By Dan Duffy
Her cheekbones sat sharp—right up under her water colored eyes. Her cheeks pooled into loose hounddog jowls. Her skin, the rough and tanned leather typical of smokers late in the game.
painting courtesy of Red Danielson (2025)
She wore pink scrubs and an old pair of white tennis shoes. She drank black coffee from a mug printed over with an image of a steamboat chugging up the Mississippi. White steam clouds floated over the boat against a baby blue sky. Her hand was steady as she lowered the cup back to the table.
Folger’s is shit, she thought.
Her legs crossed like stilts at the knees. She sighed and crossed her hands in her lap. She looked across the blank yard. The veinlike limbs of varied hardwoods thicketed grey and tan beyond the tall black iron fence at the bottom of the hill. Them trees are pitiful, she thought.
She checked her black Casio and saw it was 7:07. She pushed into the thin cushions of the plastic lawn love seat. She picked up her cigarettes and lighter from the glass table. The smoke felt dry in her lungs and she wretched wetly before her chest settled into regular albeit ragged breaths.
She reflected back on her thoughts beginning before she crawled out of her bunk into the darkness. She thought about how they started before her spirit had time to orient itself in the black morning room. She hated the thoughts. She thought they were a total nuisance. Thoughts no one normal would ever think.
She drew from the deep background of her mind the knowledge none of these things were true. Yet she found herself unable to let go of this new copy of the old story. Every morning was like starting over in this way. She breathed in through her nose. An old trick learned in the Midwest recovery scene.
Here I am, she thought.
I am alive. I have my Kamels and the lawn is alive and them trees are alive and the Folger’s is shit but it is still black and warm and warmin me and givin me one of the two remainin buzzes. Folger’s and Kamels and the trees and the cardinal just landed there on the feeder. Barnfire’s soul come to see me in the morning.
She slurped her coffee and let her breath out after an eight count. She accepted her and her suicidal brain would dance this dance of breath and neurosis until the end of days. She laughed at them. She imagined their voice was a wooly faced man in a suit in the fetal position sucking his thumb on the membranelike bottom floor of her brain. She imagined brushing his hair and cooing him as he trembled and wept. An old ego vision from the early days.
A breeze washed up from the south across her nose, her crowsfeet, the lines around her mouth as she smoked. A clump of ash fell to the concrete patio as she lowered her hand. Lightbeams played through the leaves. The sky smoky blue.
It all reminded her of the morning in Dixie, Alabama when she’d stolen Deddy’s cigarettes off the Formica counter. She’d stared at them under the yellow light overhead of the stove, where they sat next to his gold keys, for a long minute, before she snatched them up and walked out the back sliding glass door. She’d busted six matches before she got one to stay lit on the front end of the Winston. She’d remained proud for years on account she hadn’t coughed on the first one.
She thought the house they’d grown up in a poor one. All shingles and no roof. The backyard full of beer cans and spent propane tanks—cigarette butts, dog shit and ashes. She still cringed at the thought of it. She thought she’d tried to talk straighter, clearer, whiter—more like some person from New York would talk—on account of the house. The clapboard painted a dark emerald. She always thought the guy who painted it must’ve been drunk or high as hell as the coats were as swirled and thick as Van Gogh’s buttermilk impastos over olive trees.
They lived after a few empty lots at the end of a road at the edge of Dixie. The city came in and turned it from dirt to oystershell in ’68. The houses up the street were mildly better than theirs insofar as their paint jobs were cleaner and their boards were straighter, and their yards were free of the trash so dominant in hers.
She was halfway through the first Winston as she felt hands bury into and grip her shoulders and skin touch cool against her cheek as she smelled a rosy waft from the sweet olive bush near the door.
“Hey!” said a voice like a bell.
A smile wrapped her head. She turned and looked up into the pale diamond eyes, the suddenly strong jaw, the round nose, the dirty blonde hair in loose curls draped around the face of Barnfire. Her warm breath on her breath.
“The hell you doin smokin a cigarette?”
“Bein a man,” Chastity said.
“You a man now?”
“I am today.”
Chastity felt a darkness in the center of the morning as she watched the cardinal hop up on the powerline. She slurped her coffee. Her bestfriend Rebecca Barnfire had come to see her from up the road.
They’d run the town with boys in trucks till they were old enough to leave. The big trees’d all been logged out before they were born. The Service-planted-pines were just starting to grow back once they got older.
Chastity’s father drank Bud heavies and smoked dope on the back porch when he was home in the mornings and nights. He slaughtered cows down at the slaughterhouse. The oystershell ran out by the time the road got to their house and there were big washed out holes in it and he refused to pay for the dirt work.
