“A Countrified Rumpelstiltskin.” On the Visceral, Versatile Stories of Brad Watson

My grandfather found his mother’s body. She was his neighbor and getting on in years. I’ve imagined the scene, how it might have happened.

I’ve pictured my grandfather’s concern after missing her working in the yard for a few days. I’ve heard the silence after my grandfather knocked on her front door, and I’ve seen the television set still on after he looked in her back window. I’ve felt my grandfather’s heart break at the usually innocuous sight of a half-eaten piece of buttered toast lying on the edge of a coffee table: It hadn’t happened in her sleep.

Over the past few months, while working on this article, I’ve often returned to that imagined scene, not out of morbid curiosity, but because it feels both eerily familiar and, given whose mother was involved, strangely doubled. It feels like a scene from one of Brad Watson’s short stories.

Those stories were first collected in Last Days of the Dog-Men, winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize, and Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Now, following Watson’s death at 64 on July 8, 2020, the most celebrated from those two collections are resurrected in There Is Happiness: New and Selected Stories.

Resurrection is a key theme to Watson’s work. In his novel The Heaven of Mercury, a finalist for the National Book Award, corpses rise from mortuary tables, sometimes from a case of undiagnosed catalepsy, other times after a bout of mutually consensual necrophiliac kink, and his short story “The Zookeeper and the Leopard,” excerpted from an unfinished novel in the new collection, follows a zookeeper’s consciousness as it’s passed into the piles of excrement left by the leopard that ate him.

In one of two epigraphs to There Is Happiness, Michael Petit, who wrote a cycle of poems inspired by his friend, writes, “Watson knows how, step by step, the soul / can die in the living body. He’ll make sure / they go together, and when they go, quick.” Take note of that last word, an archaic meaning of which is “alive.” When the soul and body die together, they live.

The stories in this posthumous collection are a Rosetta stone to that Rosetta stone of Southern literature—the Gothic—which often explores the negative capability of decay, how it engenders artistic beauty. But instead of decrepit antebellum mansions draped in kudzu Watson gives us double-wides with their roofs thatched in blue plastic tarp. Instead of aged widows who can remember the Civil War we get Dolly Parton proffering sage advice to a country-singing ex-con.

Southern Gothic probes the beating heart in a cadaver. Watson’s fiction cuts it out and slaps it on the Big Green Egg. He leans into the grotesque, knife in one hand, spork in the other. Alane Salierno Mason, his career-long editor, has said he was the only author she ever called “one sick bastard.”

Like many sick bastards I’ve known, myself included, Watson exhibits a sometimes-disproportionate concern for animals. “Seeing Eye,” a writing exercise posing as a story in this new collection, is told from the perspective of a seeing-eye dog, and “Terrible Argument,” more of a summary than a portrayal of one, ends with another canine point of view.

Watson’s concern for animals works best when it’s a bolster to rather than an impairment of his concern for people, when it affirms Barry Hannah’s proclamation that “Watson’s people are the wretched dreams of honorable dogs.” In the poignant “Agnes of Bob,” an elderly woman out for a walk encounters a tanager fallout, birds exhausted from their flight across the Gulf of Mexico plopping at her feet:

She looked out over the Gulf and thought about the birds having crossed all that water without even a rest, and she thought about the fishes and other creatures that traveled beneath those waters, strong and free as they pleased, roaming without the boundaries of continents or countries or cities and towns or jobs or houses or yards, and the idea of the freedom of such a journey stirred in her something like joy and something like frustration. She didn’t know what to do with it, this feeling, and she felt so strange standing amid these people struck wild with wonder over the tanager fallout while all she could feel was the most curious detachment from it all.

An animal metaphor is put to the rack and stretched to a conceit in one of There Is Happiness’s best and most heart-shattering stories. “Noon” begins with an utterly chilling line, the final clause of which is not figurative: “The doctors had delivered Beth and Tex’s only child stillborn, in breech, and the child had come apart.”

A young married couple, Beth and Tex cope with their loss via alcohol, avoidance, and literary device. Tex, a newly avid fisherman, practices casting in the yard, “tossing lures with the barbs removed from their hooks toward an orthopedic donut pillow Beth had bought and used for postpartum hemorrhoids.” On their own, the barbless hooks would be too on-the-nose, but Watson leavens their symbolism with the specificity of the donut pillow and the delightfully, sophomorically sick humor of the postpartum hemorrhoids.

But Watson doesn’t end there. He goes full Vardaman’s-mother on this couple. On a drunken night, Beth imagines one of the catfish Tex tries to catch swallowing her like Monstro, “her body encased within its own, traveling the slow and murky river bottom for ages, her brain growing around the fish’s brain, its stem lodged in her cerebellum.”

She goes on to envision her husband catching and cleaning her. “But he was unable to detach the fish’s brain from her own,” Watson writes. “Her words, some gurgly attempt to say she loved him, bubbled out and then she died.”

