Bill Marsh
Tall and lean, a long-drink-of-water
of a man, Bill Marsh was a Marsh of the Marshville Marshes from Marshville,
North Carolina (pronounced Nokaleina), a rural settlement of about two thousand
immortal souls near the South Carolina state line, about 30 miles (50 km) from
Charlotte. The nearest town of any size is Monroe, which is about ten miles (16
km) away, and is where the residents of Marshville have to go to buy beer, because
Marshville’s dry.
Bill’s horizons stretched a bit
further, however, and at the appropriate age he took off on his beloved Indian
motorcycle to travel the country and see what he could see and do what he could
do. After a few years he wound up in New Orleans and got a job as a pressman
with New Orleans’s daily Times-Picayune.
He bought himself a nice little house in a quiet neighbourhood in the Mid-City
district, commuted by bicycle, grew a beard, read books, and found outlets for
his need to express love and caring by acquiring dachshunds and a wife. None of
this is in any particular order, but by some time in the 1950s or early 60s he
had accomplished all these accomplishments. I consider having a beard and
commuting by bicycle in the context of the era to be accomplishments.
His wife, a seamstress, was named
María, a mestiza from Honduras. She
already had three children by her first husband, Martínez (divorced), and one
by her second husband, Gatto (widowed). Her second husband, who was an Italian
Lombard from France, had been some kind of a big-shot manager with the United
Fruit Company, and after his premature death by drowning, whilst surfing, I
believe, Chiquita had gone to the trouble to relocate his widow and her
children to New Orleans as US citizens. How they managed this I don’t know.
Anyway, she and Bill went crazy in love and remained so. They had two children
of their own. Bill learnt Spanish.
And so life settled down in the warm
glow of steady work, family, bicycles – he and María got a tandem bike – books,
and dachshunds. Of the three Martínez children, Raúl went off to university and
became a research chemical engineer with the DuPont Company, Eliseo (“Just call
me Joe”) got into sales, because he was like that, and Graciela got married and
moved off into the middle-class Midwest somewhere.
The problems, other than María’s
occasional grog binges, tended to be associated with the banana-boss’s
daughter, Helena Gatto, my first wife. Ignoring high-school academics in favour
of dope, sex, and the fast life in the French Quarter, she kept life from
becoming too settled. When I fell in love with her in Biloxi, for example, she
was fighting two felony raps for selling weed. I helped to keep her out of the
slammer, something that helps to make me feel good about myself.
Bill and I got along real well. He had
a laid-back way of talking, as if he’d modelled his speech on Bing Crosby and
Dean Martin, with just the murmuring ruffle of down-home Marshville around the
edges. He appreciated ideas and Latin American food and my little dog Naomi. He
let Helena and me borrow the tandem bike to tour the city. He didn’t seem to
have any liking at all for the sort of flamboyantly loud and drunken bullshit
that characterises tourist New Orleans, and although not religiously inclined
he was disposed kindly toward María’s extravagant Latin Catholicism.
Bill wasn’t along the one time I
visited Marshville. I was travelling with Bill and María’s two kids: Larry, who
was in his mid-teens, and Annamaria, who was just barely pubescent. Our hostess
at the old family home with multiple verandas was Bill’s elderly great aunt –
I’m sorry to say I forget her first name – who was mostly blind and a relic of
an earlier era. She gave the impression of being old enough to remember owning
slaves, but that couldn’t have been right.
She was most pleased to see the young
people named Marsh, but I apparently bewildered her. ‘Ah declayuh, Honeychile’
(She actually said that to me in her almost-another-language rural Carolina
drawl), ‘but I don’t believe we’ve ever had a Jewish person in Marshville before.’
(I’m sparing you the dialectical transliteration.) ‘All we’ve ever had in
Marshville is Baptists and Methodists and backsliders.’
I assured her that I fit right in,
being a backslider, at which point she informed me about the need, mentioned
above, to drive to Monroe if I wanted to buy beer.
Soybean prices were up that year, which
meant that everybody in that neck of country was eating off the highest part of
the hog, and the first oil shock was just breaking. We went fishing on her
farm’s stocked pond. It was a hot, humid, uncomfortable day swarming with
various insects. Everybody, especially the old great-aunt and little Annamaria,
caught plenty of fish – except me. I caught none. Then we drove on.
The last time I saw Bill was on
Christmas day 1974. Helena and I’d separated about a half a year earlier and
I’d been living alone in San Antonio. She had moved back to New Orleans, had
Naomi, and I wanted my little dirtball back. Having the holiday off work, I’d
driven through the night to New Orleans in my 15-year-old Karmann-Ghia and had
tracked Helena down to Bill and María’s house. After some acrimonious phone
calls, during which I did myself no credit, I drove up to the kerb in front.
María, apparently drunk, was shouting
in Spanish out one of the front windows. Bill came out of the front door, Naomi
initially at his heels, and then running full tilt to me once she
saw-and-smelled me.
Once he got to me Bill drawled in his
lazy voice, ‘What are you fucking up our Christmas for?’
I replied something like, ‘Well, it
wouldn’t even be a fucked-up Christmas for me without Naomi.’
He considered this for a moment, and
then, dachshund lover that he was, said, ‘Yeah, it aint right to keep a man
away from his dog.’
It was all over except for some loud
and vigorous theatrics from María, who brought out a basket containing some
puppies to whom Naomi had given birth a few weeks before, and me writing Bill a
cheque to reimburse him for their veterinary bills, and I was off back to San
Antonio, leaving Bill to recover his Christmas.
I wonder if digitalisation eliminated
the need for Bill’s job and, if it did, if he’d been able to retire first.
Brenda & Tyrone
One day Helena and I
were sitting on our front porch on Adams Street and this little kid came over
from a front porch across the street and a few houses down with a note for
Helena. The note said, “Hi, Let’s be friends,” and the skinny woman sitting on
the other porch waved over at us. And so we got to know Brenda and Tyrone.
Tyrone and Brenda
were coon-assed to the marrow, and not your better sort of coon-ass, either.
White trash, some might say. Anyway, Tyrone was by trade a house-painter, and
by legal definition a prison escapee. I’m not sure what he’d been in for.
Stealing stuff off building sites, I’d imagine. It doesn’t matter. The police
wanted him. They came by looking for him from time to time.
Once they came
zooming up in police cars, sealing off our block at both cross-streets. Then
they came down our street from both directions, as Helena and I watched from
our porch, and converged on Tyrone and Brenda’s house. They surrounded it and
went in by both the front and back doors. They searched that little two-bedroom
shotgun house for the better part of an hour, then they came out, packed away
their stuff, and drifted off. The street returned to its normally sleepy-quiet
state.
Then Tyrone came out
onto the porch, stretched, and sat down on the porch swing to drink a beer. I
was fucken amazed. Later, Helena got their secret out of Brenda: he’d hid in the
fridge.
Tyrone was a friendly
sort, about my age. We got high together a few times. After I split from the
French restaurant, he took me with him to a couple of building sites while he
bid on painting jobs, but being Tyrone’s painter’s helper seemed much less
attractive to me than being Murray’s apprentice trucker had been, and I hadn’t
done that. And Murray hadn’t been wanted by the cops and acting real cocky
about it.
But they were friendly folks, and
Brenda wasn’t nearly as crazy as Helena. They eventually disappeared, and a
pleasant, friendly, unexciting working-class African American family took their
place.
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