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What the Spray Allowed

On the night of the fourteenth of September, 1997, in the first squall band of a blow that never got a name, a man went over the rail of a shrimp boat working the inside grounds off Cameron, Louisiana. The boat was the Coralee B, sixty-two feet of wood and rust out of Cameron, named for the captain’s mother. Junius Hebert was the man: twenty-nine, out of Hackberry, the lead deckhand, with a wife and two little girls and a laugh that carried over the engine. The sea that took him did not splash. He was working the winch on the starboard side, and the first green sea stood on the deck amidships, and the second one came over the rail where he was standing, and when the deck cleared the winch was running empty and Junius was gone.

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Raise Your Right Hand: The Blind Oath

First, swear. Then we will tell you what you are accused of. Sit with that order of operations for a moment, because the order is the whole instrument. A man is summoned before the court. He is not told the charge, because there might be no charge to tell. The summons brings him in, the book is offered, and the oath is administered before any indictment is read: swear to answer truthfully every question this court intends to put to you. After that, if anything is coming, it comes inside the interrogatories he has just sworn to answer. He has pledged his answers before the questions exist.

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Preplay: The Courtroom in the Wings

The news of my removal from my own show came from the producer. I had obtained the rights, signed us to a first-class theatrical option, and written the book and lyrics, all of it inside the year the rights contract granted to us. The director hired to stage the all-or-nothing reading was not my choice, and he was friends with my collaborator. After the failed previews, I was unceremoniously let go. When I asked my composer collaborator why this had happened, the director called me instead, and said that nobody wanted to talk to me. I had no choice but to sever the show, and my attorney fought to get me paid, credit on show. Everyone stonewalled him as well. That is the whole record, at the width the print ruling allows, because the identifying details of the production and the collaboration stay blurred in print for the privacy of the living, and the blur is logged in the specimen record beside its telling.

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The Viking Funeral and the Us of Us

On the last Saturday of August 2019, in a valley that had already lost the assembly plant and the regional medical center, the daily newspaper of Mahoning County, Ohio, printed its final edition. The Vindicator was a hundred and fifty years old. It had celebrated its sesquicentennial the week before it died. The announcement had come on June 28, in a letter signed by the publisher and the general manager, members of the family that had owned the paper since 1887, and the record of the letter is exact about the cause: the paper was hemorrhaging money, the family had looked for a buyer, and there was none. The letter’s close is in the record too. “It is with broken hearts that we say goodbye and a final thank you.”

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The Retirement Is Always Silent

On a Tuesday in August, at three in the afternoon in Manhattan and two in the valley, a telephone went to speaker and a family in Nebraska began to read a week to me. The call carried a death and a storm in the same breath, which is how the plains have always carried them, the funeral hour and the rain total riding the same wire. Trees down across the county. The town’s grain silo wrecked the week before the crop came in. A hundred utility poles down, thirty-four of them consecutive on one county road, snapped at ground level and thrown across into the lines and trees on the other side. Four inches of rain that day at North Loup, and still raining. The festival, Popcorn Days, running since 1901, had gone on among the ruins anyway, because a town that cancels its celebration has lost something the storm cannot carry off.

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The Crowd That Pays

The new book is out this week, and I will tell you which page of it I expect to be disbelieved. It is not the scheme, the city that prices its poor as calories; readers accept a bureaucracy’s appetite on sight. Nor the flood; readers accept water. The trouble page is the fourteenth chapter, the one where the crowd takes the stores. The Quarter rises after the flood, goes to the Trust’s grain, seizes it, and then does the thing the whole city has spent the year insisting a crowd cannot do. It pays.

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The Whole Boodle

People keep asking me one question, so here is the answer, whole: the history, the intention, the meaning, the being, and, at the end, the me. “What’s a Boodle Boy?” I get the question at dinner tables, in podcast mail, in the pause after a lecture when someone has finally worked up the nerve. My business cards claim the title. My websites announce it. A consultancy of my own wears the name. The asker usually half-expects a punchline, because the phrase sounds like something a vaudeville comic would shout while falling off a stage, and some people assume the whole thing is a pun on Boles. Those vowels help, I admit. History does the heavy lifting. The honest answer needs a Sunday night in 1974, a Dutch probate record from 1699, a safe-deposit vault stuffed with bribe money in St. Louis, a candy raid at West Point, and a banana leaf piled with garlic rice somewhere on Luzon. It also needs a teenaged cadet holding a pot of coffee. Pour yourself a cup, and I will lay the whole boodle on the table.

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