STORIES: Big Tim Dawson

There was a reality about him, an earthy prominence that made one want to reach out and lay a hand on his arm or pat a mountainous shoulder to ground one’s own self.  His wife took her dawn in his rising each morning.  Always him first, the great gradual weight of his body leaving their bed like the ball of sun pushing through the horizon while the mattress resettled into the lonely lost flat of the fields of the delta. By the time she was fully awake, he’d reached his high noon of stride out the door and dressed and down to the kitchen where he’d already have coffee perking its scent with the browning bread smell and the click of the toaster.

Big Tim Dawson was the best known and liked presence in the little town of Okeepa on the Louisiana gulf coast.  Well over six feet-four with the solid heaviness of a lighthouse, iron stanchions of legs and arms as strong as steel I-beams.  A voice that boomed thunder and a laugh that galed like the late August hurricane winds to blow you along with his own pleasure at life.  His wife Jessie was teeny–or at least looked even less than she was in the contrast–and made the oyster stew at each and every church supper for hers held a flavor that paled all others and a secret ingredient passed down through mothers to daughters for years.

And so, when the third storm of the season finally broke down the levee and the waters rushed through in the dead of the night, the sleep-dazed folk who had no time to do else but climb to their roofs in the morning looked down in despair to watch the body of Big Tim Dawson floating down through the streets, like a great whale returning to sea.  And it seemed in the weeks that followed that with him, as if not mere man but the town of Okeepa itself, all hope and life receded and were lost.