Every Day by the Sun Read online

  Copyright © 2011 by Dean Faulkner Wells

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Parts of the Christmas story on this page–this page first appeared in Mississippi Magazine, December 1987.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wells, Dean Faulkner.

  Every day by the sun: a memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi / by Dean

  Faulkner Wells.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Faulkner family. 2. Wells, Dean Faulkner. 3. Wells, Dean

  Faulkner—Family. 4. Faulkner, William, 1897-1962. 5. Faulkner,

  William, 1897-1962—Family. 6. Mississippi—Biography. I. Title.

  CT274.F377W45 2011

  920.0762—dc22 2010031684

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59106-7

  Title page photograph © Buddy Mays/CORBIS

  Jacket design by Jennifer O’Connor

  Jacket photographs: © Kevin Fleming/CORBIS (house), courtesy of the author (portraits)

  v3.1

  Larry

  Dean never needed a watch. He lived every day of his life by the sun.

  —FAMILY MEMBER SPEAKING OF DEAN SWIFT FAULKNER

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Faulkner Family Tree

  Butler Family Tree

  PROLOGUE

  1. MY FATHER’S DEATH

  2. SECOND COMING

  3. ANCESTORS

  4. MY FATHER’S WORLD

  5. COUNT NO ’COUNT

  6. TWO BROTHERS

  7. THE WACO

  Photo Insert 1

  8. WORLD WAR II

  9. WESE AND JIMMY

  10. JILL

  11. CHO CHO AND VICKI

  12. NOBEL PRIZE

  13. PULITZER PRIZE

  Photo Insert 2

  14. FAULKNERS AND RACE

  15. THE WOMEN PAPPY LOVED

  16. POSTCARD FROM PARIS

  17. A WEDDING

  18. MY LAST YEAR AT HOME

  19. PAPPY’S FUNERAL

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  THE BEST AND THE WORST THING THAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED to me took place on November 10, 1935, four months before I was born, when my father, a barnstorming pilot, was killed in a plane crash at the age of twenty-eight. The best, because it placed me at the center of the Faulkner family; the worst, because I would never know my father.

  He was Dean Swift Faulkner, the youngest of the four Faulkner brothers of Mississippi: William, the future Nobel Prize winner in literature; Jack, an FBI agent; and John, a painter and writer. All four were pilots. Dean was the baby of his generation as I am in mine. His death defined my position in the family. I became more than just another granddaughter or niece. I was the last link to my father, and since he was gone, the people who loved him so dearly cared for me in his stead; they did the best they could for me. Due to an accident of birth I belonged to all of them, but it was Dean’s oldest brother, William, who felt the heaviest responsibility for me. He encouraged Dean to learn to fly, paid for his lessons, gave him a Waco C cabin cruiser—William’s own plane—and with it a job at Mid-South Airways in Memphis, Tennessee.

  After Dean’s death, William suffered from grief and guilt I imagine almost every day of his life. He attempted to assuage the pain by offering me security, both emotional and financial, whenever he could. It was as if William made a vow to Dean that November afternoon when he saw his unrecognizable body in the wreckage of the plane: He would tend to me in Dean’s place. He fulfilled his promise, and I grew up calling him “Pappy.”

  Cherished by my family as an extension of my father, I have had to struggle to find my identity. My search for who I am started when I began to research my father’s life. His influence on me could not have been stronger had he lived. And as Pappy’s fame grew, of course we were all touched by it.

  In 2010, I became the oldest surviving Faulkner in the Murry Falkner branch of the family. My father’s first cousin, Dorothy “Dot” Falkner Dodson, daughter of Murry’s brother, John, died January 23, 2010. We were the only remaining family members with firsthand memories of the long dead people who shaped and supported the man who is arguably the finest American writer of the twentieth century. Now I am, one might say, the last primary source—and I don’t like anything about it. By the time I reached seventy, I expected to be transformed into Miss Habersham, Aunt Jenny, Granny Millard, or, if I was lucky, Dilsey. I believed with all my heart that to grow older was to grow wiser. I am living proof that this aint so. (Note that throughout I’m using Pappy’s preferred “aint,” without the apostrophe.)

