A STAR IN HER CROWN

Chapter One: “...And the dog days of summer are lingering, folks...” WANE-LP

I had seen Emmett’s nephew Peter Dawson Sessions only once in well over twenty years until he stepped past a sentinel of jack o’lanterns at the lead-paned door of my low-powered FM radio station. PD waltzed into WANE-LP and without a how-dee-do took a seat on the fold-out chair facing the plywood counter beyond which my husband Barry was absorbed with an SMR receiver that he’d been using to check our station’s signal levels. The dog days of summer had lingered through the last day of October in Florida’s Big Bend. There was no frost on the pumpkin and no hint of COVID or the plague to come. Just a few minutes before PD popped into the lobby, I’d been in our jerry-rigged studio taping public service announcements for our rural and conservative community that in the turmoil of present circumstances seem trivial.

“The Holt clinic announced today a new vaccination for shingles. Elders are urged to...”

“The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles reports that texting on mobile phones has increased traffic fatalities by...

This was also before President Trump’s scorched earth efforts to overturn his defeat at the polls. There were no re-counts and no death-counts that October, and people had jobs, but even so it was a struggle to keep my modestly-powered station in the black. WANE-LP broadcasts to a market of about two counties in northern Florida just west of the Suwannee River, a mere parcel of Florida’s Big Bend, and even before the pandemic’s devastation I was coaxing advertisement from businesses surviving month to month. Fortunately, folks like to hear their weddings and family reunions mentioned on-air; hunters and fishermen like having their trophies chronicled, along with updates of weather and tides, and of course football season demands a weekly rehash of the Holt Hornets’ success or failure. Occasionally, there’ll be an added wrinkle to the standard fare. On the day PD visited the station, for example, I was trying to figure out how we could put together a live-stream and podcast for the coming revival of our County Sing.

I say a revival because there had been no twenty-four hour marathon of gospel singing in Holt in decades. In years long past, the all-day sing was as regular as Easter. In that bygone age, churches would take turns hosting an annual event that included amateur performers along with professional groups like the Oakridge Boys or the Sego Brothers and Naomi in an enthusiastic celebration of Southern gospel that pealed from sunset to sundown.

Now let us, have a little talk with Jesus

Let us, tell Him all about our troubles...

Aside from round-the-clock music, there would be a spread of food that could stretch for yards on makeshift tables propped over white sand cooled beneath a splendid shade of Spanish moss. A thousand families might converge in that fairground atmosphere bringing baskets gorged with fried chicken or chicken-fried steak along with okra or acre peas or succulent tomatoes freshly plucked from local gardens. Not to mention pies and puddings tailor-baked to trigger diabetes. Think of lard and banana pudding and sweet-tea stirred by the gallon in cast-iron kettles once used to make syrup from sugar cane. Families mixing and visiting. Children running in coveys like quail.

The tradition of that all-day convocation died when I was still a youngster in an internecine war fueled by the culture wars and nuances of dogma that only a medieval scribe could untangle. But then Reverend Munroe Walker proposed a reprisal of the celebration to be feted at his own Midway Baptist Church.

Nothing like having a talk with Jesus over a plate of chicken and dumplings.

My only quibble with Preacher Walker’s strategy was that I wished he’d scheduled his great awakening sometime other than smack dab between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I’d have liked to see Preacher’s all-day feast put off until the following summer—which ordinarily would have been sensible counsel. Normally, folks in our neck of the woods are antsy for a summer diversion. There’s not much to do once school’s out and the hot weather hits. There’s no football or baseball or basketball. No hunting, to speak of. The old sings were always held during the summer, usually around the last harvest of tobacco.

Of course, we moderns don’t tolerate summer as well as our forebears. Surviving old-timers love to recall lazy evenings on shaded porches, an occasional respite from cropping tobacco or loading water melons or hay won with a plunge into one of the many local springs that boil ice-cold into the Suwannee River. We late-comers, on the other hand, have gotten used to air conditioning, and it’s just not feasible to chill a church as large as Midway Baptist for an entire summer’s day, not to mention the toll of heat on the hundreds expected to spill over into the grounds outside. The summers here are merciless and they linger. The year PD Sessions returned to his hometown we registered record highs all the way through October, with no sign of letting up.

