Silas House
FOXGLOVES
“Rufus was beautiful,” my grandfather announces. He is sitting in his rocker on the porch, looking out at the hills. Earlier I helped him get dressed; I picked a blue shirt that made his eyes shine a ghostly lavender, the color of wild phlox. I have never heard him call a man beautiful before. I doubt I’ve ever even heard him use the word.
“Who’s that?” I ask, just as my mother pops the screen-door open with her hip. She is holding two glasses of sweet tea in front of her.
“Rufus,” he says. “I loved him.”
My mother stops. The ice shifts in the glasses. “What are you talking about, Daddy?” She gives her words a questioning little laugh at the end.
“Rufus, dammit!” he huffs as if we are fools for not recognizing this name. “I kissed him all over.”
“Daddy, you did not!” Her words are nearly a gasp. She holds one of the glasses of tea out to him, but he doesn’t seem to notice so she sits it on the small wrought iron table beside his chair with a sharp click. She drops heavily into the porch chair opposite him and turns up her own glass, taking a long drink. The air in the thick cushion beneath her exhales in a low, long wheeze. “What in the world?” she says to me, not even whispering, as if he is not there.
We have been told by the nurses to always go along with whatever he says. If he thinks my grandmother is still living, then we are not to correct him. If he believes it is 1959 and he is back in Germany serving in the army, then we are to play along. Usually, my mother is militant about following this advice but today she clearly lays that aside; accepting that her father finds a man attractive is a bridge too far.
“I never even heard tell of a man named Rufus,” she says. “I’d remember a name like that.”
But he isn’t paying any attention to her. “Look, the clouds are racing,” he says, floating back to us. My mother stares at him stuck on Rufus. I follow his eyes to see the way the stripes of shadows are easing over the distant blue hills.
* * *
My grandfather moved in next door to us the summer before I left for college after he awoke and found my granny cold and still beside him. He didn’t want to leave their farm, but he was already having memory issues that would eventually worsen enough to result in a diagnosis, so he knew he was going to need help. My parents had bought the small house next to us a couple years before, predicting it would come in handy for my grandparents eventually. They made him sell his animals and the farm where he’d lived most of his life.
When I was little, I loved to spend the night with my grandparents. In the mornings I got to gather eggs from the outraged hens. I liked to lean against the fence and listen as the cows ripped hay from the ground and wetly chewed the cuds. In the afternoons I helped slop the hogs. Papaw taught me how to call them so they would rouse from their muddy reposes to grunt their way over to the trough.
My grandfather is not like anyone else in my family. Even as a child I noticed how he took time to pause and study a line of ants carrying morsels of food up the trunk of a cedar or to tenderly cup his palm around a newly opened jack-in-the-pulpit. He was the only adult who gave me permission to have a sense of wonder about such things. My parents and grandmother, aunts and uncles, were always working, busying themselves with the most menial tasks to stay in motion. They all had an aversion to stillness. Even in the hot evenings when everyone settled on the porch to chat for a while they were rocking in their rockers or cutting watermelon or wiping off the table or sweeping the porch floor. Most of my people cannot rest. But Papaw can, and often I see him studying the everyday magic of the world while everyone else hustles around him. He can name all the wildflowers and all the trees. He has always liked to lie down in a field and chew on a piece of grass or taste the waters of any creek he encounters. My grandmother was not as charmed by all of this as I was; she often yelled at him to pay attention or to get to work. Even as a child I knew how ill-suited they were for one another, but they shared an unusual devotion. Although they often seemed frustrated by the other’s actions, they were best friends whose relationship was forged by years of struggles and secrets, but not touch. I cannot remember them ever kissing or holding hands and it was rare for them to even sit close together. But they made each other laugh and that seemed more of a bond than most couples I know, particularly my parents.
I would miss the farm, but I knew he needed to be closer to my parents, and I was glad to have him next door in those last weeks before I went to the university to study journalism three hours away, in Nashville. I knew his presence would preoccupy my parents enough to make my leaving for college easier on all of us. I didn’t go home much, even though I felt guilty about it all the time, and still do. Especially after my father left my mother in the first semester of my sophomore year. I was selfish to not go see her more often during this terrible time, but I wonder if it was self-preservation more than simply being self-centered. When I did make the occasional trip home, I found that I didn’t miss my father at all. I was amazed he possessed enough emotion to desire a divorce, much less a new life, which he immediately created with a young woman he had embalmed bodies with at the funeral home. They moved to Ocala, Florida and my whole relationship with him since has been a Christmas card with a fifty-dollar bill enclosed. Signed by her.
