FICTION
“Flying Shoes”
Lisa Howorth
Bloomsbury, $26, 304 pages
When Mississippi housewife and mother Mary Byrd Thornton gets the news that the investigation into the 30-year-old unsolved murder of her younger brother is being reopened, she is understandably rattled. Enough to break a plate, though not the good family china, of course — just the cheap Corelle.
And while “breaking things was not a good, adult response to getting sudden, scary news about a terrible thing in the past, a thing buried with the dead and kicked to the curb of consciousness … that was what she’d done anyway.”
It’s our first clue that Lisa Howorth’s bittersweet debut novel, “Flying Shoes,” is more about faith, human endurance and Southern traditions than it is about the abduction and murder of a 9-year-old boy.
Howorth, co-founder of Oxford’s independent bookstore, Square Books, based the novel on events in her own past — her 9-year-old stepbrother was killed in 1966, the case reopened in 1994 — but says that other than the crime, everything else in the book is fiction.
Beginning in February 1996 and taking place over a period of a few days, the story revolves around an impending meeting. To help clinch the investigation, Mary Byrd must travel to her hometown of Richmond, Va., to help ID the killer.
The long-ago crime, never talked about by her family, dredges up “an old creepiness, a poisonous smog of bad feelings.” Afraid the nightmares she once had about her brother will return, Mary Byrd casts about for someone to help sort out her feelings.
Her aristocratic, emotionally cool husband, Charles, is not a good bet. “Jesus,” he says upon hearing the news. “Will that never be over?” She can’t imagine dragging her mother back through the “tornado of grief and fear and the unknowable” that gripped her family years ago. Her closest confidante, Mann, the gay CEO of a chicken company, presents a cautious shoulder to cry on but begs her, “Please don’t blubber.”
So it comes as no surprise when Mary Byrd looks for support in a rogue’s gallery of misfits who pass for her allies: a pill supplying, wolfish admirer named Jack Ernest; Teever Barr, a homeless Vietnam vet, professional driver and yard man; and Crofoote Slay VI, a blue-blooded redneck trucker who works for Mann.
Instead of driving to Virginia with a sympathetic family member, Mary Byrd ends up hitching a ride with Slay, who holds forth on Southern culture, much of it on the skids, for 200 miles — a delirious soliloquy that concludes with his request for a souvenir after her brother’s killer is brought to justice: “Save me the heart.”
Howorth delays the meeting until the end of the book, using it to unspool the sprawling, off-kilter lives of characters who sound off on everything from race relations to music of the ’60s, from the acceptance of difference in small Southern towns (“there was always an old queer or lesbian couple, or a Boo Radley”) to Mississippi’s role in the Civil War.
With the exception of Mary Byrd’s mother, the only other woman in the story is the Thorntons’ elderly black housekeeper, Evagreen, who sees Mary Byrd as an outsider “who did not know her place.” Despite the irony Howorth employs here, and the change in Evagreen’s upright life that provides a counterpoint to her employer’s, the housekeeper’s seething resentment and domestic sabotage (she covertly ruins a pair of Mary Byrd’s expensive shoes, for instance) undermine her credibility.
Holding up a more convincing mirror to Mary Byrd's plight is her favorite reading matter: the daily diaries of her husband's ancestor, an 18th-century Virginia plantation owner. His underlying grief (his first son died in infancy) echoes her own loss, and she takes heart from his unique coping skills (he dances every morning by himself). The journals lend their sensuous, antiquated words and phrasing to Mary Byrd's thoughts: she fantasizes donning "a fancy mantua… thickly embroidered and beautifully scroddled in swallows and flowers, with its lovely scroop, the train up the back."
Howorth captures modern-day scenes with equal relish, as when Mary Byrd observes a group of “knuckleheaded frat boys, hollering and floating around in their hot tub like beer-sodden dumplings in a testosterone stew.” Or the flowers in an African-American neighborhood: “Clumps of red president cannas up against porches, wine-colored barberry sculpted into tuffets, exploding fountains of pink pampas grass …”
In the end, it’s not the meeting — and breakthroughs — between the detective and Mary Byrd’s family that offers the most satisfying click in “Flying Shoes.”
It’s in how we come to see the world, the way Mary Byrd does, as “a crazy, round place” where bad things go hand in hand with the good, where “God may work in mysterious ways, but a lot of those ways suck.” The real journey we take in this giddy, bighearted lifeboat of a novel is not toward death, but a wild ride into the irrepressible life that goes on in spite of it.
