Speaker 1: When he was two years old. The boy was dropped
off at the donation door at the Salvation Army second
hand store in Tunica, wearing nothing but a sagging diaper.
A Planet of the Apes backpack stuffed with more diapers
and some shirts and mismatched socks. Little green Army men
was dropped on the ground next to him. Then a
hungover woman banged a scabbed fist on the metal door,
and a hungover man blew the car horn, and she
ran abroun and got in as the child watched with
a docile expression out of the car window. The man
called out some sort of farewell to the child that
was lost in the offbeat jug of the engine, and
then the foul running Cadillac rattled out of the gravel
parking lot, leaving the in the dust cloud of abandonment.
The door opened and two women in matching red Salvation
Army T shirts stared down at the boy. Then they
looked into the parking lot at the still lingering cloud
out into the gray morning the sky, and they glassd
at each other, and then one said, I guess we're
going to have to hang a sign next to the
one that says no mattresses, that says, no young'uns. The
other woman lifted the boy and held him up beneath
his arms, as if to make certain that he was
made of actual flesh and bone, and when she was satisfied,
she hugged the child close and rubbed her hand across
the back of his head. She said, I pity those
who have to live behind me in this weary and
heartless world. The police were called, and while they waited,
the women washed the boy in the bathroom sink with
paper towels and hands so filthy feet and filthy hands,
and the diaper was two changes past due. After they
had wiped him clean and filled the trash can with
dirty paper towels, the boy stood naked and fresh on
the smooth concrete floor of the bathroom, and they admired
his innocence and beauty. He was then dressed in a
new diaper and a spider man's shirt taken from the
rack and the kid's section. The boy did not cry
and did not talk, but instead satisfied between the women
on a tweed sofa marked fifteen dollars, as if he
had already decided that this was his new home and
that he was better off. He was better off, but
this was the beginning of a childhood spent in the
company of strangers. The next ten years saw him move
from one Delta town to the next, four foster homes
and two group homes, five different schools, a handful of caseworkers,
teachers whose names he could not remember, and then stopped
trying to remember because he knew he would not be
in their classrooms for long. The steady and certain build
of restlessness and anxiety in this child who was certain
neither where he had come from nor where he was going.
When he was twelve years old, the assistant director of
the group home told him to gather his things again.
He sat on the bench seat of a white van
with a home loco on the side, and he watched
the fields of soybeans and corn stalks with sullen eyes
as he was driven from the sleepy brick street town
of Greenwood to his fifth foster home, moving northwest and
closer to the Great River, to the fringes of Clarksdale,
the once bustling Delta hub of trade and commerce that
now wore the family faded expressions of days gone by.
His eyes changed when the van pulled into a dirt
driveway that led to a two story home, a white
antebellum with a port stretching across the front on the
bottom and top floors, flaking paint on the sun's side,
and vines hanging in baskets along the porch with their
twisted and green tails swaying in the wind. A woman
sat in a rocker, and she rose to meet them.
She wore work gloves, and she pulled them off and
tossed them on the ground as she approached the van,
as if readying herself for whatever may climb out. She
took him to his upstairs room and opened the dresser
drawers to show him where he could put his things,
and he told her there was no use. I won't
be here long enough to mess up the covers on
the bed. Sure you will, she answered, Now I won't,
he said, a twelve year old certain of the workings
of the world. Are you going to run away? I
don't know, are you? Because unless you run away, this
is where you live. Now. Yeah, so you think so,
I know, she said. You don't know nothing, he said,
and he walked out of the bedroom and down the
stairs out into the backyard. She stood at the window
and watched him between the slits and the curtains. He
did not stop in the backyard, but crossed it and
walked out onto the dirt road that ran on and
on between the rows of cotton. The sun high and
a short shadow followed him, and she did not chase.
She stood in the window and watched until he was
nearly out of sight. She was one step toward the
door to run after him when he stopped, a tiny
figure in the distance. He stopped and stayed in the
same spot for several more minutes, and she could not
know that he was talking to himself, telling himself, I
don't want to do this no more. I don't know
why I can't have somebody. But the space between them,
she could not have noticed that he looked back at
the big house and said that that place right there
don't want me neither, and that woman can't catch me.
