C. Morgan Babst's Blog, page 4
March 22, 2017
The Winter Horses, a short story
The Harvard Review 41
It was the first day of chill, the ashy sharpening that portends autumn, the day the horses returned. It had been raining finally for the last hours—the dark clouds caught high in the mountains, the mists lower, in the trees—and we were standing at the kitchen windows fretting over the snap beans when Tom came running up over the ridge, his hands in the air.
Three years before when it had seemed they weren’t returning, we had told the children that this particular herd, the young dapples with Gwenny at their head, were like birds, that come spring they moved north to find the better pastures and leave ours to rest. We said we believed they’d be back at the changing of the leaves, and we hoped the children—Tom was only twelve then, and easily distracted—would have forgotten this promise by the end of August.
For, of course, it was all nonsense—either they’d been rustled, or they’d snuck over the downed tree on the fence in the high pasture and wandered long into the national forest. You swore you’d heard a diesel that night in your sleep, and, though I’d heard no axles over the drive (strange, as it needed grading), I believed you.
But Tom came hollering, wind-milling over the new-wet ground, and, behind him, the gray horses were running like pushed, steam coming off them. When they reached the dip at the house Tom fell to a walk, and they quit too, like they’d hit a wall, and bent their heads to the grass. He was panting when he pushed through the door, creaking, as we hadn’t taken down the screen yet, and we held up our hands to let him catch his breath.
“Is it our brand?”
Tom nodded, and we followed him back outside. The horses stood to be touched, hands down the cool, tight bones of their cannons. They had burs in their forelocks and ears and, on their shoulders, our rocking T. Only Gwenny of them had paled, whiter except on her haunches and forelegs where the gray was dark but white-veined, as if she’d been hung up in a spider’s web. It had been three and a half years they’d been gone.
We sent Tom for the gate to the hay meadow and got behind them, slapping our thighs. They picked their heads up out of the plumped grass and moved easily before us. We watched for a hitch among their hocks, for a stiffness in the play of their pasterns, but they were all sound. They limbered their necks to one another, not playing, not kicking, not even paired.
As we neared the open gate, Tom standing in it, his hands on the wet-dark thighs of his Wranglers, the horses thinned and, Gwenny first, streamed through into the field. The other horses were still in the high pasture, though they’d begun to hide in the trees for the residual grasses and at the springs for the peppery ferns. The grass here was almost ready for them and, with the rain, gave a semblance of total readiness, the field green and beaded with the soft rumpling of the irrigation channels through it.
We hung on the creosote-rails and watched them. Tom wouldn’t speak. His thick-skinned hands were crossed on his chest, his elbows over the top rail, and we could see his eyes watering a bit even in the filtered cloud-light. “They were just so quiet,” he would say later, “and when they were drinking they didn’t even suck it hard, they didn’t make a sound.” And he would be right, they were silent, even their hooves quiet on the sodden ground. When they ducked their heads into the channels, only their eyes and ears and the smooth round of their jawbones showed above the grass. We knew that we’d dream later of drinking horses, beasts severed in the field.
The Island Theory, a short story
jmww, Spring 2014
You know better than I where this is going, perhaps where this has gone.
Maybe this is not a girls’ retreat at all, but a double-wedding weekend (your husband wearing seersucker in Nashville, you in your purple Valentino on Nantucket) or a conference so dense with lectures on ornithology, dental hygiene, maritime law, or the feminist experience in colonial South Africa that dragging your disinterested spouse along would be completely unreasonable, if not justification in and of itself for divorce.
Maybe you are not even a woman married to a man. Maybe you are married to a woman. Maybe you are a man. Maybe you are a man married to a man.
Maybe, though this is riskier, you are the one who stays at home on 23rd Street while your husband goes off on his own man-cation/bachelor party/visit to mother/business trip, and maybe it is in the take-out Indian around the corner that someone calls your name, asks why you are eating alone on a cold Saturday night, asks if you’d like company, but you will not go home to your place, you will not pull your wedding china from the cupboard and sit on the brown leather ottoman. The Island Theory is not effective in conjunction with the Marital Bed.
Maybe it is Hot Ron: six-pack lifeguard at the neighborhood pool, subject of your high school poetry. Maybe it is the Swedish Left, that communist you met in the cinema in Tokyo whose knuckles were like smooth river stones. Maybe it is Julia Fielding, whose body glowed in the moonlight when you went skinny-dipping after prom, whose laugh can knock down walls. Maybe it is someone only you know about: the girl from the bunk above you in that hostel in Venice, the shave-head boy who takes your laundry in.
