This letter was included at the start of the early reviewer copies of EVERY CLOAK ROLLED IN BLOOD.
I have never planned a book. Each day I see perhaps two scenes in the making, and I write them as best I can in hopes of getting 750 words on paper. I do not know where the characters come from, nor do I control their dialogue or their behavior. I have always felt that I am a witness to the story rather than its creator. My new book is personal in many ways, but it is not meant to be. To borrow from John Donne and Ernest Hemingway, I believe none of us is an island unto ourselves, and because of that belief my goal is to tell a story that involves us all. This book, as my others, is my attempt to capture part of mankind’s trek across a barren waste into modern times. Perhaps that’s a vanity, but it’s the only goal I have in writing. My father said that both science and art are actually little more than the incremental discovery of what God has already created. But, my father continued, the “discovery” is inside all of us; the issue is recognizing it.
The path to Golgotha or the Garden of Gethsemane is not a pleasant journey. It involves sweating blood, literally. This is why I have always believed that the real gladiators are the silent souls whose eyes glow with a luminosity that seems to have no source and yet is intimidating. What does this have to do with writing a book? That’s easy. It is my belief that pain is the conduit into the unconscious, where the history of man resides and passes from one generation to the next. I also believe the greatest loss and the greatest darkness we can experience is to lose one’s child. There is no noun or adjective that adequately defines or describes the initial shock, as though language has forsaken us, in the same way no one provides us with a calendar or a clock when we find ourselves inside a black box we never thought would be ours.
Our daughter Pamala Burke McDavid passed away on July 31, 2020. It is with great sorrow that I write these words, which are less about my wife’s and my loss than the world’s.
Pamala was one of the kindest and bravest people I ever knew. There was no limit on her generosity and her love of animals and people. I remember once in San Francisco when she took every cent she had in her purse and gave it to a homeless man digging food out of a garbage can. As a little girl she fought bullies on the schoolground in defense of smaller children. Nor would she accept bad conduct on a personal level. At age ten, in Little Yankee Stadium in Ft. Lauderdale, she asked a famous Yankee pitcher who had chewing tobacco for brains to autograph her baseball.
“No more autographs,” he said.
“Ashamed of your penmanship?” she replied.
I think he’s still trying to figure out what she meant.
She was born August 5, 1964, in Lafayette, Louisiana. I was a newspaper reporter who made little money. I took a job in the War on Poverty and we moved to a hollow in the Cumberland Mountains, where children lived in dirt-floor cabins and wore clothes made from Purina feed sacks and went barefoot in the snow. I think it was here that Pamala acquired her empathy for the poor and the downtrodden.
She graduated with honors from Wichita State University and had many jobs, almost all of them associated with problem-solving and public relations. She had abilities that seemed preternatural. She could look at a room and click a shutter in her head and ten years later describe everything in the picture. She was often prescient and could read people’s minds. In one instance she had a vision in which three men appeared. They told her their names and gave her a message for me. The names meant nothing to her. The three men were deceased members of my family. The message saved our lives.
In her young life she was hurt in ways that would have destroyed others. But she forgave those who had done great evil to her, and to my mind became the standard for everything that is good in people. She became my publicist, my problem-solver, my psychologist, and my film rep. She copyedited my manuscripts and used dialogue herself that was like a cross between Shakespeare and Mickey Spillane. Illness was sometimes her bane, but those who knew her never thought less of her, never doubted her honesty or honor, never doubted that perhaps the light in her face came from the thumbprint of God on her soul.
My first cousin was Andre Dubus. In one of his most famous stories, he states that God had a son, but never a daughter. I loved my cousin and his work, but I differ with him on this one. I think God has a lot of daughters, and Pamala is one of them. And my wife Pearl and Pamala’s siblings Alafair and Andree and Jim and Pamala’s son Parker McDavid and I have taken her in our hearts, and having done so have not closed a cover on a book but opened one, because now Pamala will always be with us and we with her, and she will never die and the light she carried in her face will be a beacon for us and others unto eternity.
This novel is fiction, and the characters are fictitious, but the world and the larger human story are not fiction. The narrator, Aaron Holland Broussard, describes his loss as a hole in his chest that is as big as a pie plate, a hole that is like a blue sky with carrion birds inside it. He has vertigo and can’t breathe or concentrate on a conversation or drive a car; his gun cabinet beckons to him, like a dirty whisper in his ear.
The book enters what others might call the supernatural. It is fine that others do that. But I believe the natural world is a metaphysical entity, and I also believe that most conventional wisdom and science are of only moderate worth and I believe that we do not all come from the same tree and that gargoyles are real and waiting for their time to come round. I also believe the Garden of Eden is within our grasp, if we will only appreciate the enormity of the great gift that has been given us by a divine hand.
That’s what this book is about. Some scars never leave us. But scars can’t break us; only we can do that. As Ernest Hemingway said, the world is a fine place and worth the fighting for. I hope you like this book. It’s by far my best, even though I feel that another hand wrote it for me.
