The judge was a tall big man with blue eyes and a brown billy-goat
beard and he seemed to me to be old, though he was only around            forty years of age at that time. His manner was grave. On his deathbed           he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife’s religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need of some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make. It is something to think about (True Grit 42).

I was raised Methodist and have thought a lot about it. Most of my thinking occurred after I left the church, for while I was a member, what I mainly thought about was the drudgery of attending Sunday school and church each week; the horror of the torturous deaths in both testaments; and the reality that my only interests in attending church at all were (1) singing hymns both in the choir on Sunday evenings and in the congregation on Sunday morning, and (2) sitting next to my adolescent peers on those same mornings, playing games of hangman or, if I were really lucky, rubbing legs with some equally squirmy girl.

I have no regrets about the little attention I paid to our various reverends in their pulpits. I never wholly disbelieved in God, but I did come to disbelieve in any organized body that claimed ownership of a particular version of deity, personal or otherwise.

I do admit to feeling funny, and perhaps a little guilty, about seeing the word “Methodist” in print. What I mean to say is that I notice that word in the same way that my eyes gravitate to the words “Jewish” (my father’s faith), “Bessemer” (my hometown), and “Alabama Crimson Tide” (that entity which captured more of my father’s faith, and in recent years my own, than any other creed I’ve cited).

I also don’t claim to know or understand what “medicine” the Methodists could make,” though I do recognize that in general, Methodists are much milder and seemingly less potent than Catholics and, certainly, our more natural rivals, the Baptists. A sprinkle on the head when you’re a newborn, ingesting grape juice and consecrated paper on the first Sunday of the month, simply can’t match the equivalents of those other faith forms.

But Methodists, of course, do make some bad medicine, and the harshest dose I ever swallowed came on the day our congregation saw a family of African-American visitors walk through the front entrance of “our” sanctuary. I am told that after the service, a group of concerned parishioners “informed” the preacher that such as that would never happen again, or else.

And it didn’t.

What did happen, what I experienced directly, aside form the gaping jaws and murmuring when the family entered, was the rage of one of my good friends who for the next week kept jawing about “those niggers.”

I know. It was only one dose of medicine. But I ask you, if you could help it, wouldn’t you do anything in your power from ever having to swallow another dose of that off-white, creamy elixir known as Kaopectate, yet another corrective to the flow of something dark and unwanted?

So I left when I could. In body, but what, I’ve wondered all these decades, did that experience do to my psyche, my mind?

Methodism, though, and why I left are not what I’m thinking about here or what I want to think about. Methodism, in fact Christianity itself, have not saved my soul. Nor do I think they ever will.

But Charles Portis has.

Or if not my soul, then at least my ailing, scarred psyche, and my terribly troubled mind.

#

When I was fifteen, I developed a crush on a six-year old girl. I’m sure I wasn’t alone, for this girl undoubtedly caused crushes in other adolescents, and in adults, too. This crush defied gender, and maybe even race.

My crush’s name was Jean Louise Finch, aka “Scout.”

Now, at age sixty-two, I have a crush on a fourteen-year old girl.

Her name is Mattie Ross.

Since both girls are fictional, though, what is this crush I have; what is its nature and how is it so medicinally palliative for me?

While both Jean Louise and Mattie act heroically–a combination of their beyond-their-years resolve and their fearlessness in addressing conflicts of their particular age and stories–I find that it’s their “voice” that enraptures me.

Saves me.

That was Mattie speaking at the top, from the early pages of Portis’s most famous novel. I first read True Grit a year ago, and I found it entertaining and relatively faithful to the Coen Brothers’ remake of the 1968 John Wayne film version. I didn’t fall in love that first time. True love, I think, does not happen at first sight.

I am also not one to wonder, or to usually ask questions like,

“Who’s Gonna Save My Soul Now?”

The version of God I do believe in is the one where some thing (person, event, or, most often in my case, a book) enters my life when I most need it.

So there I was two weeks ago, sinking deeper into depression—a depression that had been set off eighteen months ago by the loss of my best friend, and in subsequent months, the loss of my mother and my beloved little cat. I grieved, I grieved, I grieved. I know that grief runs its own course, and like the course of true love, grief’s path is hardly ever smooth or predictable.