Whoever it is, you will act first out of altruism, which will mask your underlying self-interest. Hot Ron will find you smoking in the grass beneath the chuppah and ask you for a light. The Swedish Left will drop the notes for his lecture, “Ownership of the Revolution: Mayakovsky’s May First Daydreams in a Bourgeois Armchair,” and you will stoop to collect them. Julia will be short a dollar for the curry, and you will give it to her, she will wonder why you should be eating alone on a cold Saturday night. The person known only to you might be found lying at your feet, hit by a bus, washed up on the beach, in need of the CPR you’re trained in… but that might be going a bit too far.
In the instance of the cancelled airplanes and the snow, you will find Harry Huffman—heavy weight crew ’99, mixed you a drink once at late-night, always smelled of sweat and apples—pacing in front of Ground Transportation, dialing and redialing the 800 number for Delta. Elevator music still pressed to his ear, he will carry on to you about the airline’s inhumane voucher policy, and, when you open your mouth to say something about gas prices and the stipulation in the standard Contract of Carriage about Acts of God, this will come out instead:
“Why don’t you come to the Hilton with me? We have a pre-paid room my girls were supposed to be using, but—” You will wave your hand at the CANCELLED sign.
Tic-Tac-Toe, a short story
The Butter/The Toast, July 2015
Just let go of the wheel and keep your foot on the gas, I heard myself think, simple as an item on the To Do. I had just left my father’s house, and I was speeding towards an intersection when the lights turned—it was like I saw it from above, the cars screaming towards each other in a x of red and white—but I felt no fear of crashing. No itch either. I turned out of habit, and that’s what scared me.
I remember pogoing in the street in humid twilight, the creak of it like mattress springs, for hours.
I remember the heat of the car. Screaming as my mother put her hand on my head and forced me in. How, once she sat down, shut the door, she didn’t start the engine, just stared straight ahead at the door my father wasn’t coming out of, sweat down her neck like rivers. Love looks unbreakable, she said, until it breaks. The seatbelt buckles were shards of sun.
Get over it, get over it, get over it. My feet say this when I go running—down the Bowery and over the Manhattan Bridge through the arch like something built by Rome. Get over it, get over it—even when I think I am. Mom’s at Thanksgiving, Dad’s at Christmas, the bowls of potatoes and the pies, the knives laughing over the turkeys, the singing in the kitchen.
What difference does anger make, when it’s so far in the past? What difference—when it wasn’t even yours?
DEATH IS A WAY TO BE, an essay
Guernica, “the Boundaries of Taste,” Summer 2015
selected by robert atwan as a notable essay, the best american essays 2016
In the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina, bodies floated in the streets and slumped in folding chairs in the sun. They lay on street corners for days, and cameramen took their pictures while National Guardsmen, policemen, other journalists passed them by. “That’s where the dead guy was,” my friend points out as we pass the Circle Food where the I-10 peels off of N. Claiborne, and I see again the water rippling under the overpass, the dead guy floating in his ballooning shirt, face down. Like a dog, we say. Left in the street like a dog.
The care we owe bodies is reliant on our understanding of their humanity. Humans do not die like dogs, because, unlike dogs, we live in death’s anticipation. Our mythologies are clear on this. “You are dust,” God says as he expels Eve and Adam, “and to dust you will return”—they were animals in the garden, in their ignorance, and now they are men. Knowing that we will die, we concern ourselves about what will happen afterwards, to our bodies, which we, intuiting a truth perhaps belied by talk of souls, find it difficult to separate from our conception of ourselves. What does it say, then, when we the living fail to care for the bodies of the human dead? What does it say about our humanity, and about what we think of theirs?
From Louisiana’s Code Noir of 1724, XI: Masters shall have their Christian slaves buried in consecrated ground.
Giambattista Vico: Indeed humanitas in Latin comes first and properly from humando, “burying.”
The deceased is still more than just stuff, Heidegger writes, and yet, when we leave a dead man under an overpass for days covered in only a garbage bag, aren’t we treating him as though he weren’t? The slowness with which the dead were recovered in New Orleans following the flooding was not simple impropriety but revealed a profound disrespect for the humanity of the victims of the storm and levee breaks. And bringing the corpse back into our funeral rites is not a desecration or an impropriety, either; instead, perhaps unconsciously, this custom reasserts the body’s importance and restores dignity to the deceased, insists on the humanity of the dead. Uncle Lionel standing in his suit with his watch around his hand and Mickey Easterling in the floral pantsuit she’d specified in her will reassure us that proper care has been taken. In short, a funeral that ignores the body is not a luxury we can afford.
