The Making of a Psalms

I slept in the Roosevelt Room, on a four-poster of crudely cut and varnished cypress logs, their bottoms flared like petrified morning glories. I undressed on an elk hide rug, my toes half-buried in hairs, beneath a whirring ceiling fan. Although the night promised a blanket of frost, the great room’s fireplace had filled the cabin with dragon’s breath.

Teddy Roosevelt hadn’t actually slumbered there, but his great-grandson had. Still, ol’ Bully himself had most definitely been enamored of the nearby tract flanking Louisiana’s Tensas (pronounced Ten-saw) River. He wrote about it as if he’d found Heaven’s doorstep somewhere amidst the palmetto and then virgin hardwoods -- now a federally owned refuge and national treasure.

Serpentine is too simple an adjective for the Tensas. Likening it to a giant cottonmouth might also be trite. I prefer telephone-cord-straight, but such a reference might be lost upon those who now carry phones on their hips, who have never wrestled rogue coils.

The thing’s crooked, you see, even more than a Catahoula Curr’s hind leg. If you set out walking a straight line south, from somewhere between Waverly and Tallulah to Ferriday, you’d cross the same damn river two dozen times. You could canoe it for a mile and wind up 100 yards from where you started.

The Tensas is the toothy zipper that holds Madison Parish together.

In this flat Delta country, class seems to be defined more by one’s choice for president and lot size than by dwelling, vehicle, schooling or wardrobe.

The richest and poorest wear jeans and ballcaps, drive pickup trucks, batter and fry things pulled from the swamp, resent that bears might eat as many deer as people do, and will invite complete strangers to stay overnight and thank them for doing it.

The haves and haves-less live and work alongside each other, sip their libations from red Solo cups, root for LSU and measure the seasons by what they can legally hunt.

I was the guest of Dick Brown, definitely a have, though neither he nor his sweetie, Teri Henley, put on airs. They’ve a pet skunk, an ancient Texas longhorn and three baby squirrels named peanut, butter and jelly.

We spoke of deer hunting under the chins of glass-eyed mounts, ate fried gator tail within arm’s reach of a skull more befitting a tyrannosaurus rex, and wound up talking about a former drunk while we sipped Old Charter and Maker’s Mark.

I occasionally wandered outside to smoke beside wooden benches with arms carved into bears.

While sharing stories with Dick, I told him about the Louisiana deputy who once described his sister as being more messed up than a run-over dog. He told me of a visiting evangelist, a Brother Jack Daniels, aptly named, who once came to hunt there.

I Googled the preacher later, and, yes, the man claims to have been both drug addict and drunk by the age of 21, right before he was called to deliver sermons and baptize new believers in bayous.

Brother Jack spent an evening in a box blind, if I’m not mistaken. Near dark, he peered out the left window and saw three bears. There were three more when he looked to the right. And five more when he glanced behind the shooting house.

The heavenly hotline got a call from rural Louisiana that night, and I’m fairly sure the message wasn’t one of those now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep prayers. Brother Jack praised Jesus when he saw approaching headlights, which meant safe passage through the Valley of Death.

Roadside Attraction

While navigating a sleepy Louisiana blacktop, where only 35-mph speed zones mark town limits, I stopped abruptly after passing a neglected graveyard. One corner of the spired iron fence surrounding it was encased in an 80-year-old oak, and I marveled at how the tree managed to grow 150 feet tall without tearing the fence from its moorings.

“How did you see that?” my best friend, Cecil, asked. “I’ve driven down this road hundreds of times, and I’ve never noticed it.”

Old cemeteries -- hell, old everythings -- beckon me. They cause words to fill my screen and paint to cover my canvases.

* * *

On another trip much farther south, Cecil and I drove past a newer cemetery festooned with above-ground, slab-covered vaults. Spires of a different sort jutted from the soil amidst those unfenced graves.

It took a few seconds for me to realize I wasn’t staring at little cypress knees. These were towers of dark mud erected by crawfish eager to see the light of a February day.