The antique ceiling fan churning the tin tiles of WANE-LP’s ceiling offered no relief on the morning I’m describing. It was not yet noon and I could feel my khaki shirt stuck on the skin of my back like a damp lover. The reason I did not see my sister’s old beau slip into our rudimentary lobby was that I was attending Lonnie O’Steen’s efforts to revive our own ailing a/c. I have known Lonnie since grade school. Imagine a scarecrow with overalls hanging like socks on a rooster with a scraggle of beard and preternaturally large hands. You can always track Lonnie by his brogans. Our local handyman has worn the same pair of brogans for fifteen years, and he never uses the carpet or boot-scraper outside our door, so every step Lonnie takes lays down what looks like an impression of waffles across planks of yellowheart pine that Barry and I have labored to preserve.

He sighs mournfully over an uncooperative compressor.

“You don’ keep ahead of the maintenance, you gone have these-here break downs. ‘Specially filters—you got to check your filtration.”

Lonnie extols the virtues of swapping filters with the same zeal as a dentist for flossing teeth.

“Hear me, Brenda Sue?”

No one in my former life ever called me Brenda Sue. Seems like an age ago that CNN regularly aired Brenda Barrington’s dispatches from locations all over Iraq. After three years in-country, I was littered out of Baghdad with a busted pelvis that ended my days as a foreign correspondent. A Peabody award got me back in front of the camera where a couple of times a week Brenda Barrington would hold forth on the issues of the day with Anderson Cooper or Rachel Maddow. Those opportunities dried up like lettuce on a summer sidewalk after a single on-air commentary when, not entirely sober, I dismissed Donald Trump’s first bid for the presidency as a publicity stunt.

I lost my job, my condo and my savings and came home with my tail between my legs where I am regularly reminded that a big-city correspondent’s opinions don’t count for a tinker’s damn next to family reunions, football, or the Future Farmers of America. Here in Holt, I’m Brenda Sue, Howard Barrington’s younger daughter, or else “the rangy one”. Well, I am a smidge over six feet tall and flat-chested, which in my community ranks as a curse similar to eczema, a condition, by the way, greatly exacerbated during brutal summers by a failing air-conditioner.

“’Tole you a million times ‘bout the filters, Brenda Sue,” Lonnie repeats his chide.

“Are you saying a new filter is all I need?” I demanded.

“And mebbe freon. When’s the last time you got a charge?”

“U2 concert. Bono was hot.”

“Filters and coolant. It’s either that or go whole-hog.”

I turned to my hippie-haired husband. Barry has a mop like Ringo’s. Back when the drummer had hair, that is. On his head.

“Barry? Cooler weather’s got to be close. Do we go with a filter and fluids, or shell out for a compressor?”

My paramour pauses from his labor as if actually considering a reply.

“Have no goddamned idea.”

“Well, what’m I’sposed to do?” Lonnie throwing up his hands.

“Just fix it, Lonnie,” I pleaded. “It’s hotter than hell in a thimble.”

“Unit this old? Could be more than a compressor. ‘Prolly is gone be more.”

“Tell you what, for now just put in a filter and freon. You can do that, can’t you, Lonnie?”

“Gotta grab me some first,” he qualified.

You can just about bet that if Lonnie O’Steen visits your home or business, he will not have the necessaries needed to finish the job. The reason for this recurring lapse is that Mr. O’Steen works out of a trailer about the size of a baby carriage that is hitched to a Harley Fat Bob. Lonnie always has room for his shotgun and his damned .357 magnum on his Harley Davidson, but supplies for plumbing or a busted air-conditioners or anything actually related to his putative vocation—?

Someone asked him one time why he didn’t buy a van sufficient to carry any needed tool or supply and Lonnie replied that if he followed that advice he’d never get to ride his motorcycle.

