beloved Gravely

by Christian Gehman

Copyright 1984 Christian Gehman

So then that all seeming things are not things at all, if all are inter-continuous, any more than is the leg of a table a thing in itself, if it is only a projection from something else; that not one of us is a real person, if, physically, we're continuous with environment; if, psychically, there is nothing to us but expression of relation to environment.

– Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned

The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.

– Robert Graves, The White Goddess

prologue

A little while ago, some of those friends who were accusing me of writing books less well than I write rock and roll songs were also kind enough to tell me there was not much rock and roll in this one.

They are probably right, because this book is about me and my friends and the women I loved before I met the young girl I'm about to marry, whose blue eyes and red hair may well be the death of me. But for the benefit of anyone who never heard one of my songs or read the notes on any of my record albums, I would like to say a few things here, before we start out toward the first edition of the floating opera.

A lot of the same people who accused me of writing books less well than I write rock and roll also accused me of confusing all the times and the flow of time and the interactions of the different times, and they too are probably right, because I don't believe that time is, or that time has to be, or even that time ought to be as regular as distance in a Flemish painting.

I think every moment in the past is just as distant as the last breath I have taken, and they are all equally unreachable and far away, because things grow at different speeds.

But sooner or later they all end up in the magic realm of Maybe Once and Sir, If Only, where it's all unreachable, it's all imagined – like the naked lunch tomorrow and the voice, Carl Phillips, which can sing inside your head.

When I was starting on this book, I wanted to begin with a little picture of the way Middleville, Virginia, looked when I lived there, which was pretty much the same time as all of the events described in this book – about ten years ago – and I started that way more than once. I wrote about how beautiful the dogwood and the redbud are each spring at the time of the Dogwood Festival, and how Thomas Jefferson used to live outside of town on a little mountain when He was alive, and how the Blue Ridge Mountains sometimes looked all blue and hazy, like they might be islands floating on the sea of Earth, but I kept getting stuck.

Then my omniscient friend suggested that I might want to start at the end of the book, as is commonly done by European authors, according to this person; so for a couple of weeks I tried starting the book by describing the way my next door neighbor, Christian Gehman, is riding around and around and around his gigantic front lawn on his beloved Gravely tractor here in Cismont, Virginia, but I kept getting stuck at that end of the story too.

However, some good came of the attempt, because those two words – beloved Gravely – kind of got fixed in my mind, and after I had written them what seemed like several thousand times, they took on an unnatural significance.

By then I was so sick of the project I would gladly have forgotten the whole idea, only I had promised a certain blue-eyed young lady I was going to write it all down.

And if you break your promises you lose your soul.

So I was sitting on my porch one afternoon, listening to Christian's tractor go around and around and around, and I was thinking about how much I hate Gravely tractors, because they're all the same and they all try to thump you with those wicked handlebars. I used to have a Gravely tractor of my own, and it tried to kill me more than once before I blasted it with Spook's old Purdey shotgun.

And if you don't believe me you can see the rusting carcass in the woods behind my house.

So I was listening to Christian's tractor and falling asleep when suddenly it occurred to me that I did not have to start at the beginning of the story, like an American writer, and I did not have to start at the end, like Europeans do; I could start in the middle anywhere I wanted to start if that made it come any easier, and after a while, if I had been doing it right, nobody would care where I had started as long as the story could walk and talk all by itself.

Acting on this principle I kept those words – beloved Gravely – because by that time I believed thy sounded mystifying and momentous and majestic. I wrote them at the top of every page, and it was just like magic. Just as soon as I stopped trying to do things in a particular way – just as soon as I didn't have a single idea in my head, the way I do when I am writing a new rock'n'roll song – why, I thought of something else to write down, and then I thought of another thing, and another, and pretty soon I was clipping along without ever having mentioned once upon a time.

Some of you will probably be glad to know that this book is not written in dialect or spelled funny, and I hope you believe I did my best to make it easy to understand. I really did. I changed it completely so many times that my eyes wore out and I had to buy new spectacles.

Fortunately, I had kept a copy of it just the way it was when I first wrote it down, and, with a few minor additions and corrections that my omniscient friend suggested, that version is what you have already begun to read.

beloved gravely

O N EBut what about Mac and Lynley? Mac's father was rich. He

owned a lot of land in a town up near Baltimore, Maryland; owned half the town, according to Mac, and collected the rents. He was thin. He was hard. He was eighty years old. He was a Baptist, so he never drank. He wore plain gray suits and a little gray hat, and you could tell he was shrewd when you met him. Mac and Lynley called him the Silver Fox. Whenever the Silver Fox came to Middleville, which he almost always did on Friday afternoons, he ate lunch at Elwood's Diner. He ate one fried chicken breast and mashed potatoes with brown gravy.

