Cover

Dedication

For SLB and the broken guitar string

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· one ·

JULIAN

When Coach Marcus postpones after-school football practice until sunset because of the heat, I take the long way home. I don’t hurry down Main Street with the rest of the kids from my neighborhood, but instead cut through the soccer fields and head into the scrub pines behind Crenshaw County High School.

My grandma, whom I’ve always called Birdie, used to tell me when I was little, “Idle hands are the devil’s playground, Julian.” In fact, she said it so often and with such an accusatory tone, I was convinced that the devil himself was just waiting for me to become bored so he could use my hands to commit some heinous crime. I used to sit in church with my palms under my thighs, silently repeating not today, not today, scared out of my wits that the devil knew I was bored and was ready to come up from the depths of hell and lead me into a life of debauchery… right there in front of the entire congregation of the Crossroads Church of Meridien. And then they’d all know how really bored I was. I pictured Ms. Brownie, whose real name had been lost to years of the entire town calling her Ms. Brownie, shaking her head and saying in her thick Texas twang, “I always knew that boy had idle hands.”

As I got older, Birdie didn’t repeat it as much. Maybe it was because I learned how to behave myself and she felt I didn’t need the warning. Now that I’m grown, I know that idle hands aren’t necessarily the devil’s playground. You know what is, though? Meridien, Texas, in the thick of the early September heat.

The dried pine straw cracks under my feet as I reach the clearing in the woods near the end of Kirkland Road. I can see our old backyard from here, the sunlight dancing on the tire swing and dappling the mixture of dead grass and sand underneath. The lone tall oak casts a shadow onto the roof and right across my old bedroom window. It’s not much to look at, this old house with its yellowing paint and red shutters. A shotgun house, Daddy called it, long and narrow. Every so often when I walk home this way, memories flash of me and my father in the backyard, tossing a football back and forth.

“Fingers between the laces,” he taught me, even though I could barely get my six-year-old hand around the narrowest part of the ball. “Get that pointer finger on the seam, Julian.” One fluid motion. Release the ball at the highest point and step through. Every time I throw a pass, I remember his instructions.