Life is all about priorities, isn’t it?

“Bring a couple of filters, why don’t you, then, Lonnie,” Barry advised. “Might save you a trip.”

“Can do,” Lonnie sniffed. And then, nodding, in the general direction of the gentleman seated near the front door.

“That who I think it is?”

I dragged myself erect by the ledge of our makeshift counter and that’s when I saw PD Sessions lounging in our modest foyer.

“Brenda Sue.”

A man in his mid-forties rising from his seat as lithe as a teenager to offer me his hand.

We’d crossed paths only once since high school, if memorably, but there he was, filling the room with an insouciant ease and fresh as a daisy. A perfect smile to go with every single one of those perfect teeth. Curls of hair, genuinely blond and, as always, slightly disheveled. He was dressed despite the heat in a long-sleeved dress shirt over chino slacks secured with a belt featuring some military escutcheon and apart from the hint of crow’s feet around hazel eyes, PD could still pass for the star quarterback at Holt High School. I felt a wave of nostalgia bring a rush of blood to my cheeks. Here I was a grown woman blushing before the guy who took my sister to the prom.

“PD Sessions?”

Barry repeating the name as he brushed his own mop back from his forehead.

“Weren’t you in school with Brenda?”

“Couple years ahead. Same class as Brenda Sue’s sister.”

“Ah, well. I only hear one side regarding Cindy Lee.”

“Jesus, Barry!”

PD laughed. That easy aw-shucks laugh. He strolls over and offers Barry his hand, which my husband stood graciously to accept.

“Peter Dawson. Everyone calls me PD.”

“Barry Cohen. Everyone calls me Barry. What brings you to WANE-LP, Mr. Sessions?”

“I need Brenda Sue’s help.”

“My help?” I demurred. “For what?”

“I am running to represent Florida’s Second District in the U.S. House of Representatives.”

“You don’t mean the seat vacated last year?”

“The very one.”

“But PD—,” I stumbled. “You’d be running against Emmett Sessions. You’d be running against your own uncle.”

He smiled. “Only if l win the primary. By that, I mean the Democratic primary.”

I looked to Barry for guidance. Didn’t get any. I returned to Peter Dawson.

“I am assuming you know Emmett had to resign his seat in the Florida House of Representatives to run for federal office. And he doesn’t have to worry about winning the Republican primary; he’s the only name on their ticket.”

“Yeah, I know.”

I took a deep breath. Grabbed a chair of my own.

“PD, I hope this isn’t some kind of snap decision. It sure as hell isn’t for Emmett. He’s been actively campaigning for the best part of a year.”

“Got himself a head start, that’s for sure.”

“So, you’re throwing in your hat after, what—twenty years absence? You haven’t set foot in the county in two decades, and now you’re going to take on a well­known Republican running in the most conservative district in Florida? And your uncle, to boot?”

“Why, I need your help, Brenda Sue.”

“Remember the Facebook Test,” my husband warned.

But PD and I share a history.

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Chapter Two: “...Tell you what, some of the best places to find mayhaws are in those old sloughs. You know the ones? Like out to the Sand Pond...” WANE-LP

Part of the history I share with Peter Dawson involves a pungent berry prized locally for its jelly. I’d be surprised if at the coming County Sing you will not find at least a half-dozen jars of mayhaw jelly set beside some platter of biscuits or cornbread, and yet I have never met anyone outside my small community who’s ever heard of mayhaw berries, or mayhaw trees, this despite the fact that you can find groves of them flourishing in east Texas or Louisiana or probably any other southern-tier state.

The trees that produce the most potent bounty are almost always found in wetlands of one sort or another, creek bottoms or swamps. The stand with which I am familiar thrives in a sandy loam bowl fed each spring by fresh-running water rich with bream and minnows in a place known to locals as the Sand Pond, an idyllic network of tributaries and white-loamed hollows almost completely shaded by enormous water oaks that shelter in their understory scattered copses of mayhaw trees.