Now that I am graduated from college, I find myself living with my grandfather in his small house where only three shady pines separate it from the home where I grew up. I have taken a job at my hometown newspaper to build my resume before applying to bigger papers in bigger towns. Both my hometown and its newspaper are dying. Sometimes, if I become too still, I can hear the air seeping from them, the sound of two pinpricks in a balloon. I know I am also stalling. I have been gone four years and, in that time, our little community has not changed at all; it has been dying for as long as I can remember.
But I have changed. The last year of college I spent many evenings in my tiny apartment, kissing Drew Hodges all over. Nobody knows that except Drew. Neither of us are ready to come out and Drew probably never will. He assured me of that the day before commencement, tears shivering on his long eyelashes. I haven’t spoken to him since returning home because he asked me not to. “It’ll be easier this way,” he said, then he kissed me for the last time. A long, tender kiss, unlike the hungry ones we so often shared. He is at seminary in Louisville now, fulfilling his destiny of becoming an AME pastor like his father.
My grandfather has changed, too. Those four years have eased out a slow but steady decline so that he is only truly in the present for fleeting, unpredictable moments throughout the day. Most of his life is wandering the shadowy past, a place so mysterious to us that sometimes it seems as if he might be making up memories, or at least getting things badly confused. One minute he is in Germany and the next he is growing up in the mountains east of us. One second he recalls his wife’s funeral in stark detail and the next he calls for her.
But each day he speaks more firmly about Rufus.
My mother stays with him all day long while I work and when I get home from the dying newspaper, we all eat supper together. Then Papaw always wants to sit on the porch in the cool of the day. It is a scorching summer, with an especially miserable period in the week that straddles the end of August and the beginning of September. But in the gloaming, the world cools down, slows, spreads itself out hazy and blue. Most evenings he wants to work in the yard, which he has turned into a lush garden in the brief time he has lived here. He brought iris, lily, and gladiola bulbs from the farm. Huge bunches of yarrow and milkweed for the monarchs. There is French lavender and hummingbird mint that sways in the breeze, clumps of rosemary and thyme he likes to break apart on his hands to draw in their scent. The salvia is full and red, the dianthus low and secretive.
The foxgloves are his favorites, though. Even on the first day of September, when their blooms are long gone, having shone through the gap between spring and summer, he pauses at them, running their leaves between his thumb and forefinger. He is as loving to the crisp, dry sections as he is to the few leaves that still hold green. “I like their name,” he tells me, just as he has said to me many times before. “I like that they only bloom in their second year, and then they die. But before they die, they shed new seeds to start new plants.” Weeding and worrying over the flowers is like prayer for him. When his hands are busy, they seem to turn the engine of his mind more forcibly.
The last thing I want to do after being at work all day is to weed flowerbeds, but I have come to find the activity worthwhile because he often tells long stories and because I like to witness his contentment.
That day, a purple coneflower’s stalk has bent to the point of breaking, so he clips it off and pushes the stem behind his ear. My mother would not like this; this decoration on his body seems to free him in some way that makes him seem feminine. His body is languid to the point of willowy.
“Are you my boy?” When he is unsure who someone is he always asks some form of this question earnestly. He is looking deep into my eyes.
“No, I’m your grandson. The other Thomas.”
He turns his face back to the flowers, rooting out a great cluster of dandelion greens. “Where’s my boy?”
His son has been dead since before I was born, but I was named for him. The first Thomas died when he was a teenager, and his death was used as the excuse for the physical distance between my grandparents for years. My mother often explained their indifference for each other this way, at least.
“I’m not sure where he’s at right now,” I say. I always try to abide by the nurses’ advice and avoid telling him the truth when he asks about someone who is dead, which he does quite often. Mostly this feels cruel to me. Patronizing, somehow. Other times it feels like the kindest thing to do.
“He’s buried on that hill over yonder,” he says, lifting his eyes to the distant hills again. “That’s where he’s at. He was going too fast on the tractor and fell off. The bushhog cut him all to pieces. I had to push his intestines back into his belly. He was cut so bad. Margaret had to wash his blood off my hands.”