Who among us hasn’t made some gurgly attempt to say, “I love you?” Who among us hasn’t failed to hear it?

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In her introduction to There Is Happiness, author Joy Williams notes how “the next world(s) are always near in these stories, so unlike the visible here-and-now one where people just get ‘scattered carelessly into this life or that.'” Watson’s novels and stories charted another, actual liminal place, a physical one stuck between a plethora of world binaries, past and present, prosperity and decline. Throughout his career, Watson lived all around the country—Wyoming, Massachusetts, Alabama—but he never truly left our mutual hometown, Meridian, Mississippi.

Meridian has a troubled history. The Freedom Summer murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were plotted and then prosecuted in Meridian. The KKK bombed a synagogue in Meridian. Known as the Queen City but long deposed of its status as the second-largest in the state, Meridian was in decades past notoriously home to grimy truck stops and grimier dive bars, world-class trenches of unworldly class, frequented by members of the mafias Dixie and original formula. Meridian’s a city as All-American as high-fructose corn syrup.

Thing about troubled histories? They make for some of the best fiction. Geography is destiny, after all, and blood will out.

A countrified Rumpelstiltskin, Brad Watson spun gold from the haystacks scattered across the cow pastures that surround Meridian, which he renamed “Mercury” in his two novels and many of his short stories. Those two novels reveal his remarkable evolution as a writer. With his first, the ambitiously episodic and subsequently uneven The Heaven of Mercury, Watson was a short-story writer trying his hand at a novel, but with his second, the exquisitely crafted Miss Jane, Watson was a novelist.

The concept of world-building, in vogue with writing teachers of late, is as old as the world. It’s as constant, as omnipresent, and therefore as dull as mitosis. Writers who choose for their fictional world the one they know best don’t evince a deficiency of imagination or authorial chops but an acknowledgment that not all wheels need to be reinvented. Focus is finite.

By using the world of his hometown, not only its infrastructure and layout but also its culture and customs, Watson allowed himself to direct more of his attention to the psychological depths that produced said culture and customs, how the infrastructure and layout of Mercury both reflect and affect its people. Watson’s fiction dissects the town that made him so he can dissect what that town made, and nowhere is that more evident than in a highly autobiographical story about aliens from outer space.

The almost novella-length “Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives” follows a young married couple who fit a particular genus of young married couples:

Then of course there were the teen couples who ran off to get married, so alluring the delusion of greater freedom. They were so phenomenally bored with being nothing, and high school seemed little better than a minimal-security prison. They were almost literally mad to chain themselves to lives of eight-to-five jobs, punch-clock paychecks, puttering home to the little post-war starter bungalow, and having a couple beers, cooking burgers on the grill, being grown-ups.

In addition to that genus, the couple fit a much more common one: They’re fictional character based on their author’s life. Watson dropped out of high school to marry his pregnant girlfriend.

To process what had to have been an incredibly difficult choice, Watson utilizes an ingenious contrivance in “Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives.” The young married couple, who are so freshly in love they fall “almost into sleep into one another’s kisses,” are visited by a man and woman “from a planet in another solar system only about five million light-years from here.”

The aliens might as well be from planet Tralfamadore, they’re such explicit nods to Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. They offer the young married couple the same gift that fiction offers those who write it, the chance to live multiple lives, including one in which they don’t get married or pregnant.

By far the best story in There Is Happiness, “Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives” manages a tone that’s bittersweet but not saccharine, redolent with spiritual wonder instead of earthbound regret. The story doesn’t ask what should have been but rather what could have been.

Towards the conclusion, it introduces a concept that encapsulates not only the story itself but any career-retrospective fiction collection. An “exploded view” is the

simulated photo of something, like an engine, as if it’s just been blown into pieces that happen to be all its component parts, and they’re suspended just inches away from one another, as if in the act of flying apart, so that you can see all the parts separately and where they fit into the whole.

There Is Happiness is the exploded view of Brad Watson. Not all the stories in this collection are successful—a ballplayer who never strikes out isn’t swinging hard enough—but they nonetheless prove Joy Williams’s claim in her introduction that “Bountiful is the deserving page.”

Watson’s versatility dominates. In many of the stories, including “Are You Mr. Lonelee?” a Raymond Carver-style drama with glimpses of fellow Meridian-born author Barry Hannah, and “Visitation,” in which a divorced dad visits his son, he relies on prose that doesn’t preen, durable as a Carhartt coverall. But he can also light a linguistic Black Cat, such as the line in “Last Days of the Dog-Men” about “the big subjects: God, creation, the confusion of the animals, and the bloody concoction of love.”

The bloody concoction of love.

“There are graves, many graves,” Williams notes in her introduction, “and the careful digging of graves.” That’s true as well as apt, particularly for an author who wrote so often about the communion of the living and the dead, but There Is Happiness isn’t a grave. It’s a monument.

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The Queen City Detective Agency by Snowden Wright is available via William Morrow.