Knuckling Down in Fallis

In the ghost town of Fallis, Lincoln County, Oklahoma, we met the former postmaster and one-time deputy sheriff Alva Hall. Matt and I had been to Bethlehem--the Cemetery, that is--where the woods and grass were lush with the rains of late June and the tics and chiggers feasted with songs of joy on our flesh. What our bodies needed most was a bug-killing hot bath, but we stopped at a couple of houses to ask the way to Fallis Cemetery, our next goal. We were at last directed to talk to Alva, the former postmaster, who lived in a brick house at the top of the hill and who we were assured would know all there was to know.

Map of Fallis, source unknown

The red dirt road to Alva’s house turned out to be the old main street of Fallis (that’s F-a-l-l-i-s for the prurient minded), population today about 25, but it still had a fire station and a community center, recent buildings of once-shining tin, now dull in the twilight’s last non-gleaming. Prominent too were the remains of the school, also made of brick, crowned with a broken cupola above three large rooms now trashed by teenage troglodytes, who are the banal ghosts of the pervasive electronic present, in which history itself--not to mention the cosmos--is lost. 

What’s all this about bricks? Lincoln County’s one great and inexhaustible natural resource is red clay, especially since World War II, by which time the top soil had washed away following years of intense cotton farming and the refusal to learn contour plowing. The clay was great for making bricks and getting your wagon or car stuck in. Chandler had a brick factory by the 1890s, and the streets of small towns were often paved with brick, as heaven is paved with gold. Parts of Route 66, when it was opened in 1926, followed the red brick road through towns like Chandler and Davenport. Thousands of the bricks have vanished into the gardens of collectors, the I.T. (Indian Territory) bricks being prized above the more common O.T. (Oklahoma Territory), but enough remain. When the blacktop washes out in chug holes, they are there to tell the story of the early vision of paradise.

Yet I cannot mention paradise without thinking of the grave of Harriet Long in Jerusalem. There among the green of late June, lush after the rains and brawny with blackjacks and post oaks lies a work of art whose love of color recalls Babylon and the imagistic poetry it inspired in the book of John the Revelator. (That’s the way the name comes to me, courtesy of Blind Willie Johnson and Son House.) Harriet Long’s marker asserts two facts. On June 29, 1892, She was “Born” with a capital “B”. On March 8, 1971, She “Passed” with a capital “P.” The rest is the long withdrawing tide of silence, whose latest manifestation is Alva saying No, no blacks here. God gave white folks these hills and hollows. 

But we know what Harriet dreamed of, for her stone intones the tale--not a stone but poured concrete, Portland could it be?--with the writing incised by nail. Into the soft cement marbles have been pushed, bright yellow, blue, green, jasper, and the red stone of sardis, an African-Babylonian exultation of color against the cement gray of the slab. There is something Byzantine about it, the sun, moon, and stars, the firmament of our earthly life as a box or jeweled casket, starred around the sides and bottom with eyes that stare at us.

But, Matt objects (he’s young and still argues), Fallis had a black newspaper at the turn of the century. The Fallis Blade, and it had a readership in this quadrant of Lincoln County (Tohee, Otoe, and Iowa Townships) to support it. No, the postmaster of thirty years replies, Fallis never had no black people, not to speak of. They started coming in after the big fire, cause then you could buy property for a little a nothing and that’s how come them to be here today. It isn’t clear whether he’s speaking of the fire of 1920 or 1960. Matt’s arguments don’t phase Alva, a man who knows what he knows, and what he knows is set in Portland cement, its exothermic energy long since stilled.

We came back the next day accompanied by an Oklahoma thunderstorm, good only for a couple of hours but plenty to turn the roads to a red clay mire. Matt’s eight-seater four-wheel-drive ATV with its truck tires could handle the roads, and we had three sets of written directions to shame his GPS Navigator, which couldn’t find Fallis Cemetery any more than Alva could. I’d lost the little confidence I had in Miss Navi when two days earlier, south of Davenport, she’d tried to direct us into the waters of Deep Fork. Now we were navigating as navigation always had been done under a lowered firmament, by grit and mother wit. On a better day I’d have pretended to position ourselves by looking up at the sky, but the present sky was saying nothing but rain punctuated with lightning flashes and thunder. After slithering around an hour collating our written directions, half way up a hillside we came across the sign “Fallis Cemetery 1893” right by the side of the road. There had once been a road into it, now grown up with post oaks and barred by a gate. Another vision of the earthly paradise, this one fresh with plastic flowers placed this past Memorial Day.