EVERYTHING IS NOT FINE IF IT’S NOT FINE FOR EVERYONE, an essay
Literary Hub, November 22, 2016
On November 2, 2004, I stood among other American expats outside an Irish pub in Paris, watching the election results come in. A haze of cigarette smoke hung over the sidewalk, and we sipped at our Jameson, and everyone around me got angrier as each state was called. I wandered through the mist, displeased. I had stood in line at the American consulate to send in my absentee ballot (returned to me later marked “address unknown,” though the envelope was pre-printed by the government) and did not want another Bush term. But the year before I had held one of the First Daughters’ hair back in the bathroom at an after-party at Yale, and the next year I planned to go to the Sorbonne. Meanwhile, I was riding around Paris on the back of my salsa-dancing boyfriend’s motorcycle, writing a novel fueled by two-euro wine. I was not panicked, even for my country. Everything was going to be fine.
I returned to the US to get my student visa in order a month before Katrina hit. I made friends with a girl from Lyon, polished my manuscript. On the morning of August 28th, I woke up to the smell of frying bacon and thought, Oh, good. We’re not evacuating. Everything is going to be fine. Then I heard the sound of a hammer: my father was nailing plywood to the windows to save them from the wind. On our way out of town, as small tornadoes formed on the lake just beside the bridge, the girl from Lyon huddled in the backseat, losing command of her English.
I remember it wrong. Instead of George W. Bush peering out of the window of Air Force One as he flew over a flooded New Orleans on his way back from vacation on August 31st, I see him reading a book to school children, as he did while the towers fell. I remember Gov. Katherine Blanco’s refusal to allow aid to enter Louisiana as a caution ribbon wrapped around the state and tied in a big yellow bow. I find in myself a perverse pity for Ray Nagin, sentenced to ten years in jail for corruption; I imagine him huddled in a locked hotel room, in full blown nervous breakdown, as the city he was responsible for filled up like a bowl.
What I do remember clearly: The Jefferson Parish police standing in the middle of Crescent City Connection, shooting over the heads of those trying to cross the river to safety. The crowds waiting in the heat outside of the Convention Center for buses that did not come. The multi-part story in the Times Picayune that told us in advance that the levees were underbuilt, that the storm was inevitable. I remember who we neglected, who we feared, what we called them. But most of all, I remember that we did nothing, because everything was going to be fine.
At the Time when Kings Go off to War, a short story
The Literary Review, “I Live Here,” Vol. 59 Issue 04,
There were a lot of things she’d done that Talia wanted to take back. Me, I only regretted the one.
We had limited out on redfish, and I was driving down the Chef Highway back towards the city with the cooler in the trunk. Mo had said he’d clean the boat and I’d let him and I was glad I had because the sky was coming down, a dark black roil getting close enough to the western horizon you knew the rain would break at any second. Out on the Chef, there’s still this feeling of disaster—shrimp boats on their sides in the ditches, trawl nets hung up in trees from when Katrina pushed the whole Gulf of Mexico up into the Rigolets—and I’m not used to it yet. I suppose I’ll never get used to it. Every time I go out that way I feel the flood in my chest as an enormous gratitude to still be alive, as an imperative to keep on living all the way to the hilt. So, anyway, that’s my frame ofmind as I’m driving in towards the city, stinking offish blood, and then there in front of me I see an F150 with a buck hanging out of its bed pulled over somewhere in the middle of Bayou Sauvage, and this big shave-headed man standing on two legs next to the popped hood, cursing. I pulled over—I can still feel my foot leaving the gas pedal without hesitation and jamming down on the brake. I pulled off onto the shoulder and that rotten egg, green grass, kudzu smell of the swamp came in through my open windows like some kind of chemical weapon.
He came at me, shaking his head, and I should have read the signs. Should have seen him saying No No No and listened, and gone off again, or—no—just taken him home like I did do but not accepted his offer of a beer, not come into the house where she had the door open to the bathroom at the end of the hall, sitting there on the edge of the tub in just her panties, feet in the water, soaping Jody’s narrow brown back. Oh! Company! she said and laughed, and wrapped a towel around her, but I shouldn’t have gone in, because as soon as I went into that house the storm we’d been outrunning swept down on top of us, and Ray left me alone in the living room to go shut all the open windows. I averted my eyes, but I shouldn’t have gone in because already the room was full of ozone, and even without looking I could see her chest rising and falling as she breathed, the water sloshing as she soaked a sponge and rinsed the baby’s back, her eyes half-closed.
