Merlin of the Magnolias Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. With the exception of certain public figures and locations, names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Greenleaf Book Group Press

  Austin, Texas

  www.gbgpress.com

  Copyright ©2021, 2019 Louis Gardner Landry

  All rights reserved.

  Thank you for purchasing an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright law. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the copyright holder.

  Distributed by Greenleaf Book Group

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  Cover design by Greenleaf Book Group

  Cover Illustration by Jeremy Wells

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-62634-755-7

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-62634-756-4

  Part of the Tree Neutral® program, which offsets the number of trees consumed in the production and printing of this book by taking proactive steps, such as planting trees in direct proportion to the number of trees used: www.treeneutral.com

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  20 21 22 23 24 25 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Edition

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  • Spring

  • One

  • Two

  • Three

  • Four

  • Five

  • Six

  • Seven

  • Eight

  • Nine

  • Ten

  • Eleven

  • Twelve

  • Thirteen

  • Fourteen

  • Fifteen

  • Sixteen

  • Seventeen

  • Eighteen

  • Nineteen

  • Summer

  • Twenty

  • Twenty-one

  • Twenty-two

  • Twenty-three

  • Twenty-four

  • Twenty-five

  • Twenty-six

  • Twenty-seven

  • Twenty-eight

  • Twenty-nine

  • Thirty

  • Thirty-one

  • Thirty-two

  • Thirty-three

  • Thirty-four

  • Thirty-five

  • Thirty-six

  • Thirty-seven

  • Thirty-eight

  • Thirty-nine

  • Forty

  • Forty-one

  • Forty-two

  • Forty-three

  • Forty-four

  • Forty-five

  • Forty-six

  • Forty-seven

  • Forty-eight

  • Forty-nine

  • Fifty

  • Fifty-one

  • Fifty-two

  • Fifty-three

  • Fifty-four

  • Fifty-five

  • Fifty-six

  • Fifty-seven

  • Fifty-eight

  • Fifty-nine

  • Sixty

  • Sixty-one

  • Sixty-two

  • Sixty-three

  • Sixty-four

  • Sixty-five

  • Sixty-six

  • Sixty-seven

  • Sixty-eight

  • Sixty-nine

  • After

  • Seventy

  • Seventy-one

  • Seventy-two

  • Seventy-three

  • Acknowledgments

  • About the Author

  But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;

  And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are.

  1 Corinthians 1:27-28

  • Spring

  • One

  It was the kind of bright, halcyon morning that would have augured for a chamber of commerce day for Bayou Boughs had Bayou Boughs been an incorporated city. Instead, it was a raft of privileged serenity buoyed upon the surrounding maelstrom of Houston, Texas. From the vantage of his observatory, all seemed placid despite the negative energy rotation he believed had gripped his city for decades.

  Merlin rose and, inspired by the light dancing on the freshly bloomed neighborhood azaleas, began to play his glass armonica with greater vigor and concentration than usual. A winsome melody issued from the instrument suited to elegiac dirges and eerie phrasings. Up-tempo notes flowed freely from the spinning discs in the multipartite glass assemblage, as if Merlin’s fingertips were channeling the very essence of spring. Even the cacophonic whir of blowers, mowers, and edgers was at bay, allowing his notes to float over the neighborhood without competition from the drone of internal combustion lawn tamers.

  The glass armonica, Merlin believed, was an instrument ideally suited to his outlook and personal magnetic calibration, its ethereal tones bespeaking so much more than the mere notes it produced. He sensed it intimated depths and dimensionalities few could fully comprehend and appreciate. Benjamin Franklin must have envisioned a player such as Merlin himself interpreting time-honored arrangements generations after he invented this most original and beguiling of American instruments, he mused. He believed also that he was providing a service for the neighborhood and any of its outdoor workers who happened to be within earshot of his expert musicianship. His inspiration soared as he inhaled the morning air. Sumer, Merlin thought, is indeed icumen in.

  Merlin believed the very existence of his observatory must have been predetermined in conjunction with what he reckoned as his life’s mission—its springing into form as seemingly inevitable as the burden he would bear for the city of his birth, rearing, and adult residence. Far different from the hackneyed residential addenda of so many quotidian garage apartments in the neighborhood, this structure was thoroughly sui generis. The observatory was round—utterly cornerless. It was of substantial height, rising at least a story above the rooflines of even the tallest surrounding houses. The northwestern to southeastern exposure of its top floor was a semicircle of windows and on the north-facing side there was a modest balcony for sitting, reading, morning coffee, nighttime telescoping, and the taking of readings from various instruments installed on the outside of the structure at the little balcony’s side—temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, et cetera. The building had been the retreat of the former owner of the property, on the nether reaches of which it stood in defiant iconoclasm.