The small plot was half a mile from Bayou Teche, where we’d walked beneath gargantuan live oaks upon waking and making coffee in a stranger’s palatial home, a man who would not abide our looking for a motel after midnight.

Later, as we passed through Breau Bridge, La., the thought of crustaceans sleeping alongside shallow tombs made me less inclined to scrape and eat the earthy meat from a cooked one’s red-plated tail.

* * *

It was Cecil’s turn to yell “Turn around” when we left Breau Bridge, the “Crawfish Capitol of the World.”

“Did you see the size of that crawfish?” he asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“Trust me,” he said.

When I pulled into the gravel lot of a place offering shanties for rent on the banks of the Teche, we were bumper-to-pincers of a 20-foot-long mudbug atop a flatbed trailer, remnant of a bygone festival’s parade float.

Like a creature from a B-movie, the thing glared at us as if we were plastic army men come to shoot it with a tank instead of our cameras.

Rue Royalty

Her sustained notes on a skyward-pointing clarinet leave listeners gasping. Vocally, she could be Satchmo’s much more talented sister.

A jazz icon, she’s performed for presidents plural, here and abroad, and she’s appeared in the HBO series “Treme.”

Her smile can unfurl fiddleheads. Her voice is a defibrillator. And there’s a reason the locals call her the Clarinet Queen. Although these have combined to put her name in lights for more than two decades, it’s a French Quarter crossroads that restocks the fridge, both figuratively and literally.

Doreen Ketchens is proof that talent does and does not pay the bills.

Saturday mornings, she and Lawrence the Sousaphone player hoist the giant umbrella, unfold chairs, bungee the open briefcase containing CDs to the suitcase with more, position buckets emblazoned with dollar signs toward the front of their paved stage, and then plug in the microphone. It’s their weekend ritual at the corner of Royal and St. Peter streets, where they delight crowds, except for a crotchety woman down the street who calls the police, even though the badges have turned a deaf ear to the familiar complaint.

Whether she’s there for us, or we’re there for her, Doreen’s talent and the band’s soulful blend of Dixieland standards keep passers-by immobilized for hours. How could she not return to the streets, this woman who has performed in the Lincoln Center in pearls?

For her, it’s about renewal and survival, about going home and keeping the home.

Nobody does it better.

36x24" Giclee (canvas) prints of "Rue Royalty" are now available for $300. E-mail me at mikehandley@mac.com.

When the Padlock Comes Off the Pearly Gates

The mingling of pork fat dripping on hot coals, yeasty beer breath and perfumed sweat must have a pheromonal effect upon the patrons of juke joints in Clarksdale, Miss.  Throw in the whine of an electric guitar or a mouth harp and the hawking of a bluesman, and the good times will most assuredly roll like a cue ball over green felt.

The barbecue grills are chained to light poles and otherwise sit unattended early during the week. Padlocks and posters of performances past dangle from boarded-up doors.

But when the weekend arrives, it’s time to cast a light on the men and women who’ve done us wrong, to sway in tandem with someone who hasn’t, and to hope our shoes wind up under a strange bed until the red rooster crows.

To paraphrase Albert King: Everyone wants to go to heaven on a Friday or Saturday night, and they don’t want to die to get there.

Red's Blues Club - Clarksdale, Miss.

Claims

The night before a charity squirrel hunt on Giles Island, a large spit of land cut off from the Mississippi River by an oxbow, Cecil and I were sitting at the supper table with an actuary. That’s someone who compiles and analyzes statistics in order to calculate insurance risks and premiums.

Between spoonfuls of gumbo, Cecil asked the man to tell us about some of the more unusual claims he’d seen.

The guy finished chewing, wiped his mouth, and then said, “Well, there was this one fellow, a real do-it-yourselfer, who decided he’d save money and repair his own high-pitched roof. He put on one of those harness things and tied a rope to it, the other end to the trailer hitch on his truck’s bumper. He’d just climbed up and eased over the top to the back side, when his wife came out of the house, got in the truck and drove away. Pulled him right off the roof.”