He says all of this calmly.
“That’s where he is, in that graveyard. His name was Thomas.” He looks at me then, all at once, with an accusation on his face. “Did you know that?”
“Yes, I did know that,” I tell him. “I’m named for him.”
“But who are you?”
“I’m your grandson. I’m your daughter’s boy.”
“What’s her name?”
“Darling. You named her.”
“That’s right. I raised her, but she’s not my girl. Not really.” Sometimes the things he says are heartless, or outlandish. Sometimes they make me question what is true and what is not. “I’ve always loved her like she’s my own blood,” he says, leaning over and lowering his voice, suggesting a conspiracy between us, “but she’s not. Don’t tell her. It would hurt her too bad.”
“I won’t say a word.”
“She gets tore up real easy,” he says, then swats at his wrist. “Bugs are eating me up.”
“Yeah, they come out this time of night. Let’s rest for a while.” I help him up, although he does not like to take my arm. I hover near him as he climbs the steps. My left hand floats behind his back, unintrusive, but there in case he starts to fall backwards. He drops into his wooden rocker, but I sit on the edge of the porch, the concrete floor cool beneath me.
We are quiet for a time as the crickets and cicadas make themselves known. We watch the light change. A soft rosy gauze fades into a pale peach, which eases into the blue that is the most lonesome blue.
“Rufus didn’t come to Thomas’s funeral today.”
“Did he not?” I ask, mostly to keep him talking.
“But he did come to the burial. We buried him on that hill. My boy. Have you been up there?”
“Yes, I have. Many times.” My family has always taken decorating the graves very seriously. My mother tends the graves year-round but on Decoration Day we all go up there with hoes and buckets of soapy water to chop out the weeds and wipe down the gravestones. It is the most beautiful and the most lonesome place I’ve ever been. There are cedar trees with sweet musk and songbirds calling softly to one another. My namesake’s gravestone is small and square, very gray, with black letters and dates that add up to him only being fifteen years old. Waiting in Glory is carved along the bottom, proof that my grandmother picked the words.
“I hadn’t seen him in seventeen years,” Papaw says.
“Rufus?”
“That’s right.” Papaw nods. “He lives in Knoxville now. But when he heard about Thomas, he said he had to come and pay his respects. I wouldn’t leave the grave and he stayed with me. Margaret begged me to leave but I wouldn’t. Rufus stayed there with me until dark. We watched night ease in. My boy, laying there dead under all that dirt.” Papaw stands, trudges to the edge of the porch. “I kissed him. I couldn’t help it. I felt like I could eat him alive.”
“Papaw,” I say because it feels wrong to hear him admit this to me. I feel like I am being invasive by not stopping him. But he keeps talking.
“You think that was wrong, to do that at my son’s grave.”
He waits. I have to say something. “No, I don’t.” I am telling the truth.
“The heart wants what it wants,” he says. “The body wants what it wants. That’s how we were made.”
“That’s right.” I want to say that I am so glad to know he loved somebody that way. And when I think this an image of Drew rises up before me: his bare back with the morning light falling on it. I see his face the first time I realized he was watching me from across the classroom. I see his hand take mine. We are a secret and that makes every moment sweeter, yet I don’t want to live in hiding. I want to be with him every day, and in every way.
“I think I should lay down now,” Papaw says. He looks into my eyes, and I can tell he’s forgotten who I am, once again. But something in him knows that I am there to care for him.
After I help him into his pajamas and into bed, I turn on his small television to the classic movies channel, which he likes to listen to as he goes to sleep. Onscreen Bette Davis is crying beautifully, so I watch the rest of her scene. Right away my grandfather is snoring gently, his hands crossed atop his chest, making him look like he’s in a coffin. I lift them apart, settle his arms on either side of him, and go to shower off the evening’s heat.
* * *
I find my mother dozing with her glasses on in my grandfather’s recliner the next day when I get home from work. She has turned the air conditioner on full blast and has swiveled the chair to face it. Her eyes are red and swollen, her hair so disheveled it looks as if she might have gathered handfuls of it in frustration. I lighten my step as soon as I see her, begin to back out of the room so she can rest, but this motion awakens her from a thin veil of sleep.
“I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” she says and snatches the glasses from her face. “I’ve cried myself to sleep,” she says, sounding as if she might start again.
“What happened?”
