Ballad of Thomas Diggs (Part One)

When Thomas Diggs walks inside the doublewide trailer that produces the Mama’n’Dem podcast to promote his latest album, No Good Place on Earth, the sun blazes in silver streaks through a golden halo and illuminates his body.

The windows are open and a crow glides through a torn screen and lands on his head and coos and flaps its wings while he comes into form, then flies away.

The ceiling fan is pattering and he sits down, wearing a Yokel Pilgrims t-shirt. He asks if he can light a cigarette and the podcaster says Okay and asks if he wants a beer and Thomas says Alright and Thank you. He hands him a beer and Thomas cracks it open and pulls out a cigarette and lights it, ashes into a Coca-Cola bottle, exhaling, and starts in with a story.

“This ole friend of mine,” he says almost spilling his beer. “Well we weren’t drinking buddies or nothing, though I’ve since shared a beer with him since we’d met—we'd met in Leotie Psychiatric Hospital, it’s built just after the Civil War. Dude has this story, it’s his uncle’s story. It’s a true story, he swears by God it’s true. He tells about his uncle, saying dude was an all-out family man. Took care of his wife and raised three beautiful children all ended up married themselves with jobs they loved and never divorced. Nobody calls him a great husband or great father. He was in Vietnam too. Done three tours. He killed seven of the enemy, and that's only the ones confirmed. He saved twice that many Americans over there. Come back and got so many medals boy you can’t count ’em. Ain’t nobody to call him a war hero. He started this farm, where he gave convicted criminals coming from prison a chance for a job when the damn burger king wouldn’t hire them, gave them a second chance in this world. Chance for redemption. Chance for life again. Nobody says he’s a Good Samaritan or even a good farmer, which he was. He was a great farmer. He played chess with the homeless and even gave them his time and money, if they asked, and if they wanted it, gave them work. Nobody called him a man of great compassion. Nobody called him a man of integrity, or a man of charity. Nobody evaluated the size of his heart, saying that it was big and full. Now. There was one night when he was a teenager. His buddy had caught him in the pasture fucking one of his daddy’s cows. Well, what do you think it is everybody calls him?”

***

Throughout the interview Thomas is asked about his life and he speaks some about it.

He says that he was born inside a liquor store that his parents were trying to rob. There was a blind reverend looking for a deal on wine, and he had a guide dog that apparently heeled over and died as soon as it laid its eyes upon and reckoned the newborn into this world. The reverend dropped his bottle and it spilled all over the child and he pointed and cursed it unto damnation, who was covered in wine and blood from the bottle shards.

“So I ain’t never really had a chance in this world,” he says on the podcast. “From the very beginning.”

When he was six years old, the local sheriff’s department raided his home, finding the manufacturing of crystal-meth with intent to sell, and his parents screamed and cried and attacked the authorities with shattered bottles and threw iced dust of paint thinner in their eyes, and his father pulled out a gun and was shot and his mother charged them with two bread knives and stabbed one of the officers in the chest before she was shot and killed too.

The score to this scene was in front of the television, where the six-year old was wearing Starman super-hero pajamas, a white Stetson cowboy hat that rolled around top of his head, and playing a dust-tinged National Duolian guitar singing out his heart like a sharecropping bluesman from the Depression era—his face framed perfectly within the static television that spritzed fuzz in a low volume while his lungs rose and his breath shrined his face a gray smoke and godly cloud.

He was singing, “No matter how I struggle and strive, I’ll never get of this world alive.”