Five men were hanging on the actuary’s every word, and all five winced as if they’d just seen a kick in the nuts. Cecil, knowing I’m a sponge for such stories, grinned like he’d handed me the script to an Oscar-winning screenplay.

A few days later, in an effort to gather more details, I decided to Google the phrase “wife pulls husband off roof,” thinking such news had to have made headlines. I expected to find a link to a newspaper story somewhere, but I landed on the Snopes myth-debunking website, where the actuary’s story was indeed debunked.

Unbeknownst to me or to anyone else at the table that night, the story has apparently been an urban legend since the mid-1960s.

I should’ve known the insurance guy was a shingle short of a full roof. Anybody who would drain a bowl of gumbo and leave the sausage links standing like Stonehenge on a barren porcelain landscape just ain’t right.

Plus, he was wearing white shrimpers’ boots. The squirrels can see those from a mile away.

* * *

Stories beget stories, of course. And the best are often shared piecemeal (or between pieces of a meal, as it were). Get a bunch of men together, and they simply cannot let a tale go unanswered.

“I shot a horse one time,” another Louisiana farmer declared between slurps of the greenish roux.

“Well, not really. But I pulled a gun on him ... Just couldn’t go through with it. The thing kicked in the grill of my truck and damn near destroyed my barn,” he added.

The man leased a house and small barn to a tenant who’d fallen behind with the rent. After evicting the renter, he drove by the property one evening and noticed the house was empty. The barn, however, still contained a malnourished horse tethered to one of the load-bearing posts, which had been pulled to the point of collapse.

The man called a friend with a pasture, who had a trailer and agreed to take the horse, and then he untied the animal and led it outside, where it inflicted the damage to his truck. Already peeved at the tenant, the state of the horse and the now cattywampus barn, the assault to his vehicle was the last straw.

With piss and vinegar coursing through his veins, he pulled the gun. But instead of revenge, he opted to simply file a $2,000 insurance claim and keep the horse for the back rent and repair costs to the barn.

Later, he was subpoenaed. The former tenant claimed the “high-dollar, registered quarterhorse” was stolen. Cost: $1,800.

“I shoulda shot the sonofabitch,” the farmer growled.

Rabbit Ears

GREENWOOD, Miss. -- There’s more gap between a toddler’s first teeth than between the many shotgun houses fronting streets named for either flora or dead presidents. They sit like plucked piano keys with fading furniture on crooked porches, from which life -- a television with a single static-filled channel -- is observed.

The origin of the term shotgun house has been debated for years. Some say it’s derived from African or Haitian words, while others maintain it’s purely colloquial for the long, slender architecture allowing a shotgun blast to literally go in one door and through every room before exiting the other, a description painfully reminiscent of the Civil Rights struggle.

Sans hallways, the doorways between rooms are generally on the same side, as if Percy Sledge and Lauren Hutton were kissing, which allows for breezes to cool the entire structure during summers when even catfish sweat.

Regardless of nomenclature, these homes have generally been the abodes of the have-nots since the 1920s, more apt to be rented cheaply than purchased outright.

Low Tide

For those who have no choice but to live life at low tide, where even high tide is barely sufficient to float a power pole’s reflection in a roadside ditch, poverty is not charming.

It’s either hot or cold, laden with cholesterol, bald tires, rust and too many mouths to feed.

Survival requires space heaters, quilts sewn of old underwear, tabletop fans, sauce for the gristle and, for recreation, the meaty smacking of thighs against thighs.

Tourists drive through in cars without carburetors, pointing at clothes on a line and photographing shotgun houses, accelerating past the ones where the residents lean against crooked stoops, wondering why anyone would pay $15 for a plate with two catfish filets when the rivers are teeming with them.

To cruise the city streets and back roads of the Mississippi Delta is to be reminded that life exists beyond digital thermostats, Amazon.com and American Express, and there are indeed troubles you ain’t seen.