He was out on the porch when she went in to make them both liver cheese sandwiches for lunch. She came out to find he had stripped down naked and was sitting there in his rocker, looking out at the hills. I know how upsetting this can be because he has done this to me a couple times before. Once he possessed a purple erection that I am haunted by; no one should ever have to see their grandfather with a hard-on. After she ordered him back into his clothes, directing him with her back turned to him, they sat at the kitchen table and ate together. During this meal, he told her that she was not his biological child, which she summed up as complete nonsense. “Your granny was never with another man in her life,” she says, whispering with another man like they are curse words. I want to ask her how she knows this to be true but there is no use. And, she says, for the last two hours he has been talking about Rufus. “I can handle a lot, but when he starts making up people and stories,” she says, her face haggard, “it takes all I can do to not scream at him.”
“Well, you can’t do that.”
“I know that!” she yells, startling at her own voice. “I’m sorry. I’m just aggravated to death.” She reaches down to the wooden handle to force the back of the recliner upright. She is wearing nude pantyhose beneath her skirt even though the temperature reached the mid-90s today. She has become even more beautiful in her fifties as if she has fully grown into her face and body. She is always dressed as if she has somewhere important to go although she never goes anywhere. She retired from the bank three years ago due to a nervous breakdown we don’t talk about. We don’t talk about my father leaving either. We don’t talk about anything these days except taking care of my grandfather, and she seems to like this just fine. My mother has decided to stop the stuff of life even if she is always dressed beautifully for it. “There’s ham, fried corn, and mashed potatoes in the oven for you,” she says. She produces a compact from somewhere and checks her light makeup. “I took a notion to cook early today. Some cornbread, too.”
“Where is he now?”
“Laying down. I talked too rough to him and he’s in there pouting, I guess.”
“You have to be patient with him.” Even as I say this, I know how condescending it is. I know how easy it is to sometimes lose patience with him. I mostly keep my temper in check but sometimes I find myself slipping as well.
“He described…” She caps her hand over her mouth, unable to finish her sentence. “I can’t even repeat it.”
“Tell me.”
She shakes her head, eyes closed. “I can’t.”
“I’m living with the man, so I need to know.”
“He described—in detail—sex acts,” she says. Whispering again: sex acts. “With that imaginary man. I had to hold my hands over my ears and run off. I can’t be listening to that. You know he never did such as that. He’s read about that somewhere or seen it in a dirty movie.”
“He’s had experiences you don’t know about.” I am thinking how we can never completely know our parents’ deepest joys and sorrows. I am thinking it is best if we don’t know their desires and traumas. My family only has secrets, no revelations. There must be a better balance to strike. “I mean, you had a life that I can never really know, that happened before I was born.”
“Nothing disgusting like he’s talking about!” She jumps from the recliner and stomps into the kitchen, returning with a small dusting towel. She picks up each item on the coffee table and wipes beneath it.
“It’s not disgusting just because it’s between two men—”
“Yes,” she says, the one word firm as a small rock, “it is. To speak of sex at all to his own daughter is bad enough. But to talk about a man—I couldn’t take it.”
“Maybe this is something he always wanted to tell us,” I say. I am desperate to tell her who I am, but she’s already lost so much I am not sure if I can bear losing her. She has never opened her mind about a single thing in her whole life. “Maybe this is who he always really wanted to be.”
“No,” she says, with finality. She moves on to the end table but instead of bending to dust it, she stands straight, rag in hand, shaking her head. “It’s just the disease talking. That never happened.”
“I’m going to check on him,” I tell her, and I go down the short hallway to find his bedroom empty.
* * *
I find him two miles away. A country road, blacktopped but narrow, with dense woods on one side and a wide pasture full of bored cows on the other. He doesn’t hear me approach and for a moment I idle behind him, saddened by the droop of his once strong shoulders, by the unsteadiness of his steps. He’s still a handsome, slender man for someone who is about to turn eighty-one, but he is also carrying his age in every part of himself. I tap the gas enough to move just past him and park on the shoulder of the road. He glides right on by the car. I holler to him out the open window. “Papaw!” first, then, his name: “James Robert Carter!” He stops, turns, asks who I am, and we have the same conversation we’ve had so many times before. After a while he gets into the car and eases into the seat, looking straight ahead as if he can’t face me.
