Jay and Eddie
Over the holidays we visit Katy’s parents
in Durham, her father Jay is a mid-level
executive for a big tobacco company when
it first becomes beyond dispute that smoking
causes lung cancer. A tall, haughty, bourbon-
drinking man uneasy with himself.
Their home is on a cul-de-sac backed
onto a swamp, their property, including
the wetlands, borders a dirt road where
Eddie and his wife live. Jay “rents”
for free a tar-paper shack to them, Eddie
reciprocates with a few odd jobs.
Jay and Eddie love to hunt together, set
muskrat traps. When Eddie comes by he
stoops down to knock on the bottom
half of the back door. Jay doesn’t approve,
but Eddie is an old-timey kind of man
who always did it that way.
Jay and Jan’s home is a larger, stylized
version of those unpainted wooden houses
common in the South before folks with
the funds switch to brick, the main room
features a cathedral ceiling, a stone fireplace,
a balcony leading to second-floor bedrooms.
One day Jay, already drunk, tells me to come
with him to buy a gun from a man in a parking lot
on the other side of town, says he’d feel safer
not going alone. Jay returns from the sale,
gun in hand, blurts out he doesn’t know what
he’ll do if anyone mistreats his daughter.
Eddie is resourceful, constructing a tractor
from junkyard scrap metal and truck parts.
It looks strange, sort of like a grasshopper,
but it works. A cast-iron stove keeps his home,
for me, too hot. A photo of a girl in a graduation
gown tacked to a wall beside JFK and MLK.
On Christmas Eve, while Jay and Eddie shot-
gun mistletoe down from an oak in the swamp,
we sing carols at Duke’s Gothic-style chapel.
Although he can’t admit it, Jay’s best friend
is a man who always, when he comes to visit,
knocks on the bottom half of his back door.
William Heath has published four poetry books: The Walking Man, Steel Valley Elegy, Going Places, and Alms for Oblivion; three chapbooks: Night Moves in Ohio, Leaving Seville, and Inventing the Americas; three novels: The Children Bob Moses Led (winner of the Hackney Award), Devil Dancer, and Blacksnake’s Path; a history, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest (winner of two Spur Awards and the Oliver Hazard Perry Award); and a book of interviews, Conversations with Robert Stone. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Hiram College. He lives in Annapolis. www.williamheathbooks.com
Pulsebeat Poetry Journal 