Is it any wonder that the rural South became the petri dish for the blues?

"Road to Clarksdale" (finished Jan. 2012)

Defibrillation

I live in the South, where turkeys act normal.

Okay, so maybe a train whistle MIGHT inspire a gobbler to sound off in the fall. But gobbling is generally limited to springtime unless you’re camouflaged and carrying a shotgun, and then they can be as silent as your little sister passing gas.

I was in a ladder stand last October, scribbling thoughts in my journal, when a dozen turkeys snuck up behind me. Being that the dogwoods weren’t blooming, the leaves were falling and I was in Ohio to bowhunt deer, I almost tested my safety harness when one of them gobbled a few yards behind my tree.

When forensic pathology advances, I’m quite certain they’ll discover that heart attacks among deer hunters have little to do with the rush of seeing a big buck. I barely survived, but it took half an hour for me to poke my eyeballs back into their sockets, and I think I shook for the rest of the evening.

I might’ve peed on myself just a little, too.

The turkeys thought it was funny. Afterward, they waltzed onto a picked soybean field and gloated.

Wild turkey does the butt dance after scaring the bejeezus out of author.

Playing with Food

The whole episode transpired faster than a Vegas wedding.

I was glassing the distant treeline that marked the beginning of Louisiana’s Russell Sage WMA when a commotion caused me to look over my shoulder and into the dense undergrowth I’d summarily dismissed after settling in for the morning. Not 20 yards away stood a doe, shadowed by a nice buck.

I was too stunned to pick up my rifle or even raise my binoculars; too dumb to reach for my camera. Besides, nose full of man-scent, she was giving me the evil eye.

After she squirted into a copse of saplings moments later, her suitor stomped a crescent-shaped rut in the tall weeds surrounding it. Back and forth he walked, offering only tiny glimpses of his rack -- enough to keep me interested, but not enough for me to seek a better view through a scope.

A few minutes later, another grayish shape sliced through the reeds. I thought it was a fawn, at first, but then I saw the stubby tail and connected it to a bobcat, which walked within three feet of the doe. The cat appeared (or maybe pretended) not to notice the deer and walked right on past her without so much as a glance.

She saw it, though.

The bobcat moseyed beyond a large oak, did a 180, snuck back to the tree and climbed to the first limb big enough to support it. But the doe must’ve heard claws on bark because she wasn’t fooled.

She stared at the bobcat 10 feet off the ground. It stared at her. The 8-pointer stepped full-view into an opening and stared at them both, and the air carried more adrenaline than oxygen.

Eventually, the bobcat decided there had to be an easier meal someplace else, backed down the tree and left. The deer departed as well, leaving me grinning like a bird dog with a mouthful of quail.

The Help

Stephanie introduced herself as the maid, smiled, and then returned her attention to the stack of dirty dishes left by deer hunters for whom sleep and food were inconveniences. I’d arrived late, so everyone else was already sitting in a tree somewhere.

It never occurred to her that I might be an ax murderer, just as it never occurred to me that this unfamiliar woman in my friend’s home was more than a ponytail under a ballcap with dishwater hands. She was right, but I was wrong.

I went straight upstairs to swap my street clothes for camouflage. By the time I’d changed, she was finished and leaving.

We spoke briefly outside while smoking. She said her husband was friends with my friend, Tim, and she was just lending a helping hand. She also said she’d probably see me again if our gang opted for dinner at one of the local pubs, seeing as how she tended bar at several.

Later that week, when Tim’s clients from Wisconsin were frying fish they’d pulled from holes in the ice back home, Stephanie and hubby arrived to have a few beers.

While smoking outside beside the boiling, hand-cut French fries, I asked her about her love of flyfishing. I’d overheard her mention indoors that she ties her own flies, which fascinated me.

Years before she moved to Nebraska, she got snockered one night and went home to her computer. When she awoke the next morning, confirmation e-mails greeted her. She’d apparently gone online and booked a roundtrip flight from Minnesota to Scotland, and she had NO recollection of it.

