Willem's Field; A Novel

by Melinda Haynes

• ISBN13: 9780743238496
• ISBN10: 0743238494
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-04-29
• Publisher: Free Press

Summary

What are the limitations of what we do and don't know about our hearts? Oprah Book Club author Melinda Haynes, hailed as "the real thing, a true artist, a genuine writer" (the Cleveland Plain Dealer) for her bestselling debut, Mother of Pearl, returns with a tender, heartbreaking, and occasionally hilarious novel set in the 1970s. Willem Fremont has spent his adult life held tight inside the clenched fist of panic disorder. Determined to break the pattern -- even as he reaches his twilight years -- Willem returns to his childhood home in Purvis, Mississippi, where he believes the solution lies. There he discovers his father's acreage in the hands of the idiosyncratic Till family. Eilene, mother of Sonny and Bruno and "no bigger than a dress form," pretends to be deaf as a way of dealing with her grown boys -- each of whom suffers from inertia. Sonny, hugely fat, perennially unemployed, and looking for love, is building a shrimp boat in his mother's landlocked backyard. Bruno, who has returned from Vietnam with a spinal injury and wearing a brace, escapes into the glossy pages of old National Geographics while his wife, Leah, tries to find a small measure of comfort in the day-to-day tending of their farm. From these unsettled lives comes a story of reconciliation against all odds and a vision of rekindled love as well as a compassionate portrait of small-town life that celebrates the unusual, embraces the unwanted, and opens its arms to all lost souls in search of a home. Steeped in the traditions of great southern storytellers like Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner, Willem's Field is nonetheless a wholly original and vividly imaginative novel by a brilliant and assured writer.

Author Biography

Melinda Haynes lives with her husband, Ray, on a barrier island along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She is the author of two novels: Mother of Pearl and Chalktown.

Excerpts

1974

Ten o'clock in the morning and already the wind was busy. A king-size wind as big as the state itself rolling across the bottom shelf of Oklahoma and into Grayson County, Texas, crossing the border with a low, chaotic cloud of highway trash carried in its wake. Empty cigarette packs and crinkled cellophane. Rattling drink cans and tattered bits of rain-stained paper. The stuff of chaos. Willem Fremont sat watching the two young girls with waist-length hair as they stood on the lip of the old highway. The wind gathering along the backside of their blue jeans and sending their shirts away from their bodies like sails. At their feet the manic plunder of wind-driven waste. The highway was an old one, with cracked blacktop that buckled and sheared and pitched upward near the western horizon before sinking low in the vicinity of the truck stop, a perpetually downward ribbon of lane that made thoughts of going any direction other than east seem tiring. But west was where the girls wanted to go. A cardboard sign near their feet spelled out SAN FRANCISCO. Willem watched them from the red Naugahyde booth of RUBY'S REGAL TRUCK STOP where he sat, one hand flattened over his hometown paper, folded neatly in half; his other hand closing around the ribbed sugar dispenser with a grip that whitened his knuckles and forced old blue veins to bulge across the top of his hand like worms. He glanced around.

There was nothing regal about Ruby's, in his opinion. Unless one counted the regaleze references to food, or the construction-paper crowns that randomly decorated the place. (Crowns? he thought, momentarily sliding into the blinding red-light district of alarm.) One topped the menu blackboard, heralding the "Fit for a King Meal" of chopped steak and mashed potatoes and bacon-laced pole beans, ALL FOR ONLY $3.98! Another crown sat atop the cash register, next to a plastic toothpick dispenser filled with toothpicks the color of Easter eggs. Each time the drawer was slammed, the kingdom chanced being overthrown, for the crown jostled another half inch toward the metal edge of disaster, where the possibility of being trampled and ruined by collective serfdom seemed likely. The last paper crown hung from a wire over the single glass door, within direct line of Willem's sight. It hung like a flogged victim, forced to swing and spin upon the advent of customers escaping the dust-flat Texan winds. Once the doors were shut, it would begin to correct itself inside this airborne vortex until it moved with catastrophic slowness to a position static and dead.

It was this crown that worried Willem more than the other crowns, and as with most things that worried him, he felt responsible for the reason behind the worry. He just couldn't remember what that reason might be. Perhaps it had to do with the absoluteness of gravity or the snobbishness of British royalty, but he couldn't really be sure. His fingers twitched across the top of the newspaper and he shut his eyes. On a scale of one to ten, with ten the red-level mark of extreme fear and one the uncomfortable blush of moderate anxiety, Willem felt sevenish. It was like knowing there was something inside a bedroom closet that was bad. All he hoped at this point was that he could sit quietly and finish his meal before the door flew open and whatever was in there escaped.

