Last Time Down Blackwater
By Sharon Decker
Flora-Bama is much more than a famed, mullet-tossing honky-tonk at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. It is a region. A region that straddles the state lines, beyond the gleaming white sands of Destin, Florida, to Orange Beach on the ‘Bama side. But it also stretches north, north to a land where pickup trucks fly down dusty, pine-shadowed back roads, the smell of fried chicken floats from cafes, and the humidity sticks to you like a hangover. It’s a place where people still hold the door and ask how your mama’s doing.
In other words, it’s Southern. Replete with log trucks and paper mills, slow crawling muddy rivers and clear, sand-bottom creeks, two-lane black tops and farm land, as well as little towns whose main streets long ago lost the battle with Walmart.
These stories are about the people who live here. The haves and the have-nots, like anywhere else. Some live respectable, financially comfortable lives, going to work at a courthouse or a hospital or a quiet, freshly painted office someplace, or maybe they simply stay home and tend their azalea framed house on a tidy street. Even so, they have their crosses to bear.
Others live from paycheck to paycheck and know what it’s like to put three dollars’ worth of gas in their car and try to hang on until Friday. People whose lives are no walk on the beach. They work at laundromats and nursing homes, drive trucks or break eggs over a griddle at the Waffle House. They often live in not-so-nice houses and trailers or maybe even nursing homes. They smile when they take your order at the diner while their lives are crumbling around them. They cry themselves to sleep, wondering how they’ll pay the rent or buy their children’s school supplies, ashamed of not doing better. They admire the beauty of roses but can’t face the raw ugliness of their own addiction.
In this collection, the author unflinchingly lays bare their struggles, as well as their determination not to buckle under the weight of grief, heart-wringing despair, poverty, or downright cruelty. These stories are unfiltered, drenched in sweat, sweet tea and bad decisions, as unpretentious as cast iron, yet laced with tenderness, humor, and grace. They slice to the bone but they also catch at your heartstrings. The characters stay with you, alive beyond the stories. Impossible to forget.
So jump in an old pickup and take a ride through the Flora-Bama that lies beyond bright lights and bikinis, beach hotels and bands blaring “Sweet Home Alabama”. Prop your feet on the dashboard and roll the windows down. The ride may get rough and rugged at times, but it will never be anything but honest.
Stephen Yarbrough, author of The Unmade World and Stay Gone Days
I first read one of Sharon Decker’s immaculately crafted and immensely moving stories more than thirty years ago, and I have dreamed of the moment her first book would make its way to my desk. The wait was well-worth it. Last Time Down Blackwater is beautiful from start to finish, the best collection to come my way in ages.”
CHOCTAWHATCHEE
Jesse is lying on our old plaid couch with his mama’s Bible on his chest,
watching TV. It’s Sunday morning and the preachers are on, something he
never misses now that he’s sick, although the only time he ever mentioned
God before he got emphysema was when he was cussing. I don’t recognize
the preacher he’s watching, but he looks like all the rest to me, with his
plasticky hair and his eyes popping out of his head. He’s worked himself
into a tizzy, which is what Jesse likes best. He likes that nearly as good as
he likes the wrestling.
I stare out the window while I wash his plate and the pan I fried the
eggs in, at the Choctawhatchee rolling past the bottom of the slope that is
our backyard. It slides by like a big muddy snake, cypress hulls rising out
of it like gnarled old men. For fifty-two years I’ve watched it go by, ever
since Jesse brought me here to where he was raised. It’s up right now, but
not by much—not like it can be, swallowing the yard like it did in 1977
when it rained five days straight, the heaviest rain I ever saw, and turtles
were paddling around the back porch and cottonmouths were crawling
into my hydrangeas.
The TV is so loud I don’t know how Rita can sleep back there, but then
she always could sleep through a hurricane, ever since she was a baby. And
she could always sleep as late as I let her, too, which was one reason she
hated school so much and why she complained about it from the first dayI put her on the bus in the red corduroy dress I made and the patent leather
shoes I shined with a biscuit, until the tenth grade when she got pregnant
and quit.
My eggs and grits are still on the table, cold as a wedge, but I don’t have
an appetite for them this morning. It seems like I’ve eaten eggs and grits
for a century now, and I’m just plain sick of them, and besides, my stomach
is fluttering, the way it has been since she got here a week ago. It’s the third
time in three years that she’s come to stay with us, and the last time she
stayed six months.
Jesse griped all the way to the bus station. “She’ll mess around and lose
this one, too. You watch and see if she don’t,” he said, pulling into a gas
station.
“She says he’s not good to her.”
“Yeah, that’s the way she tells it, but he seemed nice enough to me,
nicer by far than that last one. It’s always something with that girl.” He
slammed the truck door, pumped the gas and got back in, gasping for air.
“How many husbands is she going to go through anyhow? Fifty-one ain’t
no spring chicken, Norma. Hell, you and me had been married for a
hundred years by then.”
He gunned the engine and pulled right smack into the middle of a
funeral procession. The people in the big white car ahead of us turned and
stared.
“What the hell are y’all gawking at?” Jesse said, blowing the horn.
“It’s a funeral!” I said, holding my hand over my eyes. I felt like crawling
into the floorboard.
He jerked his foot off the gas pedal. “Oh. I didn’t know that.”
Now, Rita walks in, tying on a red robe.
“Morning,” I say.
“Well, she’s alive. Knock a block out from under the house,” Jesse says,
and every muscle in my neck and shoulders tenses up.
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” she snaps.
I break an egg into the frying pan, wondering why I had washed it in
the first place, put some bread in the toaster, and scrape the rest of the
grits onto her plate, next to two links of sausage. She sits, rubbing her face.
Jesse points to his watch. “You know, we ate breakfast almost an hour
ago.”“Well, good for you, Daddy.”
- Sharon Decker