Billy Coffey’s “When Mockingbirds Sing”

Billy Coffey is a storyteller, one of the best writing today. Even more, he’s a natural storyteller, the words seemingly rolling right on to the page. To read a story by Coffey is to sit in a diner, preferably somewhere in South, and listen while waitresses refill coffee cups and slide a bit of lemon meringue pie across the table in your direction. And the stories do come.

Coffey’s first novel, Snow Day, told the story of a man facing the loss of his job when it snows, giving jobs and loss of jobs a brief respite. It’s a day when he will learn what’s truly important, simply by considering the stories of the people he runs into.

His second novel, Paper Angels, involves a man recovering from an injury in a hospital, and a visitor arrives to help him sort through a box of what looks like utterly worthless things. But each thing has a story, and the man watches his own story unfold as the box is sorted.

And now there’s When Mockingbirds Sing. It’s ambitious. It goes beyond, well beyond, the weaving of interrelated stories of his first two books, to become a unified story, a large story with a large theme. Through the characters in the town of Mattingly, Coffey lays open the questions of what is faith, what is doubt, what is prophecy, and what happens when they collide in the lives or people.

Tom and Ellen Norcross and their daughter Leah have moved to Mattingly, both to seek reduced pressures from Tom’s counseling workload and to repair a marriage that is not doing well. Their daughter Leah is a quiet child with a stutter, and with something else – an imaginary friend she calls the Rainbow Man, who inspires here to paint extraordinary pictures.

Leah says the Rainbow Man has told her to give the first picture to Barney Moore, who cares for his stroke-paralyzed wife Mabel. Barney sees numbers painted on the picture, bets the numbers in the lottery and comes up a winner with $250 million. When he announces what happens at church, life in Mattingly begins to blow apart, and Leah finds herself both sought after and reviled. Her one friend, Allie Granderson, sticks by her, however (and the character of Allie is drawn so well that she threatens to steal the story at times).

Then Leah paints another picture, one no one can figure out. But it is a sign of something that’s coming, something bad, and everyone’s lives will be changed because of it.

While Leah (and Allie) sit at the center of the story, Coffey has drawn a fine supporting cast – the legalistic deacon, the pastor impressed with his own success, a father who rejects faith because of the damage he believes it’s caused in the lives of the people he counsels, a mother who in her loneliness is turning to alcohol, the small-town sheriff. Together they move toward what the Rainbow Man has told Leah will come.

It’s an ambitious novel, and it works, and works well. Coffey has aimed at large themes, and hit them with a practiced eye. These are bedrock themes, especially for people of faith, and Coffey doesn’t duck the hard questions. He’s written When Mockingbirds Sing strong and true, and we tackle the hard questions with him.

Photograph: Northern Mockingbird, courtesy Birder’s Lounge.

Reading Billy Coffey

One of the stories in Billy Coffey’s new novel Paper Angels is about 9/11. It’s not about what happened on 9/11, but more about how the central character in the book, Andy Sommerville, reacts to a foreigner while watching the lighting of the annual town Christmas tree. The story is full of symbols – the tree, the season, why the foreigner (a German) hides something in the tree (you have to read it to find out).

Like good writing has a tendency to do, that story reminded me of something else: my own family’s Christmas after 9/11. I was supposed to have flown to Eastern Europe for a missions trip that October; the trip was delayed until the following spring. The economy was starting to reel. War was starting against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. We were still feeling the effects – physical, emotional and even spiritual effects – of the deaths in the twin towers, the Pentagon, and that field in Pennsylvania.

That Christmas, the first Lord of the Rings movies opened in theaters. The Fellowship of the Ring would have been a good movie at any time, mostly because of how true it stayed to J.R.R. Tolkien’s original book and because of director Peter Jackson’s imagination. Jackson got it almost exactly right. But that year, that Christmas, the movie became something more than just a good movie. It became a kind of passage from what we had all been before to what we were becoming, or what we might become. My youngest son and I saw the movie four times in the theater.

However blissfully unaware we might have been before 9/11, Osama bin Laden taught America a lesson – but not the one he wanted to teach. No, the lesson he taught America was that, like The Fellowship of the Ring so clearly demonstrated, evil walks this world. Forces of evil would gleefully destroy the good if they could. On 9/11, forces of evil were determined to do just that, bankrolled by a rich man whose money came from his father.

In the movie and its sequels, the fate of Middle Earth rests first on a small group of men, an elf, a dwarf, a wizard and four hobbits, and then only on the shoulders of two hobbits. They continue on, against impossible odds, because, as Gandalf the wizard says, “It is what we do with the time we have” that matters.

That could be a theme of Coffey’s Paper Angels. If you believe in God as Billy Coffey does and as I do, what matters is the time we have. During that time we are being fashioned into the people we were created to be. That doesn’t mean life is always understandable. It’s not. Many things are unfair. Many things don’t make sense. Senseless tragedies happen. People die because some evil mind in the mountains of Afghanistan wants to make a point and thinks he has to destroy something.

Sometimes we feel like hobbits, struggling through the mines of Moria, or the dead zone before the land of Sauron, or the cave with the giant spider. We seem so small, so insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

And yet we matter. We are part of something larger than ourselves. We have a part to play. We are being hammered and sculpted into something better. The anvil often hurts; the chisel cuts and chips. Sometimes it feels like everything cracks and shatters.

That’s what happens to Andy Sommerville in Paper Angels. The power of Coffey’s writing and stories is that we are each our own version of Andy. We recognize him because we are him.

And out of the pain and the hurt and the tragedy will come something good, something new, something beautiful, because the something comes from God.

Related:

My review of Paper Angels.

Billy Coffey's "Paper Angels"

Billy Coffey tells stories. He’s a master at telling stories. To understand why is to understand Coffey’s second novel, Paper Angels.

It’s not that Coffey was born to tell stories. That’s important, but it’s not really what matters.

What matters are the stories themselves.

Andy Sommerville is in the hospital, recovering from some kind of attack that involved Andy being burned. A counselor named Elizabeth is sent to help him sort through what’s happened and what he needs to do.

Together, Andy and Elizabeth sort through a box containing 12 items, most of which look worthless. A cap. Some napkins from Dairy Queen. Part of a fingernail painted red. A wad of chewed gum. A slingshot. A key chain. A few other things.

Monetarily worthless. Yet these are the things that Elizabeth and Andy will use to make sense of Andy’s life, and where he goes next. As worthless as they might seem, they represent what matters in Andy’s life. And they are important.

Coffey uses the stories to construct a larger story, the story of Andy Sommerville but also the story of each of us. We all have those major events we think of as the important milestones of our lives – marriage, graduations, births, deaths, recognitions, honors. In between the milestones are a lot of living and a lot of life – and that’s where we find the stories.

It’s in those stories we discover what really matters about our lives and ourselves, because the stories of our lives are what we are meant to be. And this is Coffey territory. This is the landscape he draws and paints, a landscape composed of both place and people.

This is the landscape Andy Sommerville travels. Those souvenirs in the box are more than artifacts and reminders. They are the DNA of a life.

No one describes that DNA better than Billy Coffey. No one.

Related:

My review of Billy Coffey’s first novel, Snow Day.

Bill Coffey blogs at What I Learned Today.