Every spring my station gets calls from locals eager to find a grove of mayhaws, but you don’t go for the scenery. A species of hawthorne, the mayhaw is the ugliest tree you’ll ever see. A snake’s skin of bark clings to slender trunks thwarted like spines afflicted with scoliosis to support an unruly tangle of branches sheathed in thorns as toxic as darts from a blowgun. But come spring and rainfall, those bowers erupt in bright-white blossoms above water rising around chest high and by April or early May the spiked grove hangs gravid with a red-hued berry maybe a half to three-quarters of an inch in diameter that makes the best jelly on the face of the planet. I kid you not; I have plucked and boiled berries for just about every jelly imaginable—blueberry, blackberry, guava, grape, not to mention mangos and apples—but you put a generous dollop of mayhaw jelly on buttered toast or a hoecake burned black over a campfire and you will willingly commit crimes to get a second helping.

I can only guess that the mayhaw tree takes its name from the month of May in which its produce is often gathered, combined with an allusion to its taxonomy. I know firsthand that harvesting the mayhaw’s berries and making jelly from its nectared fruit was an activity that used to unite families in a common purpose, keeping in mind that my notion of family extends from mothers and fathers to dog-kin. In any case, up through my junior year in high school it was a tradition for my family and PD’s family to convene at the old Barrington homestead for a trek to the Sand Pond and the yearly gleaning of mayhaws.

Each year the Barringtons and the Sessions pulled or paddled our rowboats or flat-prowed johnny through streams still running and ripe with the smell of roe to reach the groves. There was an unstated protocol that the elders retired to one periphery of the thicket for their harvest, allowing young people to congregate for labor and flirtation in privacy on the opposite side. From those starting points, you’d work to meet somewhere in the middle of the stand, older folks and youngsters in harmonious occupation.

It is the only labor I can recall from my youth that I looked forward to doing. You’d still be a bit chilly in the mornings in April or May when a scarlet flash of a cardinal’s wings streaked across the bright-white canopy of blossoms. Water spiders sculling by the thousands on the water below the armored branches. Mosquito hawks hovered in mid-air to feed or copulate, their emerald wings diaphanous in a bright sun that burned through the moss above to spotlight the protected arbor. A course of bream and minnows underfoot.

The work was simple—shake and scoop. The shakers donned heavy gloves and climbed into the tree to dislodge the pink-swelling mayhaws from their thorny keep while those shivering in the water below scooped that bounty off the water in sieves that we’d empty into sheets or tubs laid inside the hull of our various water-craft. I still recall the sounds of that easy toil, the lap of water as we maneuvered beneath the trees, the scrape of an oar on a plywood hull, the swish of a seine through water.

The first plunge into the pond’s bracing pool was sure to bring a delighted hoot and laughter. Sometimes we’d make a fire ashore to warm those water-borne in labor. Within an hour the work had acquired a certain rhythm and then, almost inevitably, my sister would begin to sing--

.As I went down in the river to pray

Studying about that good old way

And who shall wear the starry crown?

Good Lord, show me the way!

Daddy loved to hear my sister sing. Cindy Lee would’ve been dad’s favorite even if she cawed like a crow, but the voice cinched it. She was my father’s pride and joy. My mother’s, too, though to her credit Mother tried hard not to show it. Cindy Lee was two years older than I, and definitely not rangy. Not particularly spiritual, either. In fact, my sister was one of those small-town belles who embraced the stereotype, blue-eyed, petite and flirtatious with a hot body turning heads right and left.

She was our high school’s Homecoming Queen, and you can guess who played her consort in that perennial rite. PD Sessions shared renown with Cindy Lee in a class of fewer than fifty seniors. It was widely assumed by the community at large that Peter Dawson was destined to marry my sister, even though he’d actually only dated her for a portion of their senior year. The late start was not related to a lack of interest on Cindy Lee’s part. She was as ruthless as Robespierre when it came to getting a boy she wanted, and by the time she was a senior there were plenty of boys who had sampled my sister’s wares.