  My relatives were private people, building walls not only to shield themselves from outsiders but from one another. This vaunted Faulkner privacy, which has been interpreted as anything from crippling shyness to arrogance to paranoia, may have evolved as a safety hatch in light of our eccentric and sometimes outrageous behavior.

  Over the generations my family can claim nearly every psychological aberration: narcissism and nymphomania, alcoholism and anorexia, agoraphobia, manic depression, paranoid schizophrenia. There have been thieves, adulterers, sociopaths, killers, racists, liars, and folks suffering from panic attacks and real bad tempers, though to the best of my knowledge we’ve never had a barn burner or a preacher.

  The only place we can be found in relative harmony is St. Peter’s Cemetery in Oxford, Mississippi. Yet there we can’t even agree on how to spell our name. It appears as “FALKNER” on several headstones; in the next plot “FAULKNER”; in the main family plot both “FALKNER” and “FAULKNER,” buried next to one another; and one grave marker reads “FA(U)LKNER.” It is obvious that though there were not many of us to begin with, we’ve never been a close-knit family. We are prone to “falling-outs,” quick to anger, and slow to forgive. Whereas most families come together at holidays or anniversaries, ours rarely has, at least not in my generation. With the exception of our immediate kin, we’ve been derelict in keeping up family ties.

  Pappy tried. On New Year’s Eve in the 1950s, he liked to host small gatherings for family and friends at his home, Rowan Oak. Dressed to the nines, we met shortly before midnight in the library, where magnums of champagne were chilling in wine coolers, and crystal champagne glasses were arranged on silver trays. As the hour approached, Pappy moved about the room and welcomed his guests. When our glasses were filled he would nod at one of the young men standing near the overhead light switch. Then he would take his place in front of the fire. When the lights were out and the room was still, with firelight dancing against the windowpanes, Pappy would lift his glass and give his traditional New Year’s toast, unchanged from year to year. “Here’s to the younger generation,” he would say. “May you learn from the mistakes of your elders.”

  I’m still learning.

  IT NEVER OCCURRED TO ME THAT IT COULD HAVE BEEN PILOT error, that the plane crash that killed four young men—including the pilot, my father—could have been his fault. He had been taught to fly by the best. He had a commercial pilot’s license and hundreds of hours of flight time and complete confidence in himself. When I began to search for answers, his fellow pilots told me that he was a natural, a pilot’s pilot, that there was no aircraft that Dean couldn’t fly, that his instincts for flying were almost mystical. The crash, the old barnstormers insisted, was caused by factors beyond his control. It could not have been Dean
’s fault.

  He loved performing in air shows, and several days before his last one, in November 1935, he flew to Pontotoc, a small town in north Mississippi, where he was scheduled to put on an Armistice Day exhibition. He flew the Waco C cabin cruiser, a gift from William, a fire-engine-red biplane with tan leather seats and ashtrays on the armrests. An elegant aircraft, it seated four in comfort.

  As usual, Dean had written all the promotional copy for the air show, had flyers printed, and flew over the town making low passes to drop the leaflets. Down they fluttered like confetti onto streets, trees, and rooftops. It was supper time on a Friday. At the sound of the plane’s engine, people ran outside, children first, clapping their hands in excitement, pointing at the sky, their parents close behind, all caught up in the moment, plucking the flyers out of the air.

  MAMMOTH ARMISTICE DAY AIR PAGEANT

  Two days—Nov. 10–11, Two O’Clock.

  Featuring Dean Faulkner and Navy Sowell.

  THRILLING EXHIBITION OF STUNT FLYING

  AND AERIAL ACROBATICS.

  Death-defying parachute jumps by Navy Sowell.

  See Pontotoc from the air. Long rides, one dollar.

  Landing field west of Pontotoc.

  In case of inclement weather show will be held

  the following week.