“Will you take me somewhere?” he whispers. I think he is going to ask me to take him to find this mysterious man from his past, this Rufus my mother never heard tell of. I imagine driving him to a neat little house out in the country to find an older man working in his own flower garden. I imagine Rufus looking up when our car pulls in, then the silhouette of his wife in the screen door, waiting her whole life for the truth to be revealed. “Will you take me to the Cumberland?”
“The river?”
He nods. “There’s a swimming hole, near where I grew up. I’d like to see it, one more time.”
“It’s a pretty afternoon for a drive,” I say, and put the car in drive. I know that he grew up near Pineville, almost an hour away.
My grandfather sits looking straight ahead, his hands folded together in his lap. Quiet and humble as I call my mother to let her know we won’t be back for a while.
“Thank the Lord, you found him,” she says.
“I’m going to take him for a drive in the country. Calm him down a little,” I tell her, and I talk overtop her objections, encouraging me to come on home: “I can’t hardly hear you on this line. We’ll be back before too awful long.”
We drive deeper into the mountains. Houses sit close to the road with children playing in the yards. Spraying each other with water hoses, wading in creeks, hula hoops spinning. A woman sweeps her porch, her work swift and determined. An old man and woman sit on a glider in their front yard, both of them looking at their cell phones. We pass several small post offices. Communities called Gray, Lynn Camp, Bimble, Artemus, Four Mile. On every hillside, the dark green kudzu is waiting to take over everything. The heat stands like gauzy curtains on the blue Cumberland Mountains in the distance.
“Tell me about this swimming hole.”
He is startled as if he has been about to doze. “Which one, now?”
“You asked me to take you to the river.”
“Oh. Well, let’s go.”
“We are.”
“That’s where I met Rufus. I was swimming there, alone, on the hottest day of the year. I was always alone back then. I was under the water, moving slow just beneath the surface. I came up to take a breath and when I opened my eyes there he was, standing naked on the cliff above me. He was built like a statue.”
I think of the muscles in Drew’s back, early morning light shimmering there in little pools. I put my hand out to touch him and the light falls on the back of my hand, golden.
“He called down hidy to me, and then he dived in. When he came up, we talked there in the water for an hour. I was ashamed to get out in front of him. I had on my underwear, but I knew it would be see-through. He wasn’t ashamed of anything. And from then on, we couldn’t stay away from each other. I remember everything.”
“Why did you get married, then?” I know the answer; I figured all of that out a long time ago. But I have to ask, hoping for some new insight.
“My mother walked in on us; she must have suspected all along. And she ran him off, ran him out of town. So, I married Margaret. She was the prettiest girl I had ever seen. We went on a few dates and then she told me she was carrying a baby by a man who had run off. I told her I would marry her. She couldn’t understand why I would sacrifice myself that way because she didn’t know I was asking her to sacrifice herself, too. Back then, she had a laugh like little bells all ringing at once. She sang or hummed or whistled all the time. Over the years I took that joy away from her. Me and Thomas dying. I know that. But it’s how things were back then. I didn’t set out to deceive her. I was just trying to survive. And in trade we never told Darling that she wasn’t mine. But I’m going to tell her. She needs to know.”
“You already told her,” I say. “She didn’t believe you. So please don’t tell her again.”
He looks straight ahead, watching the road.
“Where did Rufus go, when your mother ran him off?”
“He lived the rest of his life down in Knoxville. I never saw him again except for that one time, when he heard about Thomas dying and came to the graveside. He stayed there with me until the gloaming. He kissed me and told me he would always love me. And I thought about him every day.”
Now alongside the highway, I can see the river. The water of the Cumberland is as green as a glass bottle, so still it seems the heat has reduced its current to sluggishness.
“We’re nearing Pineville,” I announce.
Before long he directs me to turn down a gravel road and then onto a dirt one, not much more than two dusty tire tracks with goldenrod and ironweed bright between them. We park here and find all quiet except for the occasional call of birds from the deepest parts of the woods. “The jumping place is just a little piece down here,” he says, pointing toward the river, already headed that way.
We arrive at a bank where the river sups at the sand. Willows lean over so that the ends of their long fronds barely touch the water. Gray rocks show here and there along the shore, leading the way to a high cliff standing over the river. In my grandfather’s time, I can imagine a place like this full of wild boys jumping from the cliff and splashing in the river. Nowadays kids go to pools and waterparks, but it must have been unusual to claim it for just the two of them that day so long ago.