His first wife, Mac's mother, was dead. She died a long time ago when Mac was only eight years old. The new wife, Miss Nellie, never had any children, so Mac was the youngest. Mac had two sisters and two brothers. One of the brothers was dead.

Mac had just returned from Africa a little bit before I met him, and on the plane from London to New York he had fallen in love with a redhead. Her name was Melissa.

Melissa's red hair was very long and straight. She told Mac she had been over in England training horses, and now she was on her way to Savannah, Georgia, to stay with her father, a colonel who had just retired from the Army.

Melissa was a big athletic girl with strong bones, but she had red hair and green eyes, and Mac went nuts about her on the plane.

Almost a year before Mac fell in love, his father had purchased two big farms and a block of apartments somewhat to the east of Middleville. Mac's sister Peggy was living on one of the farms in a stone house that had its own swimming pool and a tennis court. Peggy's job was to look after all of the business connected with the block of apartments.

Mac moved into the other farm house.

Mac did not yet know which end of the business he would look after. He had been in Africa for more than a year, and before that he had spent a long time getting married and divorced and going bankrupt. Mac didn't really know if he was ready for the United States again, but as long as he didn't have to live in the same state with his ex-wife and his two children, he was willing to give it a try.

The house Mac's father gave him to live in was a big frame house with a wide veranda that looked out over a sloping lawn to the Blue Ridge Mountains. At the end of the lawn was a white board fence. On the other side of the fence was a pasture, all overgrown with broom sedge and thistles. There was one grove of trees in the middle of the field. The woods began at the end of the field. The Hardware River was at the bottom of a steep hill in the woods. The place was called Hardware Farm after the river. The previous owners, Mr. and Mrs. Bertie Burke, had moved out to Kentucky, but before they went away they planted rare trees here and there on all the lawns and along the driveway. They had also laid out a formal garden complete with a boxwood maze behind the house, and there were flower gardens and vegetable gardens on the north side of the house. Some of the gardens were closed in by English-style stone

walls. The house itself was gracious and comfortable and solidly built, which was a good thing, because Mac liked to give parties.

Mac arranged for some of his furniture – the stuff that had been in storage for years – to be transferred to his new house, and he arranged some of his business affairs with his father. The divorce and the bankruptcy had all been settled by attorneys while Mac was wandering around in Africa. Mac was supposed to make himself useful by selling building lots and other parcels of land out of his father's vast holdings somewhat to the east of Middleville.

Mac's first concern was Melissa.He called her up as soon as his telephone was connected. She

was happy Mac called. The next night Mac called her again and invited her to come stay with him in his big old empty new house. Melissa let on that she thought Savannah was a drag, and she said she would really like to stay in Mac's big old empty new house, but she was a little too young, probably, to explain it to her father. Mac offered to try. Melissa thought that would be worse. She told Mac she was sure he could figure something out. The next night when Mac called he was really excited. He was having a pig roast! He would invite Melissa to come up to Middleville for the party. She could stay – as far as her father was concerned – with these very understanding and respectable friends Mac had just met, George "Spook" and Tara MacAndrews. Tara had six thoroughbred horses, and Spook was a professor in the School of Spies. Furthermore, Tara had told Mac that there were a lot of horse farms right near Middleville, and Melissa might be able to get a job training horses. Melissa said she couldn't come right away because she had to spend a few days with her family. No problem, said Mac, tell me when you can come. Together they fixed on a date. The next morning Mac rushed out and had two hundred pig-roast invitations printed on glossy, cream-colored paper. That evening when he called Melissa she said she couldn't go to a party that weekend after all, because her brother Bird, a Navy pilot, was coming home on leave, and she hadn't seen Bird for three years. No problem, said Mac, we can just change the date. Melissa said she didn't know if her dog Bernard would be happy without her. No problem, said Mac, bring the dog.

Melissa said she didn't know if she had enough money to fly up to Middleville. No problem, said Mac, I have plenty of money. With all of that settled, they fixed on a new date. Mac had another two hundred invitations printed on glossy, cream-colored paper. Just for good measure Mac had these engraved. Then Mac decided there was no reason to waste the first batch of invitations, so he changed all of the dates by hand and sent them en masse to his friend John Stuart, the president of the Anthropology Club of the World.