  Barnstorming shows were circuses, carnivals, vaudeville shows, and county fairs rolled into one. As a plane would thunder over, spectators would gather in a field to watch female wing walkers make their way from the cockpit to the struts, as sure and as precise as ballet dancers. Jumpers with parachutes clutched to their chests would plunge out of the planes, feeding the chute out to catch air as they plummeted toward earth. The real stars, however, were the daring young men in their flying machines. Reeve Lindbergh once wrote me that her father thought of the early aviators as members of a select fraternity, “the brotherhood of the air,” drawn together by the love and danger of flight.

  Dean had flown into Pontotoc from Memphis on Friday. He was at work early Saturday morning taking up fifty or sixty passengers before stunt flying in the afternoon: figure eights and loop-the-loops and heart-stopping stalls. One of his passengers that morning was a young farmer, Bud Warren, who had never flown before. As soon as the plane landed, Bud knew he was coming back the next day with two of his cousins. He wanted them to see their farms from the air. Bud Warren had had a real good time.

  Sunday, November 10, 1935, was just right for flying. Dean went out early that morning to check on the weather. He rubbed his bare feet in the moist grass, licked his finger, and held it up against the wind. Perfect.

  He was at the landing field west of Pontotoc by ten o’clock dressed in khakis, a white shirt, boots, a leather helmet with goggles, and a white silk scarf around his neck. He began, as he had on Saturday, taking passengers for rides, charging a dollar for ten or fifteen minutes in the air. Dean’s wife, Louise, arrived unexpectedly around one o’clock, having driven down from Memphis. He was delighted to see her. They chatted briefly before he went back to work. Louise was five months pregnant with me and had recently been grounded by her doctor until she came to term. She had logged so many hours, Dean teased, that she could have been a pilot herself.

  The line for rides was a long one, and it was nearly one thirty when Bud Warren, who had been waiting patiently, came forward with his cousins Henry and Lamon “Red” Graham. Dean recognized Bud from the day before. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go see those farms.”

  Bud and Henry settled themselves into the back seats. Red, probably because he was a student pilot with several hours of flying time, sat up front with Dean. As they taxied down the field to get ready for takeoff, Dean returned Louise’s wave. The red Waco took off into the sun.

  Louise stood by the airfield eating an apple, wishing she were flying. As she waited for the plane, her sister, Clara, and brother-in-law, Roger Caldwell, showed up. Louise sat in the front seat of their car, chatting through the open door with Navy Sowell, the parachutist who was to make a jump that day. A young man delivered a ham sandwich that Dean had ordered from a café. Louise paid him and said, “Just hold on to it and take it out to the plane. He’ll be hungry when he lands.” Thirty or forty minutes passed. Someone in the crowd remarked, “Those Grahams are getting a first-class ride.” Dean must have been rewarding them, Louise reasoned, for having waited so long. Then another onlooker: “I bet they’ve crashed.” It was past two. The crowd was restless, complaining that the show should have started. Louise began to worry.

  Louise, Clara, Roger, and Navy drove down a narrow gravel road where Dean’s plane had last been seen. A pickup truck came barreling toward them. Passengers stood in the truck bed, shouting, “We saw it. We saw it go down. Over there just past that stand of pines. In the pasture. The plane’s buried in the ground.”

  Navy and Roger ran across the field, leaving the car doors open. Louise struggled against Clara to get out. The men vanished into the pine thicket. When they reappeared moments later Clara could read the agony in their faces. They had found the Waco. Dean and his three passengers were dead.

  Louise collapsed. Roger held her as Navy turned the car around and headed back to Pontotoc. News of the crash had reached the airfield by the time they returned. Spectators raced toward their cars. Two of Dean’s friends and fellow pilots, Murry Spain and C. D. Lemmons, were waiting. They took Louise to C.D.’s home, where Lemmons’s first phone call was to his family doctor to come take care of Louise. The second was to 546 in Oxford—William Faulkner’s number.

