Billy Ray’s Farm
Essays From a Place Called Tula
by Larry Brown
Algonquin, 205 pp., $22.95
These are quite literally epistles from Tula — the tiny Mississippi hamlet of the subtitle — where novelist Brown (Fay and Joe) lives and writes. The rural rules of such a place apply whether handling a gun, caring for livestock, or tolerating the less noble qualities of friends and family. We are welcome to visit but not to intrude — so please keep your hands inside the ride at all times. There’s little opportunity for bucolic reverie beneath the shade trees when there are friends to carouse with, books to be written, sheds to be built, and livestock to be tended.
Not every essay is about Tula in the literal sense — “Harry Crews: Mentor and Friend” is a moving take on Brown’s relationship to the colorful and under-appreciated author — but most of them are. This snip of a town clearly serves as Brown’s muse — he’s aware that his homestead is just a breath of wind away from the Oxford of William Faulkner and Willie Morris. Still, Tula means different things to the author: his cabin — small and spartan and constructed by himself — where he writes; his family who shares the land with him; and the farm where his son Billy Ray struggles with the exasperating and endless chore of turning livestock into a livelihood.
The unprepossessing genius of these essays is that they convey a sense of endless action in the midst of, let’s face it, a rural backwater that probably isn’t even a wide place in the road. But something is always happening — sometimes terrible and sometimes wonderful, but always, always interesting. And that lies at the heart of Billy Ray’s farm — the doing of things. Though it’s a small-time outfit of a place with a tiny collection of livestock, there’s always briar to be cleared (“black-topped thorn vines that cut my skin like a razor and sting like fire”). And there are calves to be delivered or bulls to be chased into the proper pasture (“We’re not real cowboys. We’re just guys with cowshit on our boots”). And even beyond the farm and homestead where Brown finds peace and frustration in equal measure, he wills us inside the orbit of his perpetual-motion world — always fishing or drinking or building or traveling. His spare prose is filled with movement, but profound emotions fill the spaces between.
Most of the 10 short essays here have seen print before in periodicals and the collection has somewhat of a slapdash air about it. But there’s also a sense of statement — this is Brown’s life without pretense or filter, an acclaimed novelist on the cusp of larger fame — and a desire to preserve these moments before they’re gone forever. These are memoirs posing as essays, but with such distinct moral shadings that they’re nearly parables.
This article appears in August 10 • 2001.