, easy, a whole field of yellow clover.
Bells on her shoes, real soft.
Jingle, jangle.
So many nights I can't sleep, a smell comes in the window
after me.
When my wife's alive, times I laid there the whole night
beside her, shaken, awake, all that dark tearing holes in me.
Nothing I could do but stay there, listen,
the sound of silver wind bells.
Kids in the next room sleeping.
Nobody could smell it or hear it but me.
Summer clover.
Jingle, jangle.
He sat there staring at that money in his hand,
almost like he's talking to it, like he'd
done forgotten I was there, and never said no more.
In his pocket, closed his eyes.
I could tell he was smelling summer clover.
It was all over for then.
So let's take this pig feed out to the pig pens,
and then we'll be done.
Lifting it down won't be as hard as getting it in.
Second half of anything's always easier than the first."
"What time is it?
Is it time for supper yet?"
I love to read the first line.
Everybody checks their wristwatch, don't they?
[LAUGHTER]
I like that now.
"Time for supper yet?
Go up and tell Laverne to get some supper ready.
I'm hungry.
No, no, no, no.
Don't.
Goddamn, don't.
Get on back down here right now.
Don't go messing with her about no supper.
She's in the wrong moon turn this week.
Don't say nothing at all right now.
She'll do it her way or not.
And piss her off, it could mess up the rest of your life
and ruin the whole evening.
Your goose and mine'd both be cooked.
You know, I known a man named Goose once.
I'd grown up with Goose Landrum.
That's what we called him.
And his daddy and his granddaddy, too.
I never known that one.
That wasn't their real names.
They had Christian ones.
His daddy was Harold.
And I don't know his granddaddy, but it was something,
Leon or Albert, like that, I imagine.
His was George, and we never called that to him.
It started with his granddaddy, which
had this wife and this new baby, which later on would have been
his daddy, out to take a ride in the wagon
with this new team of horses he was breaking in on a Sunday.
So them horses spooked up a rabbit,
scared themselves to death, and took off
like a slobbering whirlwind.
He thrown her the reins, grabbed that baby up, and jumped off.
Tried to-- her to keep them headed on the road
best she could till they given out.
It's too late.
Said her dress blown up in her face.
She couldn't have heard him if she tried.
Screeching too loud by then, them horses
sounded like a thunderbolt farting.
She'd have to figure it out without his help.
She's a schoolteacher."
[LOUD AIRPLANE]
I had a terrific experience yesterday
morning in a restaurant.
Here I was, having a very nice conversation
and a nice breakfast with a very good friend of mine
I haven't seen in two years.
And right over here are four people
who look like low-level junior high school administrators.
Now, I only say that because my wife's a junior high school
teacher.
And they were engaged in a wonderful conversation that had
wonderful educational jargon.
One of them got up, walked away from his table,
stood right behind me, and blew his nose that loud.
And the only thing I could think of to say was, why, thank you.
And he said, oh, you're welcome.
And well, thanks.
Anyway, here we are.
"She's a schoolteacher.
He wasn't worried.
It's her job to think of something to do.
He had to carry that baby all the way home walking.
We didn't have no hitchhiking back then.
Most people had other things to do on a Sunday afternoon.
She got back that afternoon by 4 o'clock.
He was sitting on the furniture, rocking.
When she come in the door, he said, by God, I'm hungry.
What we having for supper?
She said, where's the baby?
He said, it's in its bed, asleep.
You sure are nasty.
You better take you a bath today after we have something to eat.
She never said nothing.
Walked in that room to look at the baby, he thought.
Started humming hisself a tune, got lost how it went,
steady until he heard the cock.
Looked up, and she had the rifle pointed right at him
out of the closet.
He jumped, and she shot the middle rafter right out
of that rocking chair.
He run to the window and tried to pull it up.
It was froze.
He heard the gun go clock, ducked down on the floor.
She shot that window right on the crossbar.
All four pieces of glass fell out.
One of them didn't even break, and another one only
busted in half.
He crawled to the door until he heard it again, come up running
and hit that door, turned down the porch and saved his life.
She shot that door right through the heart and lungs
where he would have been stopped on the other side
or gone straight.
He run as far as he could back behind the barn,
where he could look through the board gaps
to see if she was coming after him.
But she never.
He waited the rest of the day out there by hisself
to see if she'd leave or burn the house down.
Nothing else happened.
Said his dog wouldn't even come out for company,
it was so ascared too.
Stayed under the porch the whole time.
He waited until after dark for something to happen.
Finally, when it didn't, he snuck back up
to see if she'd hung herself or was hiding with that gun.