By the time Ray came back, it was all over for me. He laughed, asked me what I found so fascinating about the old baseball trophies, but it was already too late. It didn’t take them inviting me to stay until the storm was over, didn’t take having a drink with her, didn’t take sitting on the floor with them and watching the news.
A tornado had touched down on the Chef, right where we’d been—Ray called me the next week to say I’d saved his life, think of that, that the twister had picked up his truck and dropped in the middle of the Bayou, gutted buck and all, and he was glad because that way the insurance would pay him for a new one, and would I like to come over again to dinner because it seemed somebody who saved your life should be fed a better meal than beer and nachos.
But it didn’t take her cooking me that second meal—red beans and rice so good you wanted to bathe in them—didn’t take her walking me to my car, didn’t take her laughter, which back then still sounded in great peals. At least I don’t think it did.
When I think back on it, it seems like I knew I was in love with her from the moment the rain fell across the roof, but I’m unsure of my memory of that afternoon now, because I have gone back in time so often and played it the other way:
Ray waves at me from the side of the road, his hood up, and, the storm in my rearview, I keep driving.
March 21, 2017
PRESERVATION, an essay
the Oxford American, Spring 2017
When our daughter was just a month old, Hurricane Sandy pummeled the eastern seaboard, flooding our neighbors’ houses, burning towns. While the peaks of a rollercoaster showed like volcanic islands above the surf, I sat on the sofa, nursing, and watched with strange glee as our windows curved inward like heavy balloons. Your first hurricane, I whispered into her bald head. See, you’re a New Orleanian after all.
Nothing made sense: After a hundred and fifty years, I was the first one in my family to build a house somewhere else—to bear a child somewhere else. And why? Because of my husband’s job? I could not articulate it, but the storm was no excuse. Sure, my parents’ roof had come off, but many had lost so much more and still returned.
We visited, of course. We’d feed the ducks and ibises, climb the oaks whose limbs bowed like elephants getting down on their knees. We taught our daughter how to roll down a levee, throw a line, and we danced in the crush at the Blue Nile where ten years ago, a girl sang through a blackout while I spun in an orange dress, falling fast in love. On holidays, I set my grandmoth- er’s table with oranges and palmettos and a long starched cloth, let the crabmeat-man in through the side door. When are you coming back to me? my grandmother said at ninety- two—then ninety-three.
My father held my daughter to his chest and sang the songs he once sang to me, and my mother sat with her on top of a tall black horse. I turned on WWOZ, and my daughter shrieked, That’s jazz!, and her mouth was green with spearmint snowball; she smelled of earth and dogs and sweat.
November 3, 2016
Everything is Not Fine If It’s Not Fine for Everyone
On November 2, 2004, I stood among other American expats outside an Irish pub in Paris, watching the election results come in. A haze of cigarette smoke hung over the sidewalk, and we sipped at our Jameson, and everyone around me got angrier as each state was called. I wandered through the mist, displeased. I had stood in line at the American consulate to send in my absentee ballot (returned to me later marked “address unknown,” though the envelope was pre-printed by the government) and did not want another Bush term. But the year before I had held one of the First Daughters’ hair back in the bathroom at an after-party at Yale, and the next year I planned to go to the Sorbonne. Meanwhile, I was riding around Paris on the back of my salsa-dancing boyfriend’s motorcycle, writing a novel fueled by two-euro wine. I was not panicked, even for my country. Everything was going to be fine.
I returned to the US to get my student visa in order a month before Katrina hit. I made friends with a girl from Lyon, polished my manuscript. On the morning of August 28th, I woke up to the smell of frying bacon and thought, Oh, good. We’re not evacuating. Everything is going to be fine. Then I heard the sound of a hammer: my father was nailing plywood to the windows to save them from the wind. On our way out of town, as small tornadoes formed on the lake just beside the bridge, the girl from Lyon huddled in the backseat, losing command of her English.
I remember it wrong. Instead of George W. Bush peering out of the window of Air Force One as he flew over a flooded New Orleans on his way back from vacation on August 31st, I see him reading a book to school children, as he did while the towers fell. I remember Gov. Katherine Blanco’s refusal to allow aid to enter Louisiana as a caution ribbon wrapped around the state and tied in a big yellow bow. I find in myself a perverse pity for Ray Nagin, sentenced to ten years in jail for corruption; I imagine him huddled in a locked hotel room, in full blown nervous breakdown, as the city he was responsible for filled up like a bowl.
