Uncle V.J. lived in a roomy shack a bit off the highway near Vidor,
a more than usually rough neck of the woods in East Texas,
where he kept a passel of hound dogs and fed us the first
and best venison stew I ever had. He wore mustard shirts
(were they also floral?) wide open to the waist
so that the full forest of chest and stomach hair
sort of poured out, this above baggy brown pants
and bedroom slippers he shuffled around in. After dinner,
he’d haul me onto his lap, laughing, mussing my hair,
and promise me a hound pup from his next litter
while my mother squirmed in her chair
and my father cracked out some bourbon to talk business.

Years later I asked him just who was Uncle V.J.
Not your uncle, he said. What he was was a timber thief,
and your Uncle Rex and I owned some land up that way
and would try to sell him the timber off it before he could steal it.
He might have been a very rich man, but he’d get drunk
every couple of years and kill someone with his knife
in a bar fight, and then he’d have to pay Percy Foreman
(700 acquittals out of 701 murder cases)
to get him off, and that cost him half what he owned.

Well, I guess half of what you own every couple of years
and you end up in a shack with a passel of hound dogs,
which, so far as I could tell, was just how Uncle V.J. liked it.
They finally did send him up for two years in Huntsville
for stabbing, but not quite killing, his brother-in-law.