Death and Ice Storms In and Around “Bodock” https://ift.tt/m5q63rs
I created a fictional town in the hill country of north Mississippi because it seems like something writers from Mississippi just do: Lewis Nordan, Jesmyn Ward, Brad Watson, Ace Atkins. Faulkner, et al. The name of the town comes from the Osage orange — what scientists call maclura pomifera but a lot of rural folks just call, among other things, bodock — because the tree figures heavily into my family’s mythology and the mythology of the town in which I grew up. Also because I love the hell out of a place with a name purely utilitarian in scope.
I grew up around communities and small towns with denominations like Hickory Flat and Potts Camp. I can imagine these designations materializing out of a certain economy of time and thought. Well, that’s where that fella Pott made camp once, about seven miles or so as the crow flies from that thicket of hickory trees where the land runs flat on the other side of the ridge. I don’t know if Bodock serves some similar, pragmatic purpose. But if Vardaman Bundren can honest-to-God think his mother is a fish, then I guess Leon Claygardner — founder of Bodock, corn farmer and moonshiner in the red clay hills of north Mississippi — can name his town after the squat, thorny tree he believes his parents have turned into.
The term bodock — see also: bodark — is a colloquial pronunciation of what French colonizers called the Osage orange tree: “bois d’arc,” or “wood of the bow.” Bodock wood is resistant to rot and insects and is virtually indestructible, with a variety of uses, not just for framing pre-gunpowder weapons but also as fence posts, often said to last longer than the hole into which the posts are hammered. And if you want to build something out of bodock, know that once it dries, it’s hard and heavy as concrete and won’t accept a nail, screw, or staple, no matter how politely you ask.
I could say that I envisioned from the start a town called Bodock to be the perfect canvas on which to drop an ice storm and see how indestructible its inhabitants really are. But it’s been nearly twenty years now — my mind certainly isn’t decay resistant — and I’m pretty sure the first ice storm story I wrote was intended as a standalone narrative, a first draft written the summer before I moved to Miami to begin the MFA program at Florida International University.
The story, which would eventually become “Offerings,” was my attempt at a modern retelling of the Flood, the 1994 Mid-South Ice Storm a proxy for the torrential, world-ending rainfall of the biblical myth. Noah became Noal, the family cabin stood in for the Ark, and the pairs of every animal — except dinosaurs, I guess, according to some denominations — downsized to a strange miscellany of livestock Noal’s estranged wife, Jacqueline, had already herded to their rural retreat. (The animals survived the storm but sadly not revisions. It was for the best.) At the least, I certainly hadn’t figured on revolving an entire collection around a cataclysmic ice storm from my childhood. But I wrote another ice storm story that fall and then another that spring. Before I knew it, I’d accumulated a handful of stories like freeze on a power line, each populated with characters like Noal who struggle to square away their inadequacies as spouses and parents, sons and sons-in-law, brothers to man and nature, the best way they can, all while coming to terms with their own, sometimes foreseeable, mortality.
At least one figurative, unforeseeable casualty occurred while spinning these yarns, a death which broke the fourth wall, so to speak. Recounting it requires a confession: Before Bodock: Stories won the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Award a year ago, I hadn’t written anything new in, like, three or four years. Following my MFA program, I’d spent nearly a decade getting up at four most every morning and writing before going to teach middle school. But by 2019, I’d felt exhausted and powerless enough by the Sisyphian effort of sending stories out, querying agents, etc., and getting mostly rejected in return.
I don’t think it would be much of a stretch to round the number of “not-right-for-us-right-now” correspondence to at least a thousand. So a few months before the pandemic, when the planet would shut down and give me all the time in the world to write, I gave up fiction, eventually quit teaching in 2021, and went into copywriting full-time. For the next few years, I’d write more words than I probably ever had in my entire life. And not a single one of them would be fiction nor excavate any sort of big truth for me in the way that writing fiction had. I felt like I was insulating myself from existential fears rather than writing my way closer to them.
In December 2023, I guess I reckoned — since I’d built this thing, a whole collection of stories — I might as well try one more time to do something with it. Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Jorden and I shipped our kids to my parents in Mississippi for a few days, and I spent that time with my head down whipping the collection into as good a shape as I could in the time I’d allowed myself before all the end-of-year deadlines arrived. One of those contests was at a press where, in 2017, a previous iteration of the collection had placed as a finalist. At the beginning of May 2024, though, I got a form rejection letting me know that what I thought was a new-and-improved version of Bodock had not even cracked the top ten.
So you can imagine my surprise and relief, my incoherent rambling and sense of elusive validation when I got the call from Kate McMullen at Hub City Press three weeks later congratulating me on my winning manuscript.
The lesson I had to learn as a writer — that I’m still learning as a writer — is that I’ve got zero reason to expect that anything I write will be published. Or, if it is published, that it’ll reach any sort of readership, whether modest or unquantifiable. Acceptance or rejection is not something I deserve. I’m entitled to neither success nor failure. But chipping away at this manuscript and others over the years has brought me to this epiphany: Like any tree not felled in the aftermath of a catastrophic ice storm, I got really damn lucky.
But then to get lucky, I guess I had to have a manuscript ready to go in the first place. Had to spend over a decade watering and pruning and growing and regenerating each story in the clandestine, pre-dawn dark of a home office or in other twenty-minute spaces carved from daily life. In 2024, I submitted that collection to another contest. Gave it another opportunity to survive or be felled. This time, Bodock held on until the end.
FICTION Bodock
By Robert Busby
Hub City Press
June 3, 2025
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