I.

Despite the radio’s persistent crackle, the boy’s leg could wait until Revis finished his cantaloupe.  If it was Revis they needed, they would wait because they had no choice.  The events of the previous night hadn’t changed the fact that he was the county’s only choice in dire matters, so he could eat at his leisure.  Cantaloupe first.  Then the boy.

Terry Childress hauled his cantaloupes out to where Macedonia Church Road intersected the highway and sold them from the back of his old orange truck.  He started near dawn and didn’t even put up a sign – the fresh cantaloupe itself did all the advertising.  Stacked in regimental pyramids in the midday sun, the promise of cool, sweet juice was enough to tempt passersby into stopping and had, more than once, nearly caused an accident, usually as some out-of-towner unprepared for the siren song of Terry’s cantaloupes had skidded into the soft gravel shoulder as the result of a last minute decision.

He knew Terry was there most Tuesdays and sold out by 3 o’clock with the exception of his tomatoes.  Terry couldn’t grow tomatoes for shit and seemed to bring what pitiable offerings he could muster out to the highway for no good reason – he never sold any that anyone could remember and seemed to have the same prunish, half-starved fruit with him every week.  Maybe he did it to make his cantaloupes look better.  Whatever the reason, Revis Pell never paid the tomatoes any mind, and this morning he had been Terry’s first customer.  If Terry was the least bit curious about Revis’ bedraggled condition, he didn’t let on, and Revis paid him his $.50 with little more than a cordial nod.

Normally he wouldn’t eat it until noon and kept it wrapped in a dishrag and perched on a bag of ice that became a shapeless bag of tepid water by about 8:30 these days.  It would rest in its place of honor until after lunch when he would unfold his Buck knife, clean its longest blade with a handkerchief and slice the yielding flesh into meticulous pieces, savoring each one in quiet ecstasy beneath the sweetgum behind what was technically still his church, despite the preceding evening.  But today was different – he indulged immediately upon arriving home and ate with a fervor only the famished can muster.  He had not even bothered to change his clothes.

Bars, no matter how filthy or poorly constructed, don’t just catch fire as a matter of happenstance.  They burn as the result of negligence, even malfeasance, or as the result of an overzealous churchgoer with more spirit than sense.  Everyone tacitly blamed Revis, but he had denied all knowledge.  He had acknowledged it as a tragedy, but no one had died, so what the hell?

Nevertheless, six people had been hospitalized and a thoroughly plowed Porter Williams had dislocated his hip trying to crawl out of the shoebox window in the men’s room, not to mention tearing the urinal off the wall in the doing.  But a sore hip and a shoe full of piss never killed anyone.  Revis, maintaining his innocence, was unregenerate.

Sheriff McClenney had always had it in for Revis after his daughter began dating a boy who attended Revis’ church.  After a few Sundays of Revis’ preaching, she came home and punctured every one of the sheriff’s cans of Miller Hi Life with a flat head screwdriver and told him he was a hell-bound heathen if he didn’t get right with God.  McClenney, confronted with the loss of both his beer and his daughter’s sanity, took decisive action.  Though he didn’t bother putting on his uniform, he strapped on his pistol and drove up the mountain and onto the unpaved Mt. Carmel Road.  He had had few occasions to go up there – he knew Revis by his wrecker business and had known that he belonged to some mountain church that believed a bunch of snaky, hillbilly bullshit, but he had had no idea Revis was the preacher.  He left with the understanding that Revis himself was a snake and his followers something worse.  Revis understood only that the sheriff’s daughter would not be returning.

He chewed patiently until the melon was nine slivers of rind lying in the grass.  His radio had barked something on the police band, something about a kid and a tractor accident across the state highway from the Loveless post office.  They always called him for this sort of thing.  Since she had become police dispatcher, Shirley had given him both the most difficult and the most lucrative business.  The two were often one and the same, and he was glad to have the work.  She was his favorite congregant, and he knew it ate at the sheriff to have to call on him even as a last resort.