He, her daddy, Charles Lee, liked to sit with his shirt off and stare at the moon. The FM band was set on 98.5 and the presence of the eternal darkness beckoned across the yard and into the fields which stretched out to the baby pines at the edge of Monroe County. He was not without the loving thoughts any man may have of his child and the universe from which she emerged. His tears ran silent down his crooked face in the moonlight and Charley Pride played on the radio.
Chastity and Rebecca played with the dirt clods and cigarettes until they were old enough to pick up whiskey and pills. Once they’d found those—in Doctor Mellingham’s offices, in the plasticwood cabinetry, in the fields—they relied upon them the way they saw the girls growing up across the street rely on Jesus. The headlights of the old Fords lit the path to the beer joint on Friday nights down at Bill Bleaker’s Creekbed Jamboree.
Rebecca wolfwhistled at the Southern rock four piece from Montgomery. She made her face sparkle and lowered her eyes and picked up her rose patterned cotton dress and spun once she felt the shaggyheaded frontman’s eyes.
Chastity bit the aluminum bar at Bleaker’s with a fury her ancestors would understand. She heard stories of her grandaddy drinking the county dry through the wars—too drunk to report for duty. Back then her face was sharp and clear: like a mirror on fire. Light freckles covered the high cheekbone, the hard jaw and the hawknose. Her eyes the color of some mystic sea water. The boys from the schools the county over didn’t know what to make of her and she and Barnfire bit their heads off at their leisure.
Once they drove west for Orange Beach under the cover of more moonlight. They watched the world turn from pure pine wood to saltwater and sand. The beach was eternal on either side and the sea went on forever in front of them and the beach disappeared into the pines at their backs. Gas lanterns burned from where they hung under the eaves of the fishing huts out on stilts at the end of long and winding piers over the water. They got naked and swum out in the saltwater. They kissed and fell asleep that way in the wet sand under the moon.
There was no evilness between them on the drive back and the air was as clear as Alabama itself. There was a silence between them which was longer and greater than the world. They stopped at bait shop for burgers and made love in the parking lot after running their hands across the neon rainbow of plastic lures, under a canopy of nylon lines. They put more ice in the Playmate and bought another sixer of Miller once they’d toweled down. The beach highway burned under the truck and the sea oats stubbled the sand on the sides of the road.
They left everything behind and moved to Pensacola and lived in the beach bars up and down the coast. Barnfire’s folks wondered where she was. They shot bottles like skeet with twelve gauges on the beach with roughnecks in from the rigs one night. The road hummed under them wherever they went and they gave no care for trouble. Barnfire’s face grew rounder and they got jobs in the kitchens and rented a bungalow. They spent their money on beer and cigarettes and lived for the sight of the beach and night unoccluded by condos or casinos.
Crank broke up the scene in ’78 and she remembered the feeling of the morning she left for the north with no idea where she would stop next. She saw Rebecca crying with her top off on the teal motel comforter—her palms upturned to the ceiling and her blonde hair a darkstreaked beautiful mess of waves. She’d kissed her on the forehead and put the bag in the back of the truck as Magnolia from the Heartbreakers debuted on the radio.
Chicago was a mean city and she’d found a new side of herself called heroin which she hated. It was a total loss of confidence which forced her into the denizened Midwestern nights like black steel burning on the highway. She fought with several men and lost and her face took on a crushed bruisedness in the silver mirrors. You could see the outline of her bones in her arms, and the thin cotton dresses from home she’d once been loved in went grey and ragged.
She flew a sign on the interstate. The mega highway wind would blow her hair back and she remembered crying without tears more than once as she waited for the dollars of strangers.
One night she found herself with enough money to enter under the Christmas lighted ceiling of Robichaux’s in the old Polish part of town. Past a row of clapboard houses not unlike the ones from the street she grew up on. There was a warm brownness to the night air. She’d seen a father and son throw a ball back and forth with a dog in one of the dozens of chainlinked backyards on the walk to the bar. She’d heard about it through her new friend Henry James who was a night thief and a busker in the central city.
She ordered a shift beer and looked up at the lights. A ball game played in the crook of the ceiling and she let her eyes drift past it. She flexed her jaw and felt like she’d been kicked in the mouth. She felt the cold come in from the door and turned to see a man in a black leather jacket and blue jeans brush powder from his shoulders and take off his beanie. She was overcome with the sensation of life having eclipsed her entirely. It was as if the last breath of her childhood self had blown out the door with the man’s entrance. She felt slurried as she nodded her head toward him. He was brickjawed and grey stubbled and he walked past her to the other end of the bar.