Our parents were oblivious to Cindy Lee’s reputation, or at least pretended to be. For one thing, my own mother was married at sixteen so the notion of an eighteen-year old cheerleader having a bevy of beaus probably brought a vicarious thrill. Certainly, my father encouraged her courtship to Peter Dawson Sessions. There was no reservation about having the high school’s quarterback date your daughter. PD checked off all the boxes important in our rural community, an all-state athlete in football and basketball with a scholarship to college—and a preacher’s son to boot! Well, stepson, actually. PD’s biologic father was Emmett Sessions’s elder brother, Samuel. Sam was killed hauling pulpwood when PD was still an infant. About a year later, PD’s mother met a preacher-man. Reverend Albright married PD’s mother not long after being called to the Midway Baptist Church.

Preacher Albright was a bit of an anomaly in our region, a kinder and gentler evangelic than we were used to seeing. As nearly every minister in our county, Reverend Albright had to work a second job to provide for his family which is why, six days a week, you’d see him on Highway 27 driving a Borden milk truck.

With the minister’s blessing, PD kept his original surname and grew with his adopted father and church to gain a reputation as a kid with brawn and brains who was also—and this can be a loaded term in my community—a “Christian gentleman”. People used to joke that PD Sessions was the only boy in the county that never worried about bringing a girl home late. Fathers rested easy when PD arrived at the front porch in genuine humility to take some girl to a church social or, very occasionally, to the movie theater in Live Oak. I honestly think Cindy Lee was bored to death in PD’s company, but he was the Homecoming King, after all, her matching crown, and, in any case, once PD was off to college, I figured Cindy Lee would move on to frolic in other fields. My parents, on the other hand, were convinced that my sister’s courtship with the preacher’s son was a prelude to marriage.

I never got along with my older sister. By the time we were teenagers, I had become Cindy Lee’s go-to target for easy humiliation. She never missed the chance to share some personal detail with her cabal of admirers—my first period, for example. And in other ways I was an easy target for ridicule, an overgrown geek who ran around with a camera taking pictures. I never had what you could call a regular boyfriend in high school, whereas all Cindy Lee had to do was wink to get a boy interested. We were only two years apart but we had almost nothing in common, nothing we liked to do together—except for the harvest of mayhaws.

The mayhaw grove offered a yearly truce in our sibling rivalry, an Olympics without competition where each May my sister and I and everyone else donned hand-me-down sneakers and shirts, and sagging bill caps to convene for a morning’s work. In that place, resentment was snuffed out. Kith and kin suspended arguments related to religion, politics, and petty grievances at the shore of the Sand Pond, pressing through the water in our long-sleeved cassocks as though for baptism to reach the laden grove. Dipping our strainers into the fount. Rising transformed.

All this in harmony with Alison Krausse’s haunting spiritual.

O, sisters, let’s go down

Let’s go down, won’t you come on down?

O, sisters, let’s go down

Down in the river to pray...

My sister’s voice rising pitch-perfect in a cathedral redolent with sight and sound and touch. The smell of spring so strong you could taste it on your tongue, an ambrosia Demeter-sent and fecund with new beginnings. The song would end to be replaced by the grove’s gentle suspuration, a modest exhalation, mayhaws persuaded from their spiked bower to fall on the water below with the muted report of miniature fireworks. Everything quiet and contained.

We coordinated our toil with the flute of wind and water in the same routine enacted every season of harvest at each dawn of spring until that morning when a short, startled scream broke from the far side of the grove along with a thawaaack that registered with a splash of something heavy into the water.

My mother stilled her sifter.

“What you reckon was that?”

And then the long, anguished cry.

“NOOOOOO!”

We all rush to see. PD meets us halfway, a swath of berries cleared in the wake of his passage as chest-deep he hauls the john-boat through the pond by the rope of its improvised anchor. My sister lolling astern, her head fixed at an impossible attitude on the transom.

“HELP!”

I remember PD bawling.

“HEEEEELP!”

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