Got to the window, and she was sitting in his chair, rocking.
Never even looked round, staring at that bedroom door, said,
your supper's on the table if you want it.
Got up and walked in and closed the door.
He'd never made a sound, so he couldn't
suppose to know how she knew he was there.
That one friend of yours says all women can see in the dark.
I suppose they can hear through it, too.
It was catfish and mashed potatoes
and fish gravy with the head on, looking at him
all in a bunch cold grease.
But he ate every bite of it.
He didn't think it was a good idea not to that time.
She never offered to talk about it,
and he had a story made up to explain
how she got free wagon driving lessons that
could have costed upward of $4.
And that baby was the only one they ever had.
From then on after that, you could walk up behind him
and goose him or clap your hands.
He would turn inside out with a spasm.
Once, these boys blown up this blasting cap [AUDIO OUT] grocery
store.
He fainted right by the meat counter
talking to Jim Kennedy about baloney and Vienna sausage.
If he'd seen a gun, he'd go white as a Yorkshire hog.
You couldn't have paid him enough to come to town
on the 4th of July.
They'd have had to given him a transfusion.
And everybody called him Goosey from then on.
Well, that baby grown up the same way.
He was Little Goose in town.
And him and this woman had this baby
they named George, which was my friend, before she run off
to Oklahoma with a well digger.
And his daddy was a Campbellite, didn't believe
in divorce or piano music.
He waited for her to come back someday.
But it was too late, and she didn't.
So what they called him then was Poor Goose.
He was run all over town.
They'd even pray for him with the sick and the afflicted.
Even the Lord known who Poor Goose was.
But she was gone for--
before that, before they dug all them dry holes on their place,
before Goosey the granddaddy hung and killed hisself
after his wife took off when Poor Goose grown up,
even before he got behind on the taxes
and lost part of the farm and Kay Stokes picked it up,
somebody give that grandbaby they
called Baby George these two gooses for a birthday
present to be funny about it all.
But he raised them for pets around the house.
So one day eating supper, they seen them two going off
down the road through the gate.
Poor Goose said, there they go.
You better get them back inside the fence
and close that gate if you want to keep them.
That boy run out to do it.
In a minute, they looked out the window,
and he had one goose under both his arms, jumping up and down.
They could hear him hollering through the wall.
Let go!
Let go of me, goose!
Went out on the porch and said, what's going on?
Boy turned round, still jumping.
Both them long-necked gooses had leaned over
and bit him on his pecker till he squoze so hard,
one passed out.
And they thought it was dead, its head down,
flopping like a well bucket, and they'd have to eat it.
But it wasn't.
Other one hung on until his daddy jerked it loose.
But it was a tragedy.
That goose flopped its wings and given him a bloody nose.
And it broke that little boy's pecker.
Must have busted something in there.
Turned off to the east, almost like the letter L, ruint.
Took him both hands to pee from then on.
He never did get married by choice,
said he never had no inclinations or otherwise.
And being married was just too much pain for being worth it.
So after that, after all the women left and Goosey
hung hisself and Poor Goose and Gooseneck, which
is what they called him at first because it looked like one,
was living alone out there together
for the rest of their lives, about to farm
during the drought with no money coming in
to nobody, before they noticed it, them
two geese turned into over 100.
You couldn't come up to their gate, even.
Them gooses would run up with their wings and their, [HISSES],,
tongues out, hissing like an oil well fire.
Even the Jehovah Witnesses couldn't get up to their porch.
They'd have busted your, knees flopping their arms.
And then you'd slip on goose crap and fall down.
They'd bite off your private parts and ears
before you could crawl off and get away.
And that is what saved their farm.
M.L. Basinger come in with the machinery and the oil well
drilling supply, had his parts spread out
all across his property.
Well, people started breaking in and stealing at night.
Dogs didn't help.
They'd bring dead meat and feed them.
Walk around, take what all they wanted.
He was about to lose everything when he heard about the Landrum
geese.
Went out and offered them $5 apiece for as many
as they'd sell him.
They'd pay the taxes and keep the rest of the land,
and it stopped the stealing right now.
Bunch of field hands cut across Basinger's one evening
after work, singing out loud, just got the gate closed.
And there was all them geese.
If they'd have kept on singing, it might have been all right.
But they turned around and went quiet,
like something was the matter.
And that was what them gooses was looking for.
It was like a bale of cotton busted in a hurricane.
Scared them so bad, they couldn't get the gate back open.
Tried to run, couldn't get away.
One fell down and about drowned hisself
holding his face down in dry ground
so them geese wouldn't get his eyeballs and nose.
