Faultless writing: James Wood on Cormac McCarthy stokes 80s memory with Nanny and Bouncer in Rome Ga

 From the second year of my life through 1986 every year at some time or another I was off the Kingston HWY  east of Rome Ga at my grandparents place. I lived there almost every summer from 1981 through 1986, playing tennis downtown and staying with my Grandmother as Papa died in 79. When I saw James Wood was taken by the passage in Cormac McCarthy'sTHE Passenger, the resonances were strong. While there is no direct correlation to the narrative, I could've almost written a similar description.

    By 1984 I was 31 years old, some romances and strong attraction in the books but on no career path of any interest . So I would take these walks on Nanny's farm with her dog Bouncer in the late afternoon. They had 120 acres at one point counting the 30 Uncle Paul and Uncle Fremont adjoined for a while. You could walk their land all the way to the Kingston HWY and Johns Store.

    For some reason of another I was very secure. No future that would appropriate the promise I had coming out of High school, where maybe in my mind only I had the stuff the be the Governor of SC some day, to a place where it such speculation had become laughable. But the recognition the absence of high school and college friends who assumed I would make something of myself. It was peaceful. I remember Uncle Fremond said at one point we love you and always will play some tennis when we visit Mother, but you are thirty now and gonna have to hit a lick at something sooner or later. But Long as I had a meal and was of some service to the family, the day by day resignation with an option the next day to go to town and play some tennis and get a couple tacos on the way home was good enough. On special days there was the Hoagie Carmichael at Schroeders.

     McCarthy's "faultless" descriptions are mirrored in my takes of Nanny and Papas farm. I remember one attraction asking if they had a barn. Raised a hole new level of speculation of what could be in what was already a huggy kissy sweet episode. Papa did indeed have a barn that has collapsed now. I remember one stall had about a foot of manure in it. And there was a great loft open ended with a view.

     Here is a paragraph from The Passenger when Bobby Western returns to Wartburg about forty miles west of Knoxville after a thirty year absence.

    

It was ten thirty in the morning when he pulled off the highway and drove down the deserted Main street of Wartburg. Everything was closed. He turned around at Bonifacious and came back down and turned up Kingston Street and drove past the courthouse and on into the country .  Just the sound of the cobbly tires on the two lane blacktop road and the moon low over the dark hills to the west. He crossed the old bridge and turned up the farm road and drove on.  When he pulled up opposite the house he switched off the headlamps and sat there in the dark with the motor idling . There was a mercury vapor lamp at the back of the house itself and dark and quiet. He sat there for a while. Then he switched the lights on again turned the car around in the road and drove back to town.

   He pulled up into the driveway under the old walnut trees and shut off the engine. His Grandmother's car was gone. He sat there looking at the place. Tall white clapboard farmhouse. In need of paint. He thought he saw the curtains move in the bay window. He got out and stood there looking across the fields. The winter woods along the ridge behind the house were dark and bare and everything was strangely quiet. He could smell the cows. The rich odor of the boxwoods. When he shut the car door three crows lifted silently out of the trees on the far side of the creek and hooked themselves away over the gray winter bottomlands.

   When he got to the creek he followed it up into the woods and crossed on the flat stones below the old wooden spillway. The spillway boards were cupped and black with age and the water that ran over them looked dark and heavy. O the gristmill itself nothing was left save the stones of the foundation together with the rusted iron axle that had once carried the millwheel and the rusted iron collars in which it once had turned.

   For thirty years I lived in NE Alabama until three years. My Car was idle in the front yard from 2017 to 2020. Almost every body in that part of the county gave me a ride to town one day or the other on the days I didn't ride my bike the three days in, many days on out to the Interstate through the narrows,  a stream excavation of a ridge the road followed a mile stretch from the downtown red light out to the good televisions on the interstate.

    The other light was at the Piggly Wiggly just past the flea market where you could go  up Lookout Mountain east to Centre Alabama and Rome Ga.

    I won't today, but eventually will likely attempt a description of every segment of the highway in the town, from the house where Momma was born to the juke Joint that was rumored in the fifties women would expose areas of interest above the navel, around the curve to Cousin Didymus place now burned to the ground that had the first concrete swimming pool in the area; across the road to WWII MIA local patriot and his sister's house that had a water wheel. She told me she remembered at five riding horse and buggy back up the road to the Rocky Mounty cemetery where my Great Grandfather is buried to inter a Civil War Vet.

    A beautiful stream coming down the ridge and then the Calvary Baptist Church and you are almost in town.