His truck door squealed shut behind him, and the engine slurred placidly to life, as though it too was exhausted by the Early County heat.  He maneuvered the unwieldy deuce-and-a-half with appreciable grace.  He knew the machine inside and out, how to get the most out of it with minimal effort and how to diagnose potential problems before they began.  He had learned to do so in Korea, where he had not fought but removed the wreckage of fighting, driving a lumbering M60 wrecker onto battlefields littered with the smoldering hulks of armored columns.  The bodies had always been removed well before he was called in to clear the field, and he did so with efficiency and skill.

And so he would do the same today.  He could lift the tractor, or whatever it may have been for he wasn’t really listening, off whatever appendage the boy had caught underneath it in a matter of minutes and collect his fee from the county at the end of the week and be back in his cane bottom chair, underneath the sweetgum, and reading for his next sermon, wherever it may be, within an hour.

This was the only part of the job that he liked.  The bulky, graceless M60 was the biggest, strongest wrecker in the county, and he was generally called upon only in times of emergency, when smaller wreckers either couldn’t or wouldn’t get the job done.  His fee was nearly double what Pete Beatty charged, but Pete drove that little shit Ford that was about to fall off her wheels and couldn’t tow anything larger than a broken down Cub tractor.  Last year, Pete had gotten himself stuck where the septic tank dipped behind Hall’s store out on Skirum Road and tried everything to get himself loose, including paying the nearest farmer five dollars to try to push him out, before swallowing considerable pride (and bourbon, if he knew Pete) and calling Revis.  Revis’ truck, its long frame straddling a ditch bank more than a foot deep with mud, freed Pete’s Ford and the attached Chevy in a matter of minutes.  Pete, squatting on his heels by Hall’s icebox, avoided Revis’ eye.  Revis had humiliated him enough for one day and said nothing other than “We’d love to see you this Sunday, Pete.”

Above all, he enjoyed making customers wait, making their need of him intensify so that when he finally arrived, it was a moment of triumph.  Knowing that the growl of his engine, heard well before he would round the corner onto the state highway, would begin to ease their anxiety was a point of immense and sinful pride.  They sensed his coming well before they beheld it, and knowing that he was near made them glad.  He liked to make as dramatic an entrance as possible, either interminably slowly or speeding madly, depending on the situation, wanting nothing short of awe and jubilation at his arrival.

The M60 cornered slowly and accelerated into sight just over the crest of a ridge where the state highway ran between the cinder block post office and  a terraced corn field.  Just about every emergency response vehicle in Early County lined the ditch bank, lights flashing and their drivers milling about, doing their best to look busy.  A sheriff’s deputy guided the minimal traffic to one side, thus occupying the only crucial duty and leaving the other responders with little chance to be useful.  Still, they looked around, hands on their hips, and glared in various directions with the most official faces they could muster.  Revis pulled alongside a county car whose driver, an aging barrel-chested deputy, leaned on his hood and smoked a cigarette in petulant boredom.

“Where’s he at?”

The question was hardly necessary – it was obvious where the boy was, near the throng of emergency personnel and likely at their center.  There were the deputies, the city cops and a group of men who, though in no specific uniform, were likely the rescue squad.  Revis smiled inwardly at the thought there could be no rescue without him.

He sauntered out into muddy field.  Puddles two inches deep stood at the edge of terrace rows, some flowing through low spots and carving tiny gullies in the red mud.  He stepped gingerly over these, for Revis hated getting dirty and hated getting muddy above all.  Though his boots were ostensibly work boots, they remained spotless at all times, matching his creased khakis and immaculate blue shirt.  When he reached the epicenter of the accident, he was muddier than he would have liked but spotless compared to his counterparts.

The boy’s foot might yet be reparable.   He had allowed the full weight of a grain drill to drop on it, and beneath the weight of the dull blue machine, his leg was submerged in the mud halfway up his shin.  If anything could save his leg from amputation, it would be that the leg had sunk with the weight of the grain drill and not been crushed between it and firmer soil.