I'm going to take off running and she won't never
catch me, won't nobody. I don't want to do this
shit no more. She could not have heard him or
seen him with any detail, but she waited, only could
see that he had stopped. She whispered a prayer without
moving her lips, as if even the slightest flutter would
spook the boy and send him fleeing on furious and
reckless feet. And he stood still, talking to himself. She
stood still, whispering a quiet and motionless prayer. And then
from the distant sky, a hawk flew toward the boy.
It flew low, and its wings were spread wide, and
when it reached the vicinity of the boy, it swooped,
seemed to hold there out in front of him, begging
the boy to admire its eloquence, begging the boy to
notice something other than himself in his troubles, begging the
boy to think of something other than running from that woman.
The hawk rose and fell again, and the boy saw it,
and his eyes followed the hawk as it turned earned
long and graceful curves and the blue, white sky, and
from the window Marianne's by the hawk, and she shifted
her eyes from the sky to the land, waiting to
see what the boy would do. The breast she had
been holding was let go when the hawk turned toward
the house, and the boy followed. All right, I didn't
want to ruin that by giving you a preface to
what this was. What I just read was the prologue
from a book called The Fighter, written by Michael Ferris Smith.
I read this with permission from the author. I thought
about reading the first two or three chapters of the book,
but I don't know. I'm going to share my heart
with you here. I envy this man's way with words
and prose, and the way he writes and the way
he describes scenes and emotions. It is so to the
point in a way, so beautiful that I'm just drawing
to this type of writing. You can go back and
listen to it and think about it in those terms.
Listen to the way that he writes this. It is
really fantastic. But anyway, I was started out doing these
fiction Fridays, and I got busy at work and the
fridays didn't work out. I'm in here early this morning
just sometimes I come in and just pull up chapters
and books that I love, and I reread the chapter.
I remember them. Might be chapter forty five of a
novel I read ten years ago. I just remember them.
I have them all on Kindle, and I'll just pull
them up on my computer screen and just read them
because I just love the written word. It's just it's
hard to describe. But and when it's on my phone
going on, when it's good, it is just so good.
It's so good to read. You can just picture everything
in your mind. You can almost feel what the characters
are feeling. So I thought i'd share that with y'all
this morning. This is Monday morning, it's about six am.
I need to get to work, but you know, I'm
kind of addicted to reading this stuff and sharing it
on my podcast, so I hope you all enjoyed that.
The name of the book again is The Fighter. The
author is Michael Ferris Smith. I'll put his name in
the name of the book in the description. If you
like good literature, if you like good fiction, you will
love this book and anything this author has written. I'm
going to be doing more short stories and chapters from
books from really best selling authors. I have found that
if I just send them an email and say, hey,
I have a podcast I like to read audio style
books from authors now and then they always say yes.
It's amazing. I just figured if I did that they
would say no. But every one of them that I've
sent an email to has said yes. So I've got
this author, I've got another one. I' to read a
short story from sometime in the next couple of weeks
when I get a minute, and I've got some guys
who some men who have publishing deals. They're actually writing
collections of short stories or novels at the moment, you know,
I'm working on Steve Lilly novels. I hope to have
those out by the summer, at least a couple of them.
I wish I could talk to these guys and say,
how do you know, just talk writing. I love to
write stories. I like good stories. Anyway, I'm just blabbering.
I don't know what I'm talking about. But anyway, this
particular book was made into a film. Michael Ferris Smith.
I believe he has two novels that have been turned
into films. One is Desperation Road. The other is this one,
The Fighter. But the title of the film is not
The Fighter. It's called Rumble through the Dark. You can
find it on a streaming service service. The cinematography and
Rumble through the Dark is fantastic. It is shot in
the Mississippi Delta, and you really get a good sense
of what this area looks like. It is flat, it
is basically featureless land, you could juxtapose it between the
Delta and the Mississippi south of Memphis to some huge
mountain range in Alberta, Canada, and you'd go, well, God,
that's ugly. But to people who live here, it's beautiful
and we love it and we love this area. And
so you get a good idea with the cinematography what
the landscape looks like. And I think the actors did
a pretty good job in it of displaying and depicting
a little bit how you know, the underlife here is
in north and central and South Mississippi and the Delta.
But Okay, I've been talking five minutes about this and
I haven't really said a thing. But check out the book,
check out the movie. I'm gonna try to keep crying
these podcasts out, even if they're short for the next
foreseeable future. I hope you guys are enjoying it. But
until the next one, I appreciate you, and we'll see
you see you then. Thanks