I see a therapist regularly. I do yoga. I live with a therapist, too, and within each I found support, helpful suggestions, and consolation. And yet, just when I thought I had made it out again, something reared its head: a bad dream about my cat’s demise (no proof even of that demise), my dog’s escaping from our enclosed back yard (we found him safely), North Carolina’s loss to Auburn in the “Sweet Sixteen” (my best friend adored the Tar Heels).

If I could, I’d go on some sedative permanently. A few nights ago when I couldn’t sleep, I took a muscle relaxer left over from my wife’s neck injury. It’s pretty strong and it made me float above my fears and grief. When I told my wife what I had done, she touched my shoulder,

“That’s not good. This is why we have an opioid epidemic.”

I know she’s right.

So the next night, instead of a drug, I opened True Grit. I was supposed to begin teaching it the following week in my Southern Gothic Literature class. When I assigned it, I did so thinking my students could use it as one of their primary research tools. I did this for them, I swear.

As I read Portis’s second novel this second time, though, I realized what had escaped me the first time, perhaps what has escaped me for more years that I can account for. The “what” that caused me to decide to major in English and to stake my career on teaching it at the college level:

The “glow” of fiction, which, if it didn’t begin for me with Jean Louise Finch, was at least kindled by her (and then by Holden Caulfield, and then by Quentin Compson, for I am not a heterosexually-fixated fiction lover).

Baby, baby, where did our love go?

I can’t remember the last time I fell this hard. I read eighty or ninety pages that first night, about the Methodists and the judge; about the three convicts publicly hanged that Mattie and thousands of others witnessed. And then I read this passage, where Mattie dickers with the livery owner who supposedly was watching over her father’s horse (her now dead father, whose revenge forms Mattie’s quest). He imagines that she is too young, too fresh, too unskilled to negotiate, to stand for her rights, or even to know what these rights might be. In this, he is incredibly, credibly wrong:

“I cannot make an agreement with a child. You are not accountable…’

“Then I will keep the ponies and the price for Judy [her father’s horse] will

be three hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

“I would not pay [that] for winged Pegasus, and that splay-footed gray does

not even belong to you.”

“Yes, he does. Papa only let Tom Chaney [who killed her father] have the use of him.”

“My patience is wearing thin. You are an unnatural child. I will pay $225 and keep the gray horse. I don’t want the ponies.”

“I cannot settle for that” (36-7).

Needless to say, she doesn’t. She gets what she wants, and whether she is an “unnatural child” or not, she had me. My love.

#

I know I shouldn’t, but I place value on objects. I buy into market values, seller demands. I acquire “things” because I think they might be worth something to my daughters one day. I once spent $50 on a Spider-Man comic book, the one where the Green Goblin kills Gwen Stacy, Spider-Man’s true love. It has a blue-ink marking on the cover and so can never be in Mint, near Mint, or part of any CBG-graded system. I have no idea whether it will be worth what I paid to anyone one day. But I have it, and sometimes I pull it out of its bag and board and think about when I could have bought it for 12 cents, but just missed, because I thought then that comic books were juvenile (I was fifteen).

If I could have one redo in my life, I would cede that redo to my father who passed away almost nineteen years ago. I would give him the chance to hide or hoard his comic book collection, dating back to when he was twelve, in the late 1930’s. Of course I never saw this so all I have is his word. To my memory, he never lied to me (he might have kept some truths to himself, but that’s a different matter). So when he told me that he once had the very first issue of Action Comics and Detective Comics #27 (introducing Batman), I never doubted him. He had others, too. He collected them all. Oh my god, what this man had.

My father also played the clarinet, well. His icons were Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. When Dad was eighteen, like most other able bodies of his gender and generation, he was drafted into America’s war against fascism, a war that the comic book creators had engaged in their stories months before Pearl Harbor found itself bombed. Maybe Dad had the issue of Captain America where Cap punches Hitler on the full-color cover.

We’ll never know, however, because while he was defending his country in Patton’s Third Army, his mother gave away, threw out, or perhaps even sold his comic books. She also hocked his clarinet for gambling money. You can look up what these comic books, even just in “Good” condition, are worth today. I don’t have the heart to do so.