No one spoke, and Revis had the feeling he had missed the party.  It was likely that everything useful had already been said, and he knew fully well that if they had called him, all other alternatives had been exhausted.  The red mud on all surrounding pant legs, some up to the waist, betrayed a desperation that had slowly given way to frustration, and frustration was why one called Revis.

He noticed the boy himself for the first time, taking in his full form, not just the pinned leg.  He was fifteen or so, and stocky with a ruddy complexion.  Had he been upright, he would likely have been quite taller than Revis, but he didn’t look as though he shaved yet and still had the rounded, unhewn look of a child.  The boy’s face was remarkably placid.  Though he was undoubtedly in considerable pain, he made no outward show of it, and aside from his chest rising and falling heavily, one might have thought him lying down for a break during an afternoon’s cultivation.

“We reckon most of the weight’s on the foot itself.  He can’t feel much down there, and he’s the better for it, but he’s been pinned for half an hour or more, and there’s concern over blood loss.  It’s hard to tell what’s blood and what’s mud, with the field in this shape.  Figure your best bet is to come down the old field road by that top piece there where it’s less muddy and….”

Revis raised a hand in the deputy’s direction and, looking in the boy’s eyes, said quietly, “What’s your name, son?”

“Derrick.”

“Derrick what?”

“McElwayne.  Derrick McElwayne.”

“What were you doing out here trying to plant soybeans after that storm last night?  Didn’t you know this field would be unfit for it?”

“My daddy said I ought to have all this piece planted before he came back from Chattanooga.  He said he was counting on me.”

“When does he come back from Chattanooga, Derrick?”

“Tomorrow.  And I ain’t but half done.  Me and daddy planned to have planting over with by the weekend at the latest.”

Revis knelt beside the boy and rested his hand on the boy’s freckled cheek.  “Do you know the best way to make God laugh, son?  Tell him your plans.  Now you just try and relax.  I’m going to release you from all this pain.  Just be patient and trust me, and it will all be over soon.”

He stood and turned toward the truck, passing through the throng of rescue personnel whose expressions ranged from bemusement to disgusted exasperation.  He took a few paces past where the pack of them stood and turned back toward them.

“When I get the old girl out here, I’m going to need some room to work.  I’ve got some 2×8”s in the truck if she starts to bog down, but I think we’ll be just fine.”

Some of the men nodded imperceptibly, but none of them spoke.  Revis searched each face in quick succession, and in the silence first noticed the beads of sweat forming on his neck and forehead.  He dabbed them with a dingy but meticulously ironed and folded handkerchief, then stowed it back into the left breast pocket of his shirt.

“You boys got any ice water?”

II.

Revis could always tell who had the spirit and who didn’t, at least among the women, by who kept fanning themselves with their funeral home fans despite being in the full throws of Pentecostal carrying on.   Those upon whom the Lord was really working, the ones who spoke in tongues, who shook and shuddered in the aisles, knocking over metal folding chairs, insensate to coming bruises on shins and knees, did not fan themselves and gave in to the heat and consuming humidity.   Sweat poured off them in beads as they swayed and wailed or ran the narrow center aisle, eyes cast heavenward with no concern for obstacles in their path.  The Holy Spirit, Revis reasoned, didn’t mind a few bruises.

Once, a young congregant had sat amongst a group of her peers watching the services with a sort of wry grin, as though she had gained admission to a show she wasn’t supposed to laugh at.  He had noticed her as she entered, this one and only time she visited.  A shortish brunette with long, straight hair, fine freckles, heavy breasts, and thin arms unaccompanied save the infant she carried nonchalantly like a handbag, in the crook of her arm.  She had been discreetly breastfeeding the child behind a worn blue towel when suddenly her eyes lolled in their sockets like loose bearings, and she thrust her child violently into her neighbor’s lap and began to leap in the aisle, going no place but up and down, up and down, the blue towel long gone.

Revis feared his congregation would be scandalized by the undulating breast, but with the exception of a small group of widows near the front, they were all too wrapped up in their own carrying on to notice.  The young girl flailed as if afflicted by a persistent swarm of bees as one of the widows nodded in the direction of the rogue bosom and said to her neighbor, “You’d think the spirit would at least tell her to put her damn titty in her blouse.”

