flash’s
by Clyde Edgerton
MAMA
During Clyde Edgerton’s appearance on UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch to talk about his latest novel, The Night Train, the author told D.G. Martin, “I had so much of Flash and his mama” that his editor (“a great editor,” he says) asked, “Can we cut back some?” Intrigued, NCLR’s editor (a regular North Carolina Bookwatch viewer) emailed the writer to ask if NCLR might publish an excerpt from the cutting room floor. The following is what Edgerton sent, noting that in early drafts, the novel was told “in multiple first-person voices.” To hear more about the various inspirations for and the writing of Edgerton’s latest novel, watch the North Carolina Bookwatch episode (which premiered 18 November 2011). I’m Fannie Acres, Flash’s Mama to you. Flash has always been a good boy. His daddy gave him that guitar before he died, and Flash has always cherished it. Benton Halston gave “ I wanted to explore him that job at the shop when he the humanity of this was sixteen, and now he’s the foreman out there. They got a guy . . . examine the good reputation. Haul in furniture racist in my book. . . . from all over and refinish it. Do a I wanted to try out lot with antiques, even sell some. Flash has always been good to taking this guy whom me. Without his daddy, he didn’t many would see as a have a lot that the other boys his villain and see what age had. Bill Burgess even went off to law school in Chapel Hill would happen . . . and got a law degree and is back if his mother got sick.” working for Jared Fitzgerald, who —Clyde Edgerton to D.G. Martin has gone plum crazy purchasing things. Like the dern TV station and some radio stations. What somebody would want with one of them beats me, and now he’s got WLBT with that dogfood-eating fool on there every Saturday night. But they do have good music, and they say that program is getting picked up all over. Flash is one of the last men on earth that squats on his heels when he talks to somebody in the yard. I’ll look out there and one or two of his buddies will be in the swing or in the chair beside the swing, and he’ll be squatting with a toothpick in his mouth just exactly like his daddy used to do. Flash remembers his daddy well is something I’m proud I can say. So Flash is going to audition for that TV show where Bobby Lee Thackton eats the dogfood. They got good country music on there, and he plays a hymn every show. Course some people don’t know a hymn from a bluebird. Odd things going on. Junior, Sister’s boy, was in here the other evening for supper with his fiancée, Joyce, and
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photograph by margaret Bauer
Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
they’d been to a funeral of Joyce’s aunt’s, and she was a odd bird that had it in her will that she was to be cremated. (I don’t know when Flash is going to settle on a girlfriend, but I hope he hooks into something with more sense than that Joyce.) “They use some mighty fine wood in those boxes,” Joyce says, talking about the boxes they put the ashes in, you know. “Mahogany, it looked like,” she says. Joyce is the same size as Junior and dresses up like a man sometimes. “I never understood that cremating,” I says. “I just wouldn’t want to take a chance about being raised from the dead.” “It’s real dark. Like mahogany,” says Joyce. “And the hole they dig ain’t big as nothing.” She was talking about the hole they bury the ashes in. See, sometimes they bury them and sometimes they give them to somebody to set on a mantle beside a picture. “No, it’s lighter than mahogany,” says Junior. He rubbed his forehead. He’s got this habit of rubbing the sweat off his forehead with the palm of his hand. He sweats a lot. “It’s about four feet deep,” says Joyce. Then she laughed kind of loud and hard. “In a square hole about that big.” And she shows with her hands. “How big is the box?” I asked her. “A big thick cereal box,” says Joyce. “About that. Almost square, but long this way. Have you ever seen a hole they bury somebody’s ashes in?” she asks me. “No.” “Have you?” she asks Flash. “No ma’am. I can’t see as how it’d be different than any other hole.” Flash is real good with his manners. I taught him. “About four feet deep,” she says. “I wouldn’t think anything would dig it up, since ashes don’t smell.” “I just wonder about the second coming,” I says, “and how anybody could be sure that, you know, they could become a body and all. It just seems like it’s lots easier and more normal to get raised from the dead if you were buried like you’re supposed to be.” “What about when somebody’s been underground so long they’re nothing but dust?” says Junior. “Well, that would be dust” I says. “I think dust is lots closer to a human body that ashes. Dust is natural – a natural ingredient, more or less.” They didn’t say anything after that. n