  When the telephone rang at Rowan Oak, William was outside in his yard putting up a trellis for a grape arbor. His wife, Estelle, called him inside and handed him the phone. His features went smooth with shock. “How far from Thaxton? At what time? Was he alone?” He turned to Estelle. “Dean was killed in a crash at Thaxton.” He began to place calls, first to Judge John Falkner, his uncle, asking him to get the operator to block calls to 15, the telephone number of his mother, Maud Butler Falkner. He phoned his brothers, Jack and John, and told them, “Come home. Mother will need us.” Then he called the police. Thinking Louise was in Memphis, he asked them to set up a roadblock to detain her in Byhalia, Mississippi, and bring her to Oxford. “She must not be allowed to go to Thaxton.” He was soon on his way to his mother’s house.

  One of Dean’s fellow pilots had just heard the news. He had flown with Dean the week before and could not believe he was dead. He picked up the receiver and asked the operator to connect him to 15. After a long pause, the operator explained that she had orders not to put through any calls, but “just this once—”

  Maud was waiting on her front steps when William pulled into her driveway. She gripped her handbag and gloves, rigid with grief. William reached out and she took his hand. They stood together in silence. Then he helped her into the car. They drove to Pontotoc without a word passing between them. Highway 6 was filled with traffic as Dean’s friends raced to the scene of the crash. William drove to C. D. Lemmons’s house and went inside. Maud stayed in the car, a small, erect figure.

  Louise was in bed, groggy from a sedative the doctor had given her. William and C.D. helped her to the car, and C.D. tucked a blanket over her lap. She sat in the backseat, staring out the window. Then they began the drive back to Oxford. Maud spoke only once. “Did I ever do anything to make him unhappy?”

  At Maud’s home they were met by family members. Clara helped put Louise to bed in Dean’s old room. Before dark, Maud’s second son, Jack Falkner, an FBI agent in North Carolina, would fly home in his yellow and black Aeronca. Her third son, John, was delayed in Lambert, Mississippi, when his crop duster nosed over on takeoff. He was now driving to Oxford with his family. The Falkners were banding together.

  William drove by himself to the crash site at Thaxton. He found men working with blowtorches and hacksaws, racing against darkness to remove Dean’s body from the wreckage. The Waco had been almost completely destroyed, its nose buried deep. It
had gone down in an open spot in a wooded area about ten miles from the Pontotoc airfield. Under a towering oak, the bodies of the Graham cousins and Bud Warren lay on a flatbed truck. They had been hastily covered with bedsheets. William went to the plane and looked inside. The impact had driven the engine through the cockpit and smashed it into the passengers. When William saw what the crash had done to his brother, one of the Graham kinsmen overheard him say, “Hell, Dean, is that you?”

  At five o’clock that afternoon, after the bodies had been taken to the funeral home in Pontotoc, a crowd was still standing around the plane, many of them Dean’s fellow pilots, staring at the crash site in disbelief. Part of the red fabric covering the top left wing had ripped away.

  On Armistice Day, November 11, 1935, the story of the crash appeared on the front page of the Memphis Press-Scimitar. The article stated that “an unofficial investigation disclosed that the control was on the right side and the wheel in the lap of Red Graham [which] would indicate that the student-pilot had taken control.” The story ran with pictures of the Waco and of Dean’s pilot’s license photograph. He was twenty-eight; Red Graham was twenty-four, Henry Graham and Bud Warren were both twenty-one. Red, Henry, and Bud were buried the day after the crash in Sand Springs Cemetery, “the cemetery near where the wing fabric fluttered to earth.” Finding fault for the crash is beyond mortal consideration.

  OXFORD IN THE 1930S WAS A SLEEPY LITTLE ONE-HORSE town in the hills of north Mississippi, seat of Lafayette County (pronounced Lafayette by locals), and home to the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss). The town doubled in population every fall with a vital influx of youth and energy. The courthouse dominated the square, big and white in the center of an island of grass and old oak trees, its two stories and clock tower making it the tallest structure in town. Four clock faces pointed in each direction, and chimes rang the hour. Benches beneath the trees were occupied by farmers in overalls who whittled, talked, and played dominoes when the weather was right.