What I do remember clearly: The Jefferson Parish police standing in the middle of Crescent City Connection, shooting over the heads of those trying to cross the river to safety. The crowds waiting in the heat outside of the Convention Center for buses that did not come. The multi-part story in the Times Picayune that told us in advance that the levees were underbuilt, that the storm was inevitable. I remember who we neglected, who we feared, what we called them. But most of all, I remember that we did nothing, because everything was going to be fine.
February 9, 2015
THE FLOATING WORLD, a novel
coming October 17, 2017 from Algonquin Books. Pre-order now!
The Floating World tells the story of the Boisdorés, a Creole family whose roots stretch back nearly to the foundation of New Orleans, as they attempt to reassemble their lives following Hurricane Katrina. Though the storm is fast approaching the Louisiana coast, Cora Boisdoré, the family’s fragile elder daughter, refuses to leave the city. Her parents, Joe Boisdoré, an artist descended from freed slaves who became the city’s preeminent furniture makers, and his white “Uptown” wife, Dr. Tess Eshleman, evacuate without her, setting off a chain of events that leaves their marriage in shambles and Cora catatonic–the victim or perpetrator of some violence mysterious even to herself.
This mystery is at the center of Morgan Babst’s haunting, lyrical debut. Cora’s sister, Del, returns to New Orleans from the life she has tried to build in New York City to find her hometown in ruins, devastated by the storm and its aftermath, and her family deeply alienated from one another. As Del attempts to reach Cora and understand where her sister wanders at night, and what she saw during the hurricane, she must also reckon with the history of the city and the trauma of destruction that was not, in fact, some random act of God but an avoidable tragedy perpetrated on New Orleans’s most helpless and forgotten citizens. The Floating World is the Katrina story that needed to be told–one with a piercing, unforgettable loveliness and a nuanced understanding of this particular place and its tangled past, written by a New Orleans native who herself says that after Katrina, “if you were blind, suddenly you saw.”
Told from the points of view of each family member, this gorgeous debut is bathed in the sights, sounds, and smells of New Orleans, and is a profound Faulknerian family saga about what we choose to salvage in a world that destroys everything we hold most dear, and what we can possibly build out of what remains.
Praise for The Floating World:
“The Floating World is a thought-provoking story of class and race and trauma, told through the dramatic prism of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Babst’s sentences are so fresh and alive they leap off the page. This is a beautiful and captivating book.”
—Jessica Shattuck, New York Times bestselling author of The Women in the Castle
“This book is an achingly precise diagram of a city and family in heartbreak. Babst’s writing is fluid and insidious and hauntingly beautiful. The Boisdorés join some of the great families of American fiction, fascinating kinfolk through whom we watch the rise and fall and rise of New Orleans.”
—Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of We Love You Charlie Freeman
“This is a rich and powerful novel, satisfying on many levels – wry, eloquent, passionate, and completely memorable.”
—Valerie Martin, author of Property and The Ghost of Mary Celeste
“In powerfully lyrical prose, Morgan Babst evokes the shattered lives strewn in the wake of the levee collapses that left New Orleans in ruins. It’s a story still difficult to believe—even by those of us who lived through it.”
—John Biguenet, author of The Rising Water Trilogy
“This powerful and lyrical novel captures the emotional currents in New Orleans after Katrina. With an authentic and sensitive voice, Morgan Babst explores family, race, class, and the essence of disruption.”
—Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of Steve Jobs
March 3, 2000
The Mountains Every Time
The man and I drove all day through the Shenandoah Valley and entered the Blue Ridge by sunset, finding the turnoff only after dark. We serpentined into the mountains until our cell service slipped, until we were singing along to a station tuned to silence. The road to Cashiers ambled through low wet forest, skirted sheer drops that whispered in the darkness of falling water. At the end of it, there was a hedge, a gate, an old fellow in a rocking chair to nod to, then a fireplace roaring on a screened porch, a tumbler full of Scotch. I fell asleep to the sound of tree frogs, woke up in a pool of sun. It wasn’t until I looked out at the view—a cliff reaching, sheer white, above the tallest trees—that I realized I’d been here before.
That before was far away and cut to pieces: a log cabin, a dirt road that just kept rising. Four years old, in corduroy overalls, I trundled up the mountain, a parent in each hand. Above us, Whiteside rose, one of the highest cliffs east of the Mississippi. I’d been promised peanut butter crackers and falcons at the top, but what I really wanted was a piggyback ride. When I discovered one was not forthcoming, I whined, stomped, cried. Did some good old sitting in the dirt. Finally, I just had to lie. “Daddy,” I said, deadpan, “I’m having a heart attack.”
I got my way.
