Between Wrecks by George Singleton

over.
    â€œIt’s funny that you should mention Mississippi,” I said. I thought of the term “segue,” from when I underwent communications studies classes as an undergraduate, usually seated right next to Abby. “I’m going to go ahead and enroll in that Southern studies program. It’ll all be done by email and telephone, pretty much, and then I have to go to Mississippi for ten days in the summer and winter. Then, in a couple years, maybe I can go teach college somewhere. We can sell off this land and move to an actual city. It’ll be easier for you to maybe find a job that you’re interested in.”
    I loved my wife more than I loved finding and digging up a truckload of schist. Abby got up from the table, smiled, walked into the den and picked up a gift-wrapped box. She said, “You cannot believe how afraid I was you’d change your mind. Open it up.”
    I kind of hoped it was a big bottle of bourbon so we could celebrate there at the kitchen table as the sun rose. I shook it. I said, “It’s as heavy as a prize-winning geode,” for I compared everything to rocks. When it hailed, those ice crystals hitting the ground were either pea gravel or riprap, never golf balls like the meteorologists said.
    â€œI’m hoping this will help you in the future. In our future.” Abby leaned back and put her palms on the floor like some kind of contortionist. “I don’t mind teaching aerobics, but I can’t do that when I’m sixty. I can still report the news when I’m sixty.”
    Sixschtee .
    I opened the box to uncover volumes one, two, and three of The South: What Happened, How, When, and Why . Abby said, “I don’t know what else you’re going to learn in a graduate course that’s not already in here, but maybe it’ll give you ideas.”
    I might’ve actually felt tears well up. I opened the first chapter of the third volume to find the heading “BBQ, Ticks, Cotton-mouths, and Moonshine.” I said, “You might be right. What’s left to learn?”
    I’m not sure how other low-residency programs in Southern culture studies work, but immediately after I sent off the online application—which only included names of references, not actual letters of recommendation—I got accepted. An hour later I paid for the first half-year with a credit card. I emailed the “registrar” asking if I needed to send copies of my undergraduate transcripts and she said that they were a trusting lot at the University of Mississippi-Taylor. She wrote back that she and the professors all believed in a person’s word being his bond, and so on, and that the program probably wouldn’t work out for me if I was the sort who needed everything in writing.
    I called the phone number at the bottom of the pseudo letterhead but hung up when someone answered with “Taylor Grocery and Catfish.” I had only wanted to say that I too ran my river rock and field stone business on promised payments, that my father and grandfather operated thusly even though the mule warned to trust nothing on two legs. And I didn’t want to admit to myself or Abby that, perhaps, my low-residency degree would be on par with something like that art institute that accepts boys and girls who can draw fake pirates and cartoon deer.
    A day later I received my first assignment from my lead mentor, one Dr. Theron Crowther. He asked that I buy one of his books, read the chapter on “Revising History,” then set about finding people who might’ve remembered things differently as opposed to how the media reported the incident. He said to stick to southern themes: the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, for example; the sit-in at Woolworth’s in Greensboro; unsuccessful and fatal attempts of unionizing cotton mills; Ole Miss’s upset of Alabama. I said to Abby, “I might should stick to pulling rocks out of