There were squeals out by the highway where the girls were, and though the window was grease-fogged and plastered with various church revival and stock sale notices along its perimeter, he could see them clearly enough to ignore for a moment his nagging anxiety. They were bent at the waist, adjusting their San Francisco sign, which wouldn't stay put because of the occasional cattle truck that thundered by.

Willem took a deep, steadying breath and read the revival notice that was closest to his face, a beige pamphlet announcing "Sister Moxilianna Sánchez up from Waco Texas to Share Her Amazing Soul-Saving Deliverance from the Satanic Life of Palm Reading." Her picture had been printed on the notice, and in Willem's opinion, she seemed fiercely unhappy with her rescue. Next to that notice was an announcement concerning Black Angus cattle for sale by a man named Robert Gerhardt who lived 4.7 miles exactly from the Old Cutter Bridge in Pottsboro. There were no pictures on that flyer, and Willem was quickly bored. Through the narrow margin left between the two notices, he could see the two girls as they leaned into the wind.

Looking away from them, he turned to the menu fastened on the wall above a bank of heat lamps, those words written in chalk boasting a three-dollar panfried steak complete with the promise of hash-browned potatoes. He felt sure the words held a temporary cure, if only he studied them long enough: The Royal Steak and Potatos - cooked the way you like it. The unskilled cursive writing. The uneven loops of the L's. The improper spelling of "potatoes." Anything to stem the worry, since Willem Fremont's worry of late escalated to panic and manifested itself in ways the general population found unseemly.

He tightened his grip on the sugar dispenser and peered across the roomful of strangers, looking for the one familiar person with whom he might converse. The nondescript face that he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt would settle him and point toward the menu and talk to him about it, maybe bring him back where he needed to be, which was sitting in a booth with good manners and midwestern patience, waiting to order something to eat. The Woman who brought me coffee was the woman he was looking for, and while he couldn't remember the necessary details of her physical appearance - the color of her eyes, her height, an approximation of her weight - he could remember her smell.

Minutes earlier Willem had smelled her before he had seen her, and the smell was a puzzle in itself, since it was both pleasant and unpleasant. The odor of her unwashed armpits had migrated into the fragrance of fresh hot coffee and confused him, the coffee canceling out the harshest elements of armpit acidity and, in so doing, reducing its own appeal by at least fifty percent. The limbic portion of his brain had overfired then - he was already overtired and overstimulated and somewhat addled from twenty-four hours of driving - as he tried to register and place those mutated smells, and his eyes were shut because he had found through the years that if he shut his eyes and concentrated it helped break open riddles, so when he felt her arm brush the back of his shoulder, he had jerked to the side and things spilled. Coffee. A small glass pitcher of cream (real cream, not a powdered substitute, which would have been self-contained and much easier to clean up), the menu entombed in yellowed plastic she was holding in her hand. The time spent mopping up and fetching what was scattered came to his rescue and gave him the necessary seconds required to register patience and remorse.

He remembered how she had dabbed at his arm with genuine concern, taking care to get a clean cloth from behind the counter and work it against his sleeve, dipping the end of the cloth in a glass of ice water that had somehow appeared on his table. "I'm so sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to scare you." Willem, feeling the brunt of responsibility for the entire debacle, had hurried to excuse her and say, "Don't worry about it, I'm fine," while sliding nearer to the window to escape her ministrations, relieved she wasn't aware that her lack of hygiene and his love of coffee were coconspirators bent on his discomfort.

But now he needed her, because the crown was swinging and the vagueness of his worry was dissipating, and studying the letters on the menu wasn't working (the L's were amazingly well done for a group of people writing from the disadvantaged side of education, which, judging by the limited vocabulary of the short-order cooks and waitresses, had to be a fact). To add insult to injury, the girls outside were standing perilously close to an uneven highway, and the wind was picking up, beating their cardboard sign against their blue-jeaned legs.

He studied the faces inside Ruby's Regal Truck Stop. Most of the customers were involved with cattle. Willem could smell the shit on their shoes. A family that included a young boy ripping paper napkins to shreds and a baby sitting in a wooden high chair was in the corner. The baby's father fanned at its face with a folded courtesy map while he sipped his coffee. The mother, a brunette with slumped shoulders and out-of-date cat's-eye glasses held together on one side by Scotch tape, was fishing in her purse for some other child-distraction device. Keys, maybe.

A man sitting at the counter (which was too close to Willem for his comfort; he needed at least five feet of separation to feel fully operational and competent, and he had been afforded only three) leaned across and laid a meaty hand on the waitress's arm and said, "Sweet pea. Listen to me. If we just sit back and wait and see, he'll settle down. Boys are gone be boys. I knew his daddy and his daddy was the same way. Took years to get used to the idea of settling down."

"There's no `we' to this. It's `me.' I have to put up with it, not you."