  The owner, Merlin’s late and beloved grandfather, had provided in his will for a trust to be created for the benefit of the observatory’s current occupant. Merlin’s grandfather, as family friends and relations understood it, had created this arrangement with the understanding, considered by all familiar with the case to be both insightful and thoughtful, that the subject beneficiary, although having proven himself quite capable academically, lacked certain connective capabilities that made interpersonal exchanges practiced daily and without reflection by the majority of people moving through the world a belabored endeavor
, taxing him in the way a corporate tax exam might tax an English major. Human interaction for Merlin was, at the least, difficult and, at the most, utterly bewildering. This did not mean, however, that he did not desire it. He truly longed for real friendships, and the few people in his life who were able to connect with him he treasured as much as life itself.

  Then there was his weight. Not just his weight, but his size, also. Perhaps it was better to speak of it in more or less scientific terms as his mass, the presence of Merlin’s personage often described by those who beheld him for the first time as so massive that they would have sworn they had encountered some sort of urban Sasquatch had they not been apprised of his Christian name and provenance. His height? Some six and a half feet or better. But that was not really the biggest visual impact. Merlin’s width was astounding. And it was not just because he was overweight, which he unquestionably was. No, the astounding thing was the huge frame on which all the excess weight hung. Ursine comparisons abounded from his earliest post-pubescent days, as in addition to his mass, a gene marking hirsuteness expressed itself with relentless and reckless abandon. After many seasons of meticulous shaving, he became weary of the whole enterprise and let his beard and hair grow, with the occasional trim and cut the only interventions keeping the whole unruly affair moderately in check. Strangely though, as large and even coarse seeming as his physical presence was, Merlin’s facial features were rather fine. This dynamic created an arresting juxtaposition. Big thick hairy body, round thick hairy coconut head with bushy beard, but glimmering through the follicular forest was the unexpected sunlight of his face, anchored by sharp, gunmetal blue eyes that the world usually observed behind the thick circular lenses that brought his days and nights into focus. The nose—more aquiline than the rest of his physical person would have suggested. The effect of this compounded strangeness was so disjunctive as to be arresting for the first-time beholder. One saw a big stupid body and expected a big stupid face to center it; instead the face intimated significant, if idiosyncratic, synaptic activity between those two jumbo ears out of which more errant hair protruded.

  Concern for personal orderliness was not in the ascendant on this bright antipodal morning, and justly so, as its sunlight-through-dew-drop perfection seemed to cause the armonica to wail more plaintively and at ever higher volume. A few hundred yards away the ethereal strains of Merlin’s inspired playing wended their way to the desiccated ears of a twosome of leathery old golfers, who on hearing them regarded each other with momentary befuddlement as they ambled up one of the back nine fairways before acknowledging simultaneously what the sound was, and, more tellingly, its source and the identity of its generator, for although Merlin was not easily knowable, he was far from unknown. He was one of those neighborhood characters whose vagaries seemed to be tolerated not so much with contempt as with benign bemusement. He was a type who, if a stranger were to see him ambling down the street, would elicit an immediate reaction, but as it is with all local oddballs in their own neighborhoods everywhere, the display of his eccentricities became a commonplace part of neighborhood life.

  His impromptu playing morphed into the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and the effect was so pleasant that even the usually complaining neighbors desisted and allowed the armonica’s notes to fall unprotested on their ears. Could the feeling he sensed this morning bode well for a world wider than his own visual purview? Could it extend to the far-flung boundaries of Houston itself? Might it intimate the long-awaited energy shift that would finally bring an air of the positive and hopeful to this place that, although the birthplace of many profitable business concerns, was an energy sink for much of the melancholy and malaise the not-too-distant Gulf of Mexico seemed to deposit into the area? The regular heavy inundations, sometimes in the form of tropical systems, reminded him of this dynamic—Hurricane Harvey only the most recent of such phenomena as it parked itself over the area and deposited a year’s worth of rain in just a few days. Hmm, he thought. I must consult the instruments and tables.

  Finishing the final notes of the iconic classical piece, Merlin shifted his focus from the lyrical to the analytical. First he recorded readings on his instruments outside—barometric pressure: relatively high for this time of year; humidity: tolerably moderate. Light breeze out of the north-northwest and an air temperature in the middle sixties. Additionally, the azaleas were popping, adorning the neighborhood with the floral equivalent of its Sunday best. Although he realized the temporality of this display, Merlin somehow had a sense that all of these factors were combining to telegraph to him that change of a positive nature might be afoot, and that he might have a central role in effecting it. Was a window opening? Might it fall to him to defenestrate himself through it in sacrificial service to his fellow Houstonians?