This year Batman turned eighty, the eightieth anniversary of that issue of Detective Comics. And last week, the 1000^th issue of Detective rolled off the presses. I reserved two copies for myself and for my brother. Selfishly I grabbed the copy with a cover drawn by comics legend Jim Steranko, a cover sporting the 1960’s Detective logo. I got another for my brother that looked like a 1950’s vintage Detective. I thought I was late in reserving copies and halfway expected my local comic book shop to tell me that “Sorry, you’ll have to wait for a second printing because the demand was too strong.” Yet when I entered the store, they literally had scores of the issue, with eight variant covers.

Yesterday, I decided to get my son-in-law a copy, too, and when I walked into the store, I saw none on display. The rush must have been late, but thorough, I thought. But then I went back to the regular stacks, and there they were—at least fifty copies ready for sale. I found a Golden Age variant. I paid ten dollars for each copy. Maybe one day they’ll command half that much.

Still, I have something that I love.

And I also have now a first edition (third printing) of True Grit. I found it on EBay for $25. I could have dickered with the seller and maybe gotten it for 15 or 20, but then I would have had to wait and some other obsessive could have rushed into the void and deprived me of my love. So I hit buy, and three days later, it arrived. It’s in “Very Good” condition: a bit brown and worn, but with that original cover of a young girl with long pig tales, wearing late 19^th Century southwestern garb and holding a shot gun by her side. The jacket was designed by Paul Davis, a person I’ve never heard of, but who, according to Wikipedia, had a long and distinguished career.

I now think I need some of his original art.

What I love most about the True Grit cover, though, is that in Mattie Ross’s left hand, she’s holding the reins to her beloved horse, “Little Blackie,” who gives his life for hers. That’s what our animals do for us, as I’m reminded again and again when I miss my lost cat Morgan; when I dream about him and all my other cats whom I usually find waiting on me in the basement of my childhood home. That basement was unfinished and was also where my own comic book collection—my first collection that began back in 1963—was destroyed when a toilet overflowed. I have since replenished that collection and have even re-subscribed to Detective. Say nothing to my therapist wife, for this goes against her more healthy prescriptions.

Usually I refuse to reread, much less love, a book where a pet animal dies, and let’s face it, when an author introduces such a pet at the story’s beginning, that animal is doomed. I do wince for Little Blackie, but I love him too much to skip over his death.

Today, I had to take my dog Max to the vet. His skin color is off, turning from pink to a moderately dark gray on his underside. My anxiety ratcheted up last night, considering what we might discover. The vet says, however, that it’s a seasonal allergy and has caused a slight bacterial and yeast infection. She’s also checking for endocrinological issues like thyroid trouble. But I won’t find out those results until tomorrow. [Update: he’s fine.]

In the meantime and for the rest of our lives together, I will take more Gaba Calm, love him as much as I can, and try not to worry.

I now have first editions of Charles Portis’s Masters of Atlantis, Gringos, and Escape Velocity, a collection that includes his reporting on a Klan rally back in my hometown of Bessemer, Alabama, 1963, the year I bought my first comic book. I’ll look for Norwood soon.

I will also stare from time to time at Mattie and Little Blackie and consider what they’ve done for me. How much I miss them, cherish them, and so look forward to meeting them again next fall in my new class, loss and all.

Which brings me to the line I love best in True Grit, a line that nurtures my own faith in the power of literary words.

Mattie has found her father’s killer, Tom Chaney. At gunpoint, she orders him to come with her, and when he refuses, laughs, and tries to take her, she shoots him.

“He said, ‘I did not think you would do it,’” as he sits in a prone position against a tree, nursing the wound in his side.

“I said, ‘What do you think now?’”

Chaney responds, “Everything is against me. Now I am shot by a child.”

He’s wrong about that. Mattie is a young woman even though technically she’s an adolescent, and we all understand that trying to predict what an adolescent will do is fool’s gold.

Sometimes they surprise you.

Sometimes they save your life, and, sometimes, maybe even your soul.

– Terry Barr

Author’s Note: “True Character” is a piece I wrote that began my spiral out of grief and depression. Reading True Grit, for the second time, reminded me of the times in the past that, when all else seemed hopeless, a work of literature–my precious books–have rescued me, befriended me. This is yet another reason for why “we” read.