Rather than panic and pursue a refund, she decided to go. And if she was going, by god, she might as well hire a flyfishing guide -- an idea she’d always fancied.

She went. She fished. She smiled when the Scots inevitably guessed her nationality from her ballcap. And she had an absolute blast.

After scribbling her e-mail address on a piece of paper resting on her husband’s back, she paused before handing it to me. She has a longish Polish name beginning with L-U-T, so her handle began “S-L-U-T ....”

“Um, this isn’t what it seems,” she said, pointing to the letters. “I’d better explain.”

Secret Night

Deer camp conversations tend to run the gamut, and stories beget stories in a dance of testosterone-fueled one-upmanship. If one man claims bobcat is delicious, another will surely have eaten dogs in Korea.

Silence before bedtime is rarer than a dead buck strapped to the roof of a Prius.

But I witnessed such an occurrence in Kansas last month. 

Five and a half men were sitting around after supper when a sixth muttered, “I think I once kissed a guy.”

The room fell silent. You could’ve heard hair growing. The TV muted itself, and the man washing dishes forgot he’d already dried the plate he was holding.

“I’m not sure,” the 39-year-old added. “But I know it didn’t feel like kissing a woman. I wake up in a cold sweat sometimes, wondering about it.”

Glances were exchanged.

“You know, I told my wife about it,” the kisser continued, his face the shade of lung blood.

“You did WHAT?” another man asked.

“Well, it was ‘secret night.’ You know ... when you sit around and share things. Surely you all have had secret nights?”

Nobody had, or at least they didn’t admit it. But the dishwasher took the ball and ran with it.

“Son, that’s when you lean in close, look sheepish, and tell her you once put too much salt on your French fries,” he offered.

Home on the Range

Four times a day, we crawl at 35 mph through Oklahoma’s Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, staring out the truck windows at grazing buffalo, elk, deer and Texas longhorns, the latter stocked in 1927 to prevent the breed’s extinction.

As is often the case when my artist’s wiring is humming, I know my regular readers aren’t going to appreciate this, that cows not on a plate might be the least interesting animals on the planet besides poodles.

But I respectfully disagree, even though what I know about cows of any stripe could fit between buns with a slab of cheese.

Compared to the Angus and Herefords back home in Alabama, longhorns are plenty sexy.

Rather than standard-issue black, red or white, their hides look like technicolor dream coats, and their horns are made for the front end of a block-long El Dorado.

They fell out of cattlemen’s good graces almost 90 years ago because they’re too lean, but that was before anybody’d heard about cholesterol.

* * *

The first time we drove past prairie dogville, one of the guys in the crew-cab Ford allowed as to how fun it was to watch a bullet turn the little rodents into pink mist. The animals are generally despised by ranchers because their burrows Swiss-cheese the landscape and cripple cattle and horses.

It was a different reaction the next day.

Mr. Pink Mist’s voice broke two octaves higher when one of the critters approached the parked truck, like the man was talking to either a newborn or to a chihuahua with big teary brown eyes.

“Look at that cute little rascal,” he squeaked.

About that time, a bobcat darted out right in front of us and grabbed one, inflicting considerably less damage than a bullet, but making it no less dead.

* * *

I didn’t mind that the coyote probably ruined my chances of arrowing a deer that morning. The song dog was full grown, still wearing its summer coat; or maybe mange had taken a toll, transforming Pavarotti into Otis the Mayberry drunk.

I’ve wanted a prime coyote pelt for as long as I can remember, but the only ones I’ve managed to do a favor have been lizard dogs with wispy fur more resembling a hell-spawned creature from a straight-to-video horror flick.

Ours is a love-hate relationship.

They serenade me when I’m leaning against a gate in the evenings, and I smile like I’m being treated to a private concert. If a piercing yelp catches me off guard, if it’s close rather than on the neighboring ridge or hollow, I tense up and either caress my rifle’s stock or pick up my bow.