Tried to climb that fence with the barbed wire on top,
cut their hands up like it got caught in a gin grinder.
Tore their britches almost off going over.
One got tangled up and his foot stuck, hunging head down
on the [AUDIO OUT] But them geese
couldn't get to him on the other side, his face an inch away.
This one goose, trying to get its head through the fence,
hissed so loud he had goose spit all down one side of his face.
Screamed so loud they thought it was a fire truck,
but all of it in Spanish, couldn't
understand a word of it.
But them geese seemed to know exactly what he wanted.
Made them so excited, you could hear it four miles away.
Had to cut him down with some pliers.
They thought his ankle was busted.
Never found out.
He hit on his head and come up running.
None of them field hands said they didn't never see him again.
He was gone.
Them geese chased him down the fence
trying to get to him heading straight south.
They had them some plans worked out for him.
M.L. Basinger after that put up a sign that said, keep out.
This property is protected by Landrum attack geese.
You come through this gate, you will probably die.
It's such a good idea.
Everybody wanted to buy [AUDIO OUT]
Even Charlie Baker for his junkyard
had tied up that son of a bitch dog with a chain.
But somebody told them idiot kids of his
they could populate with a goose, so he had to let them go.
But it was worth a try, he said.
That dog was too mean even for him.
But it never bit one of them idiots even once.
And that's how the Landrums got by and held onto their land,
selling geese for all them years till they give it up.
But now you know something most folks don't who
lived here all their lives.
They think them people was called Goose
because of what they raised.
And that's how come nobody can pass a history test no more.
They don't know before from after.
And most don't give a damn either way, just,
what's on television, and supper gonna
be ready on time, which can get you in a whole lot of--
when she ain't in the mood.
Start that whole thing going all over again,
like how it happens when you don't pay attention.
Sometimes your goose don't get cooked.
You have to live with it.
And that can last a real long time.
Get in.
Turn the crunk over.
Let's see if this son of a bitch will start yet.
We'll drive to town and buy something to eat if you need
supper that bad before it's ready."
Let's see.
Here's a poem I haven't read in ages.
This was my hero in Paragonah.
And this poem has an epigraph from John Donne.
"Then you have done a braver thing than all the worthies
did."
"Willie Dalton would have laughed if he had been there
for his own funeral.
Eight men carrying his box.
Anyone could have carried him off like a flour sack.
He never weighed 100 pounds or stood
5 foot tall in cowboy boots a day in his life.
His own family said they thought that doctor must have throwed
out the baby and got the other part to grow, he was so runty.
He's a horse jockey.
Didn't have much choice of it.
Broke hard three-year-olds every spring
to all the ranches around.
One time, a man said in front of him,
never was a horse Willie Dalton couldn't ride.
And he said, well, that's a pile of crap.
Any horse could have thrown him off on a day.
He'd try and get back on.
Most of them throw him right back off again.
Busted every bone in his body one time or another.
But he made good money at it.
There was a 4th of July picnic we had for the whole town back
then every year, had running and wrestling in it.
So this one year, Leon Bilberry whooped
everybody that tried him.
He said, it ain't no man in this town I can't kick his ass.
Them words wasn't even hit the ground
before Willie Dalton was at him.
Wrapped him up right on his head, one leg under his neck
and the other one under his armpit and elbow,
hollering like a strangled bobcat.
He'd pry something loose.
Willie would grab him another way.
Couldn't shake him off.
Leon said it was like an octopus had his testicles wrapped
around his head.
And finally, he fell down.
Whichever way he rode, Willie went the other one,
riding him like he's breaking a mule.
Kicked his side so hard he thought nine ribs was broken,
it was only two, till he give up.
Willie said, say calf rope.
He did.
Say, I give.
He did.
Say, I won't never wrestle Willie Dalton again ever.
He did on his mother's white butt,
her standing there watching him.
Anything to get him off of him.
He wouldn't never wrestle nobody again after that.
But what Willie done that nobody else
in our town ever done before or since
was clean out the water pipe.
Our town water come from the mountain,
seven miles for ditch water and for drinking.
So one spring, both pipes clogged up.
They fixed the drinking by geography.
Went halfway down and cut.
Wasn't no water, so half that back up,
found the water, third cut, and got it out.
But the ditch water was different, not
plugged off, just partly.
Couldn't get no full stream of pressure.
They didn't know what to do.
So at the town board meeting, Willie Dalton
said, for two bottles of whiskey,
I'll clean that pipe out.
They shut off the water.
Bam.
And he come in the next day crawl--