Early on a chilly, gray morning in November 1941, Henry Miller, bored from his drive across the country, stopped for breakfast at Eudora Welty’s home in Jackson, Mississippi.
Knowing him only from reputation, Miss Welty was at wits end. What will we do, she thought. This will be like diving into cold water.
That same morning, near the center of town, Warden Love said breakfast grace at the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum. After the meal, he announced that the Asylum would be moving that day to the new facility across the Pearl River. A shiny-faced man jumped up cheering and danced around a table where another had just vomited his breakfast. Several inmates rose simultaneously and began speaking while others hid under a table. The Warden ignored these outbursts.
“Divide the inmates into groups of two,” Warden Love explained to his assistants. “Each pair will pick up a bed and carry it over the bridge to the new facility on the other side of the river.” Then he nodded to the staff who circulated from table to table matching up the inmates.
Word spread quickly and many Jackson residents turned out to watch the spectacle.
Perfect timing, Miss Welty thought, watching Miller sip his breakfast rum.
“Put your glass down and get your coat, Mr. Miller. We are going to see a show.”
At eleven o’clock, a line of old men in ragged overcoats against the chill marched their beds down the street and onto the bridge. People pinched their noses against a thick urine-tainted wind.
A woman standing beside Welty and Miller asked, “How can Warden Love suffer crazy old men to such a task in weather like this?”
Miss Welty smiled uncomfortably. Miller burped.
At mid span in the bridge, the lead pair of inmates dropped their bed. One man picked up a rock from the road and began to beat it against the bronze handrail — stone against bronze, stone against bronze. Others followed suit. Stone against bronze, stone against bronze grew louder and swelled from the bridge over the crowd and out across the marsh.
The beating bronze voice caught the attention of an armed farm boy counting shells in a duck blind north of the bridge. He readied his shotgun and looked up as a cloud of pigeons dropped from the bridge and blew upstream. Miss Welty watched that cloud and a spearhead of ducks that rose out of the brown marsh grass and flew south.
“Isn’t this something, Mr. Miller?”
Miller, head dulled from rum and creosote, nodded like a silent orange on a tree.
Lukewarm, Miss Welty thought.
The inmates continued — stone against bronze, stone against bronze. The ducks flew high out of range. The pigeon cloud dissipated
“It isn’t often,” Miss Welty said, “that Jackson has so much to offer.”
Louis Abbey is a retired Professor from VCU in Richmond, VA. He has an MFA in Creative Writing and has published poetry and fiction in Indiana Review, The MacGuffin, Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others. He has published online in Grey Sparrow and Toasted Cheese. He currently lives and writes in Revere, MA.
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