Fallis Cemetery, 1893

If a woman poet could love March because his shoes were purple, we could love late June because ours were red. I felt sorry for Matt’s vehicle, though, with its running boards coated with red clay which we tracked into the formerly spiffy interior. Not to worry, Matt says, I’m going to have it detailed. Detailed? Well, says I, we better go tell Alva the good news.

His originally white pickup, covered now with the dried-blood dust of the roads, was parked in front, so we knew he was home. Not wanting to hurt the man’s feelings, we made up a story about how his directions had guided us to the cemetery, and I promised I’d insert the smooth fact that it’s earlier name had been Divine, which may have kept him off the scent. 

It was five p.m. and Alva was drinking. He used an anonymous coffee cup which he kept on his armchair table, no bottle in sight, but moonshine has a distinctive smell, not anonymous to anyone who’s ever smelled it. It also showed up up in an added vehemence in his speech, as he corrected our handdrawn map and pointed out other neighborhood glories like the old Katy depot, which we could easily reach with a five minutes’ drive. This time at least I was able to steer him clear of the Civil War, a trap I’d fallen into the day before when I learned how the Hall family had single-handedly won the War in North Carolina except that Lee had gone on and lost it.

  As we’d approached his front porch and knocked, I’d heard the plaintive mewing of a sick cat. The sound came from a hollow in a camphor bean tree that grew hard by and had attracted the attention of Alva’s two weenie dogs, front-porch guardians, one brown and one tan. I’d thought of checking on the cat, but Alva was already inviting us inside. Now we heard renewed excitement from the weenie dogs. 

Alvin had a way of pronouncing “weenie dogs” that sounded to my unsteady ear like “winter dogs.” Goddamn those winter dogs, he exploded, and we all went out to the front porch to see the action. The cat had come out. Bedraggled with dog slobbers all over its gray and white fur, it wobbled as it tried to walk, and the winter dogs were in full ardor, attacking with quick nips which bowled the cat over, then retreating in memory of earlier encounters with cat claws. Or maybe just scared at their own temerity. In this case they had nothing to fear--this was one very sick cat and didn’t even try to defend itself. We watched a minute, figuring how long the cat would survive and grasping the dogs’ peril, since the sickness could be contagious. Goddamned winters dogs, Alva would yell in a drill sergeant’s voice, stamping his booted foot, which bought the cat abut ten seconds avail before the dogs attacked again.

Alva, says I, you got a very sick animal here. You’d better put it down. Needless advice, since Alva was more steeped in country ways than I was. I’d left decades ago and he was still here, but I figured the corn liquor might have dulled his response-time. Goddamned right, he says, and goes back in the house. I’d seen the .32 on his coffee table already. He may have stopped to  freshen his coffee cup, for by the time he came back out the cat had wobbled its painful dog-clobbered and -slobbered way nearly out to the street. Which made for good shooting.  

Here it lies now on its side, and Alva’s going in for the kill. First he stamps and yells at the winter dogs, then he goes into a stiff-legged stance with both hands gripping the pistol about three feet away from the cat and fires. I won’t say he missed but if he hit the cat, the cat didn’t know it. I will say that the gun made a bigger bang than I’d anticipated. Maybe it wasn’t a .32 but a .38, which seemed to me overkill for a coffee-table gun, but what did I know about country living? What I did know was that, amplified by the perfect silence of main street in Fallis, even a .32 was loud as a thunderclap. 

Alva sees that the deed is still to be done and repositions himself, this time bending his knees and bringing the barrel of the gun to within eighteen inches of the prostrate but still stirring cat. He sights carefully, gripping so hard his knuckles gleam. Oddly enough, at this prime-time moment, I’m not paying attention. I’m thinking of marbles. I played the game as a kid, like any red-blooded American boy. I can still feel the marble hard against the knuckle of my thumb as I squat to shoot. Taws and shooters have been found from days as far gone as 4000 years ago. Was Harriet quitsies when she quit the game? Was she keepsies, when she died? 

Hands tight, fingers whitening on the grip, Alva is about to fire again. This is what it means to knuckle down.

Wayne Pounds, Tokyo

2018