"All I'm sayin is it takes some boys years -"

"I've not got years to wait," the waitress said.

"I knew his mama, too. She waited years and -"

"Well, I'm not his mama."

Willem didn't have years to wait, either. As inevitable as a sunset, the yellow caution light inside his mind was slowly beginning to turn to red. Glancing around the room, his blue eyes looking desperately for a diversion, he leaned toward the floor and noticed the irregular patterns of the black-and-white linoleum. It had been patched in places with blue replacement squares the color of Play-Doh, and to make matters worse, pollutants collected in the spaces where the squares didn't meet: bits of nondescript dirt, a clump of waxed-over organic material, and what seemed to be a small bristly wad of nonhuman hair. The bar stool nearest him was worse. Where its stainless-steel tube met the floor was a casement of black rubber that was torn and floppy, and when the customer put his shit-covered boot to it, the rubber slipped down the pole like skin off a bone. Willem looked to the warming tray for help, the fixed metal cones of radiant orange heat actively mummifying french fries and apple pies alike. It made him think of roadkill roasting in the sun. Wild-eyed and frantic, he jerked to the side, rattling the silverware on the table, pinging his spoon against his glass of water, frantic for the attention of someone, anyone.

His smelly less-than-regal waitress was nowhere to be found.

At this realization, his heart rate increased to such an alarming tempo that he was sure its galloping could be seen clearly by the person behind him eating her Fit for a Queen sausage and pancakes. He was sure his heart was pounding so ferociously that his booth inside Ruby's Regal Truck Stop was beginning to vibrate and shimmy and any minute now this seismic activity would shatter the glass and those handwritten notices concerning salvation and stock auctions would commingle out on a stricken landscape until plastered to the earth by eighteen-wheelers hell-bent on California. Willem knew that if he allowed his gaze to travel to the paper crown hanging over the glass-front door, it would be spinning with tornadic intensity.

The affliction had been happening for so many years that Willem no longer thought of it as a condition separate from waking and breathing and eating and shitting. It could not be fooled or cajoled or intimidated. But it could be delayed. Turning to the window, he said to his slack-jawed reflection, "Look." It was a command he always gave himself, as though the sanity to which he clung could be reinforced a little by self-examination. Seeing his face peering back at him only moderately distorted, he noticed that his thick white hair, no longer brown, was not receding as severely as he had imagined. His teeth were still good. Evenly spaced with a sufficient bite that had been tearing at meat for seven decades. He grinned at himself. The muscles along his face had relaxed, and there were ridges alongside his mouth, but his eyes were still bright and clear, not rheumy or wizened or weak or failing. He took in a deep breath through his nose. He had already figured out that his sense of smell was working at its optimum. These observations were good. They slowed down his heart, and he felt strong enough to chance looking at the front door.

The crown was not spinning like a tornado. It was aloft in a quiet, easy, rocking turn. Willem nodded. Relaxed his shoulders a little. Began to think of other things that hung: piñatas, wet flags, a noose. "Wait," he said to his reflection in the window, trying to backpedal to the least harmful item on the list (the piñata) and feeling that inevitable engaging of gears as his mind skipped over the innocuous vision of a parrot-colored swinging container of candy and headed straight to the hangman's noose. At this point he mentally slammed shut the door by physically slamming his hand on the table and lurching to his feet. Suddenly upright in the aisle of the restaurant, he felt the instantaneous jolt that comes from knowing you've done something stupid. To his surprise, he seemed the only one aware of it; whatever acknowledgment registered on the faces of the diners, surprise was not a part of it. They were bored with him. They saw him for what he was: one more crazy old man in saggy pants and wrinkled shirt given to jumping to his feet at the least provocation. Insulted, he stood as tall he was able and stumbled to the counter and said in a voice that was a little too loud: "Sir, I need a menu, please."

"Looks like you got one right there on your table," the short-order cook said with a point of his spatula. And there it was, grease-spattered but adequate, the words printed on paper trapped within a plastic binder bordered in red. His Majesty's Ham and Eggs. A complete family of Royal Waffles. The Duchess Omelette.

Beaten, Willem shuffled back to his booth and sat, his fingers running up the edge of his water glass. Early on he had decided he was crazy, and he had read every book he could find on mental illnesses. Studied the various aspects of psychosis. His bewilderment had grown. As far as he could tell, people who were crazy were not aware that they were crazy, and Willem Fremont was very aware that he was crazy.

The beelike drone of conversation ebbed and flowed around him. Sentences ran like water and lapped at his feet and the cuffs of his shirt and moved steadily across his shoulders as he sat in his booth listening to references concerning the weather, and the proper way to fence forty acres, and the stupidity of President Nixon.

Continues...

Excerpted from Willem's Field by Melinda Haynes Copyright © 2003 by Melinda Haynes
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.