Outside of the Law

by

Nicki Leone

A couple months ago, the couple that built the new house in the development down the road kicked me and my dog off their community pier. “When you buy a house here,” said the woman, “and help to pay for the pier, then I don’t have a problem with you using it.” I’ll admit, I felt a sudden rush of outright fury, and had a brief but very vivid fantasy of letting go of the leash my dog was straining against. He’s not a bad dog, but he’s big and not well trained. I don’t think he’d bite someone, but he would have run at the two, and since we were standing on a narrow boardwalk with muddy marsh on either side, they would have had nowhere to go. I viciously relished the fear they would feel to have an unknown dog running at them, let loose by an obviously pissed off owner.

I didn’t do it. Instead, I swallowed the “hello” I was going to offer, hauled the dog back (I noticed neither the man or woman moved until we were well away) and the two of us took the long route to our little beach, walking from sandbar to oyster bed to sand bar through the marsh while my new neighbors watched, nonplussed, from the narrow pier they couldn’t step off of. I fumed to myself for hours, though.

What made me so angry, of course, wasn’t being told “hey, no trespassing.” I’d been ignoring the faded “No trespassing” signs on that pier—and the one that had been built before it, but had blown to pieces during an earlier hurricane season—for years. The dog and I had walked through the woods before they were cleared, through the fields after the woods were cleared but before the road was added, alongside the road before the lots were marked for building. We’d been in and out of the marsh at all seasons, in all tides. We’d walked deer paths and watched the banks change with each new storm surge. We knew most of the old trees and the fallen ones and had even discovered the old dead tree two red tailed hawks were using for their nest. No, what set me fantasizing about setting the dog on her was that woman’s oblivious dismissal of five years of joyful wandering—of living in this neighborhood—with her casual “if you want to belong here you’ve got to pay for it” convictions. Legally, she is right. But she’s just the kind of person who would come to a nasty end in Daniel Woodrell’s spectacular new story collection, The Outlaw Album.

“Once Boshell finally killed his neighbor he couldn’t seem to quit killing him,” goes the first line in the first story of this searing but beautiful collection. “Outlaw” is a word that we sometimes confuse with “hero.” It’s a word that in our minds describes men (and women) who challenge the law, who defy it. The freedom of the individual versus the repression of the government. We tend to idolize rebels in this country. Defiance is a characteristic of the people in Woodrell’s stories, but his use of the word “outlaw” is more literal and tragic. It is the ones who are outside the law. The ones who don’t count, or who live their lives in the murky edges of society, where the law  barely reaches and doesn’t seem to be able to resolve any conflicts, and where “justice” is usually meted out quickly, in person, with no chance at an appeal. As Boshell’s dead neighbor was to find out:

“If I come across one more eaten guinea, [said the neighbor] I'll shoot your dog.”  And Boshell had said, “That ain’t the neighborly way, mister. If’n Bitsy was to rip a guinea or two, just tell us.” And the dead man, so much younger and bigger and flush with money and newcomer attitudes, said, “I don't give two shits about being neighborly with you people. Have you not noticed that?”

But it was the neighbor who didn’t notice Boshell carried a squirrel gun and was a good shot. I don’t think Boshell would have liked my neighbor, either.

Set mostly in the hills and hollers of the Ozarks, Woodrell’s own home, the stories in The Outlaw Album center around the kinds of us-versus-them conflicts that can make people do criminal things—desperation, being backed into a corner, having nothing left to lose. A girl who wants to stop her rapist. A man who murders a housebreaker in self defense. A man who burns down his neighbor’s house because it was built on land his own family was forced off of. Woodrell has a fine sense of how even ordinary and innocuous situations—like a dispute over a family pet and some chickens—seethe with potential violence that could erupt from the slightest match. In “Twin Forks,” Tom Morrow, retired from up north to run a riverside campground, finds himself facing down an meth addict who won’t stay in jail long enough to forget his grudge. He starts keeping a rifle in the campground office.  In “Florianne” a father whose daughter has gone missing is starting to stare at friends he’s known all his life, wondering, wondering if one of them is responsible.  In “Black Step,” an Iraqi war vet between tours quietly lets the boys who used to bully him in high school that things are a little different now: “After the desert, bro, the list of things you’re totally certain you’d never ever do gets a lot shorter.”

But if the stories simmer with violence, they are also filled with an aching beauty and pathos. With places in the woods where a house once stood but now can only be found by the remnants of an ancient flower garden gone wild. With girls laughing as they swim in under the bridge in the river. With the care a troubled vet takes over his cancer-ridden mother, and the strong bond between two brothers as they share a drink and wait for one to be arrested for arson. Woodrell writes poetically but without pretension, and without laying it on thick even though he’s obviously capable when the situation calls for it. (There’s a description of a dead cow where the situation definitely calls for it). And if he occasionally waves a metaphor in our faces—descriptions of the ramshackle houses of a shanty town an obvious parallel to the way family stories are created in “The Horse in Our History”—well, he does it so beautifully we hardly mind:

New rooms were made of what was easily found—wood scraps from backyards and trash piles, sheets of crumpled metal blown free by storms, chicken wire, river stones, with foundation stumps of almost the right size tipping the floors slightly this way and that.

The storyteller, looking for what really happened years ago between a grandfather, a favorite horse, and black man named Blue who was his rider and died under mysterious circumstances, collects a veritable scrapheap of memories and recollections from the people still living who remember the incident and is left with a story that is put together just like those old shacks. “That horse was magnificent, hear?” says one.  “There never was a horse,” says another, “The rest is true.”

Woodrell resists being anything other than a witness (albeit a sympathetic one)  to the clashes that happen when the outside world meets his outlaw Ozark world. He empathizes, rather than moralizes, about the kinds of pressures that occur when old meets new, young meets old, rich meets poor, outsider meets native. Even the outsiders with good intentions find themselves dashed to pieces against the immovability of “the way things are.” When a woman comes to plead with a father to speak for his son at a parole hearing she runs—crashes, really—into this fatalism. The son has apparently become an acclaimed poet while in prison. The father thinks this is irrelevant. His son is still a thief and violent man who knocked out his own father’s front teeth. Your son has changed, says the woman. Writing poetry about it doesn’t change what he is and what he did, says the father. “He ain’t getting no more poems off of us.”

One gets the feeling that the two—the outside world and the Ozark, the outlaw and the oncoming tide—will never be reconciled. The march of modernity into the mountains, with its wars in foreign lands and soldiers returning silent and sometimes broken, its cell phones and satellite televisions and in home health care equipment, rolls over these people with little effect. In most of these twelve stories when outsider confronts outlaw, it is the outsider who suffers for it. The folks in the Ozarks knows their shotguns. But although the outlaw wins a few battles, they are still going to lose the land. A shotgun is a great weapon against a trespasser. But it is useless against a mortgage and years’ owed on back taxes.

The outlaw knows this. So he might as well fire that shotgun.

Books mentioned in this column:
The Outlaw Album: Stories by Daniel Woodrell (Little Brown and Company, 2011)

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.