I do not realize he has unbuttoned his shirt until he peels it over his freckled shoulders and tosses it onto the ground, immediately going for his belt.
“I don’t think—” I start, about to tell him that this isn’t a good idea, that he can’t go skinny dipping in the broad daylight, that the river might not be safe, especially for someone his age. But why shouldn’t he swim if he wants to? He knows this terrain better than I do. He can probably remember these cool depths better than he can recall who I am. We are in the past here and this is a country he knows well. I keep my mouth shut and am thankful when he leaves on his underwear. I will only object if he begins to climb the rock to jump, but instead he pads across the strip of sand and wades into the river.
“Oh, it feels so good,” he says once the water strikes his waist.
I sit on the sand and let him have his time. I watch the river and the willows. I study the cliff and the ferns that burst from its crannies here and there. In the lush trees around us, birds are suddenly in high conversation. This is a forgotten place.
My grandfather is swimming now. He does a gentle backstroke, floating perfectly with his ears below water—that eternal quiet—his long toes pointing skyward, his arms stretched wide on either side as if crucified. He looks magnificent there in the water, and it is easy to imagine him as a young man. I wonder if he is looking at the sky or the trees as he drifts there. Perhaps his eyes are closed and he is imagining himself back in time, watching Rufus up there on the cliff in that beautiful instant just before his toes pushed off his dive.
He sinks below the water and I sit up more stiffly, watching closely for him to return to the surface. Perhaps he is just reliving that moment of going under, hoping he might rise up and find Rufus on the cliff again when he opens his eyes. So much loss it is hard to fathom.
But he has been beneath the water too long. I run into the river without even taking off my shoes. I thrash around right where I saw him but for a frantic moment, I cannot lay hands on him until I plunge under, grasping for him. My hands find the sandy bottom and small rocks before him. He is completely still, as if he has given himself to the river, and I grab him round the chest and jerk him above the water. I drag him behind me and drop him onto the sandy bank. Once there he doesn’t gasp or struggle but simply lies there as if awakening from a dream. He looks up into the branches of the willow.
“You scared me to death!” I yell, too loud.
“We can go back home now,” he says. “Margaret will be worried.” My grandmother has been dead for nearly five years, of course.
I help him get his clothes back on, but he insists on walking barefoot to the car. “I want to feel the ground beneath my feet again.” He scampers up the hillside, lithe and reenergized by the water. He sits in the passenger seat and hangs his legs out of the car as I kneel to wipe his elegant feet clean with a wad of napkins I find in the console. When I look up, he is staring at me.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Thank you for bringing me here,” he says. “You always were a real good boy.”
I know he thinks I am his son. “I’m just so glad to spend this time with you,” I say.
As I drive the winding road back home my grandfather strains against his seat belt to see the river as long as he can. When the Cumberland turns away from us, plummeting through the green mountains toward its inevitable spill over the great waterfall that bears its name, he finally relaxes in his seat. He dozes and I drive along with only the hum of the wheels to give me company. He starts awake suddenly, confused about where he is but once I calm him he yawns and stretches, reminding me again of how he must have been as a boy.
“I went to his grave once,” he says.
“Your boy? You mean Thomas?”
“No, no,” he says, aggravated that I misunderstand. “My Rufus’s grave. I read his obituary and I knew where he was buried. So, I went to the graveyard in Knoxville. Took me an hour to find his gravestone. But when I did, I planted his favorite flowers there. I imagine they’ve spread pretty well by now. But I’ll never know.”
We drive on toward home, not speaking the rest of the way. I decide that once I have resettled him at the house I am going to get back into my car without saying goodbye. My mother will come out onto the porch, asking why I’m leaving. I can picture her there. But I won’t answer her. I’ll go on to Louisville, imagining Drew’s face when he looks up to find me standing there.
Silas House is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels, one book of creative nonfiction, and four plays. His work appears in the Washington Post, Time, The Atlantic, Ecotone, Oxford American, The Bitter Southerner, and elsewhere. He was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and received the Storylines Award from the New York Public Library/NAV Foundation, the Weatherford Award, and an E.B. White Honor. In 2022, he was chosen as Appalachian of the Year in a nationwide poll and given the Duggins Prize for Mid-Career Novelist. He teaches at Spalding University and is the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair at Berea College.
Photo by C Williams.