She watched him finish his one beer. Magnolia leaves in sunlight against a blue sky blurred in the back of her head as she was overcome with the old desire for Alabama. The depression was a deep navy. There was no one to call in the homestate any longer. There might as well have been no Alabama.
She covered her pint glass with a coaster and put her hat on and walked out to the sound of Bocephus singing notes on fishing from the jukebox. She sat on the cold black iron bench out front and felt nothing as she smoked. A boxtruck pushed through the slush and cast golden beams on the wet black road. She wanted to go to the mission and sleep. She wanted to never have another drink. She cursed the old man with his shirt off in the backyard in the moonlight.
I got what he got. And it’s all I got.
The truck pushed back by going the other direction and she thought of flagging it down for a ride to the mission.
She blew her hands and looked up to the clear black sky. She began to walk toward the mission with the vision of the field beyond the trash of her youth in her mind like a warm spirit guiding her feet in the direction of the sense of a sound mind. Her pulse quickened and her body warmed. She was all of a sudden sure of what was going to happen next. She would walk all the way to the mission: the clear five miles. She would pay the dollar fifty for the bed and ask to borrow one of their towels. She’d get on her knees and pray next to the bunk, her elbows at rest on the baby blue waffle blanket, like she did as a baby in Dixie.
She’d wake up the next morning at six to beat the crowd. She’d pray again, and have another shower, and see if she could get a comb for her hair. If she could, she’d comb it out slow and easy like the rain which then fell on her as she walked. She’d hit the eight o’clock meeting at Southland. She’d make the ten block walk there from the mission. She’d hope to see one of the women she knew there with some time. One of those pure women in the golden light of God—their steely hair healthy, well brushed down to their shoulders and secured by expensive clips.
She’d ask the one which called to her to guide her and she’d call her everyday and do what she said. She’d find a way to get the dollar fifty for the mission and live there the rest of her life if she had to until she found somewhere better. If she never found anywhere better it would be okay as long as she didn’t drink whiskey or get high ever again. She’d fly a sign for an hour or two a day and look for a job the rest of the time. If she had to she’d fly a sign for the rest of her life. She’d try and buy a better shirt as soon as she got the chance.
And it all went as close to this as one could imagine. She stayed at the mission for three months and got a job in one. She sold coffee off a street cart at less than minimum wage and saved up enough in three months to move into an Oxford House further north. She worked the cart for another three months before getting on at the Donton Square McDonald’s where she made manager in two years. She kept her hair pinned back and her hands clean at work. She watched the odd reflective grey towers of the city in the mornings on the train on the way to work. The sun hit the sides of the towers and she felt alive through her muscles and face. Lightbeams fell through the shadows and crossed her face in diagonal lines those mornings on the train.
One morning five years in she was cleaning the windows in the front of the restaurant when her pocket buzzed and she answered her phone.
Her sister’s voice on the other end of the black line asked if she’d “heard the news” about their father.
“No,” she’d said.
“He killed himself this morning with a knife in his bedroom. Stabbed himself in the heart three times and fell back on the bed and died. Dixie police found him stomach up.”
Chastity watched a shirtless man, with a dirty blonde beard, in swimtrunks, cross the street. He knelt on one knee. She heard him cry out like a hurt bear through the plateglass over her sister’s static voice on the line.
She met her sister three days later, down in Dixie, at a grey hotel on Highway Eight. It was a small, sad service. There were only a few Presbyterians the old bastard had long since abandoned. Chastity thought his head was bloated to unreasonably red and wide proportions even for an alcoholic. His hands folded on top of one another like a schoolboy’s on his football field of a chest. His shoulders met the white padding interior of the casket on either side. His mouth drawn in a thin anti-smile and the black holes of his nose erupted in pubic-like hair. She crossed herself at the sight of him and kneeled by his casket. She said the old prayers under her breath and the new ones she’d learned in Chicago.
She couldn’t bring herself to kiss his forehead; the specter of this failure would haunt her for decades. They closed the box and drove him out on Highway Eight to the Dixie Historic Cemetery. She rode with her sister in her silver sedan behind the hearse. The church people only made one more carload. Highway Eight emptied out into the fields past the Sonic and the Advanced Autoparts. The fields were bright green; to Chastity, they looked more alive than all of Chicago combined. Her sister’s car windows were oilstreaked and the clear coat on her hood had come off in two big boils of rust and sunbaked metal.