  That idea prompted a review of his printed and electronic tables of the phases of the moon, the angle of the sun, the earth’s present course through the solar system, and the alignment of various celestial bodies. Additionally, he considered the old lines of navigation the Druids had understood millennia ago; he had extrapolated them from the other side of the world all the way to the Upper Texas Gulf Coast. He sensed that the geomagnetic ley lines influencing the area were beginning to light up, too. Everything pointed toward change. Merlin was unequivocally being communicated with, and it was time for him to pay attention to the subtle and maybe not so subtle messages being sent his way.

  One of his tried and true methods for achieving this active listening beyond his observatory was to ambulate while wearing a device of his own creation—a metal crown of sorts with protruding but retractable antennae, internal magnets, rather complex electronics, ear buds, and a volume control that allowed him, he believed, to pick up subtle signals regarding his environs. Merlin’s walks while wearing it were among the eccentricities to which the neighbors had become practically oblivious. He had incorporated the device into season-appropriate headwear, so he could stay in sartorial step with the seasons even as the apparatus helped him tune in to faint messages in his own changing world.

  Today, he chose a retrofitted Ecuadorian fedora, a style that for generations has gone under the misnomer of a “Panama” hat. Not having donned it so far this spring, he felt a frisson of pleasure as he appraised its classic lines and the discretion with which his contraption had been incorporated into its circumference where a wide, black satin ribbon would normally have encircled it above the brim. Merlin had even gone so far as using navy blue and crimson felt-tip pens to draw a faux hatband on the exterior electronics to further conceal his head-borne device. He removed it from a hat rack, wiped clean the small solar power cell blanketing the little valley of its top crease, and prepared for his constitutional to breakfast.

  As the morning fairly cried out for it, Merlin chose an off-white linen suit, but left his shirt tie-less, as he knew a few footsteps, even on this pleasant morning, would be all it would take to incite his eager sudoriferous system to frenzied activity, causing him to resemble a living fountain over which glistening rivulets of unctuous liquid seethed incessantly. As to footwear, Merlin required furnishings more practical than style-forward. Owing to his substantial mass, he wore almost exclusively a little-known brand of heavily cushioned, wide-soled urban hiking boots. With a nod to what he considered the most basic of sartorial requirements, he owned several pair, each dyed a distinct hue, per his instructions to the shoe hospital, to complement his daily ensemble, in accordance with the season and meteorological conditions. He dusted off a pair that had been unused since the previous summer and appraised them with winsome fancy. The lacing up of the white boots was a rite of the season’s arrival and meant that he was publicly averring that spring had unquestionably sprung.

  He emerged from the base of his tower, opened the driveway gate, and stepped onto the neighborhood sidewalk. He adjusted the earpieces dangling from the hat’s sweatband into the cilia-dense jungles of his outer auditory canals, listened for a moment, and slid the frequency
locator bar on the left side of the hat forward and backward very delicately until he zeroed in on what he believed to be a legitimate signal. He adjusted the volume, and then, crucially, adjusted his angle of ambulation.

  He believed the frequencies his listening device picked up should determine his approach to the world—his literal approach, that is. Today, hearing a compelling whir through his left ear bud, he adjusted his person to an angle of approximately 33 degrees, his left side turning forward on the sidewalk. He adjusted the volume knob on the right side of the hat and began tentatively, then resolutely, to proceed on the sun-dappled sidewalk. The visual impression was like watching a wide-body jumbo jet angle against heavy crosswinds on final approach for landing, a maneuver known as crabbing.

  The linen-besuited, white-booted barge of a man moving down the sidewalk was something to see, but the addition of the broad-brimmed straw fedora out of which protruded small antennae in four directions constituted another level of the unusual. The sight, augmented with Merlin’s curious sidelong gait and frequent adjustment of knobs and rheostats alongside the hat’s brim, would have been enough to induce in a hypothetical new-kid-on-the-block observer momentary catatonia, if not mild terror. Add an upward cock of the head inclined to the left and a visage that bespoke rapt listening, and one was presented with the most iconoclastic of Bayou Boughs’ many eccentric denizens.

  Lawn maintenance equipment was now audible from seemingly every direction, but leaf-blower- and grass-edger-wielding specialists desisted from their eardrum-assaulting vocations and stood aside so Merlin could pass undisturbed—intimating, perhaps, a degree of Catholic respect for a mystery beheld. Merlin turned left onto Bayou Boughs Boulevard. He passed a couple of hulking mansions and approached the gate house of the club at the end of the block. The majority of the traffic through the gates was vehicular. The pedestrians transiting the gate house were members on the way to a workout in the gym, lap swimming in the pool, a tennis game, or launching a few balls off the practice tee at the driving range—all of them in casual athletic clothing.