I was drinking in the Blue Moon's bar one afternoon the first time I laid eyes on Mac. It was happy hour. I was depressed. I had not been in that bar for a long time because, the truth is, bruises on the heart take years to heal, and if they're bad enough they never do heal all the way. Since mine had not begun to heal, there was no telling how bad the bruises might be, or for how long they might affect me.

The bar was crowded on that happy afternoon. A man wearing a white safari jacket shouldered himself into the

gap between me and the cash register. It was a small gap, and this fellow had to turn sideways to get into it.

He was about my height, but older and heavier. He had salt and pepper gray hair, and the sort of deep sun-burned tan that comes from working outdoors in the tropical sun. A red bandanna had been tied around his neck.

"Sorry," he said, as he jostled my arm."They're in here today," I commented, excusing him."Gin and tonic," he said, pointing at the bartender. "Mac

Mason," he said, nodding toward me."Carl Phillips," I said.Mac's gin and tonic arrived."Cheers," he said, lifting his glass.I waved my whiskey at him. Mac took a gulp of his drink. He

sighed. He lit a cigarette."Having a pig roast, he said. "Like to come?"

Mac could not possibly have known it, but there is nothing in the world I like better than a pig roast, unless maybe it is getting lost.

"When is it?" I asked."Tomorrow," said Mac. "I think it's tomorrow."

Mac fumbled in one of his coat pockets and drew out an engraved invitation printed on glossy, cream-colored paper.

"That's right," he went on, inspecting the invitation carefully. "It's tomorrow. Tomorrow is Saturday, isn't it?"

"Yes," I said. "How does one get to the party?""I don't quite know," said my friend.Not long after that I had to tell him where the airport was.

The pig roast had started before I arrived.Mac was nowhere in sight.It was late afternoon on one of those clear blue September

days when scarcely any of the trees have lost their green. A crowd of gaily-colored tents had been pitched in the meadow near the grove of trees. Three big blue tents had been pitched right inside the grove. The pig was roasting over a fire on the meadow side of the white board fence not far from the gate. Right smack in the middle of the lawn there was a pile of pipes and girders that someone had welded together. It was one of those new modern sculptures that change all the time depending on your point of view.

There were hundreds of people sitting in little groups here and there on the lawn or going in and out of the house or wandering down through the meadow toward the tents. Some of them were peering at the pile of pipes and girders. Some were playing Frisbee. Others were sitting in chairs on the veranda. It did look like half of Middleville was there.

I didn't know how I would feel about meeting any of my old friends, so I thought it would be best to have a beer before I tried to talk to anybody.

But I ran into Spook before I got to the beer."Spook!" I exclaimed. "Good to see you. How's Tara?"I punched Spook on the upper arm."Tara's up at the house," Spook said, giving me a peculiar look.

"Where have you been all these months?""I was away," I said. "Have you seen our host?""Do you mean Mac? He's up at the house with us. Come on

up – I know Tara wants to see you.""I'm going to check out a beer," I said. "And I want to look at

the pig. I'll be along in a minute.""Are you all right?"

"Not really. Not yet.""But you will be all right again. You know that, don't you?""I don't know anything," I said. "Not like I used to.""It's just going to take more time," Spook said confidently.

"Look. We're up on the second floor, on this end of the house. See that big window? Come join us – we're watching the party."

"I'll be there," I said. "There's no reason to worry."

The night before, after Mac had come back all alone and disappointed from the airport without Melissa, he and I continued drinking in the bar a long time and then finally Mac told me that there wasn't any point to it that he could see – but if you didn't want to kill yourself you went on living.

"Did you ever want to kill yourself?" I asked him."Sure," he said. "Plenty of times.""What happened?""Nothing.""What do you mean, nothing?""I'm still here, I guess – ain't I?""Did you try it? Or did you just think about it?""I don't know," Mac said. "No one was there to keep score.

Once in Zimbabwe I sat by the window for a long time with a gun in my hand, but then I had to take a leak, and after that I just decided to go back to sleep."

I walked down past the pile of pipes and girders to the beer.There was another full keg of beer behind the keg of beer that

had been tapped. There were plenty of strong plastic cups. I filled one of them up. The beer was very cold. I drank a whole cup of it and pumped the keg up a little bit and drew another cup before I went down to the pig.

A stranger was turning the pig on a stainless steel spit.