The cemetery backed up to a soy field. It was encircled by a couple scraggly pines and a half dead cedar in which a couple turkey vultures’d made their roost. The two Hall brothers from Hall Funeral Home brought out the riser cart and set it up for their father. They wore matching auburn and navy check sportscoats, navy slacks, shiny black loafers and salt and pepper hair trimmed down to a neat half inch.
The older brother, James, opened the back of the hearse. “Awlright Miss Chastity, now, let’s gone head and get yah daddy home baby.”
The younger brother, Beau, pulled the casket out of the back and slid it onto the riser, in one precise pull, as James held the riser steady. Chastity turned and watched the two Presbyterians pile out of a big white pickup. The young, skinny one—with his thick brown hair combed over in a quaff—pushed his checkered shirt deeper into the belted waist of his khakis and curled his lip as he squinted. A bald man who drove strowed right up to the casket and patted it like a dog with a pale hand.
“We’re gonna miss ol Charles Lee down at the chewch,” he said. “He was a helluva card, but I believe the man had a good heart. People are gonna say what they say about anybody, but I believe Charles Lee had a good heart.”
Chastity brushed some hair away from her mouth where it’d been caught. A breeze blew through and kicked up dust in their faces. Her sister threw her hand up and guarded her eyes.
They found themselves over by the hole in the ground the Halls dug before dawn. James Hall held his slim, leatherbound copy of the Gospel against his chest with his dark and shining hands. He wore a forlorn look of patronage as he looked over the small crowd with his back to the field. He looked as though he was prepared to deliver a life sentence to a man of equal nobility. He opened his mouth to speak but it was so dry he mashed his tongue against the roof of his mouth before he opened it again and spoke.
“The ribbon of life is cut in the dyin days of a dyin land.”
His tongue felt thick and pasty against the dry roof of his mouth. He gulped what spit he had left down before he spoke again.
“It is through this ribbon we walk, and cross this ribbon we mus live. It is in the mornins, alone fields such as this, where we mus pray and say, ‘I too am a man in this land. I too will cast my seed across the clean of the earth, and ass Gawd to provide whatever providence he may deem suitable to my existence.’”
He took a small step forward. He rocked back on his heels as he lifted his toes and then tapped them down against the dirt.
“’Jesus was a cross maker’ it has been sung. ‘Jesus was a cross maker.’ A man amongst men. A fishermen of men amongst fishermen. The Leaven carryin the secret of the Leaven to the unleaven flock of the world. Charles Lee was one of the other. He was in one of these two camps, and only Christ knows the difference, and Charles Lee of course was made of Christ as we all are. The Brother is at rest now. He has found his heavenly home. He is in the sky of diamonds. He is in the teal pull of the universe. For us, here on earth, there are only the two commandments to remember and practice daily. There is no truth outside of those truths.”
James looked over at Beau where he stood, arms crossed, at the corner of the grave plot, under one of the sickly cedars.
“Amen?”
“Amen,” the small gathering said in broken pieces.
On the car ride home, her sister asked her to come and live with her after the funeral and she was struck by the clarity in which she felt the conviction to agree. She hugged her and flew back. She sold most of her things, swept the floor and bought a car to drive down to Fairhope. She went to the mission and served a meal and thanked the staff there. She visited the grave of the steelhaired woman who helped her and left a gold coin on her headstone.
Her windshield and rear window were clean and clear as she headed south out of the Midwest. A twenty year career in the Fairhope public schools, a turn of the century cottage in a quiet neighborhood drowned in green oaks, a life in the church, her sister’s eventual release in the arms of cancer in hospice care—this was much of all which stood between her and that long drive she made out of Chicago.
The cardinal hopped down from the feeder into the grass. It was preening itself. It twitched its head. It reminded Chastity of a smile. It spread its wings and paused. It flew blackeyed across the yard and into the sky. She touched the coffee. It had gone cold. The birds in the trees had gone quiet. There was no sound but the wind. It was 1976, no 1978. It was her, it was Rebecca Barnfire, it was her sister. All of them in the car. All of them turning the radio up to the right level. The trees burning way to give rise to the rest of the country. She coughed her wet cough and lit her last Kamel. She took three drags and a smile crossed her face in the reverie of the morning. She coughed and she coughed and she laughed as she fell from the chair—arms wide open to all the women of the universe. To Alabama herself.
Dan Duffy is a writer from Gautier, Mississippi. A graduate of Ole Miss and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he lives in Gautier.
Red Danielson, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is a poet, screenwriter, and painter. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Haiku Journal, CERASUS, Three Lines Poetry, and Subterranean Quarterly, among other publications. This piece, an earlier version of which appeared in Little Village magazine, was adapted from an ongoing project pairing his prose with portraits of poets, writers, and artists.