It was at that moment, in the presence of a flopping breast, that Revis came to appreciate the utter superfluity of his position.  He was, as his father often said, about as necessary as tits on a boar hog, and recognition and disappointment washed over him in alternating waves.  He gazed at the scant congregation, their forms contorting and loudly disarranging folding chairs, voices rising and falling but mostly rising, their eyes rolling in every direction but his.  He was, for the duration of the service, without purpose save stoking their fervor with an occasional exhortation shouted over the din of their worship.

He stood and watched his congregants, his congregants, commune with God all on their own, when it was he who was their true conduit to God.  They had circumnavigated him and could now reach Jesus without his help.  He primed the pump and pulled the rope, and the Spirit did the rest.  This, Revis concluded, was no place for a man of his talents.

He had investigated other churches and even other denominations.  Subtlety was not a virtue Revis possessed or valued in others, but he managed to put out feelers, primarily among those whose vehicles he rescued from the red Alabama soil.  Through particularly deft conversational maneuvering, he learned of a scandal-ridden Baptist church near Harmony whose preacher’s wife had fallen pregnant, most likely by the organist.  He could appreciate the pun, but Revis had no interest in Baptists – they were too docile and always secretly detested their pastors.

There was also a Methodist congregation in need of an interim pastor while their normal shepherd recovered from a heart attack.  Revis felt much the same about Methodists as he did about Baptists and had no interest in their lukewarm attitude toward church attendance.  Besides, he was no one’s substitute.  By far the most promising items were a Pentecostal church up in Dawson (their last pastor was dispatched mid-service by a satinback rattlesnake) and a black church down in Will’s Valley (their pastor was dispatched by a jealous husband).   Between the two, Revis decided that neither suited his powers and that he would bide his time until the right opportunity came.   Granted, the fire didn’t help.

The old church ladies were riding him hard.  They, because of infirmity or lack of spiritual zeal, did the least shaking and whatnot during the service, and because they were the only ones who paid any attention, Revis became suspicious.  They were hard after him to organize some kind of crusade to gather as great a force of spiritual power as could fit in Doris Whitlock’s Plymouth and go out to the county line, that demarcation of evil, and minister to those stumbling out of Ruby’s.  More than once Beth Turley had suggested that they actually go into Ruby’s to come to grips with Old Scratch in his lair.  Revis nipped this idea in the bud, citing legal reasons but withholding his own concern that half of the clientele knew him, including Ruby herself.  She had almost been his wife once and would be still if the county probate judge hadn’t ruled that Revis couldn’t officiate his own wedding.

Despite his stalling, the church ladies were gaining strength, not least from a young doctor who was about as Pentecostal as Liberace but had bought a considerable tract of land near Ruby’s with the intent of turning it into a sedate horse farm.  Loud drunks, rickety trucks, and electric guitars played poorly tended to do ill to a horse’s delicate constitution, and he offered to fund the whole damn thing out of pocket.  He had even treated Doris’ latest bout of sciatica gratis, the little shit.

He couldn’t win against these hateful old bitches, that much was certain.  But Revis had built this church from little more than a dozen illiterate peanut farmers meeting on folding chairs in the back of Betty France’s store to damn near 100 regular attendees.  It was his church and his congregation.  Yes, they had outgrown him, but they needed him, whether they knew it or not.

III.

No one ever reads the book of Obadiah.  Tucked at the obtuse tale-end of the Old Testament, it’s rarely referenced in sermons, and most readers of the Hebrew Bible succumb to boredom long before they reach its sparse pages.  Revis liked these books the best – Micah, Zechariah – there was nothing really substantive in them, but he could be sure that none of his congregation had ever read them, and that allowed him considerable creative license.  Like most hard-shell Protestants, they knew chapter and verse of the Bible’s greatest hits, but obscurity wasn’t their strong suit.

Normally, he relied on the obscure texts when he had been too busy or too hung over to prepare a sermon.  He prided himself on his ability to preach off the cuff.  Any hack could do the Gospels, and God save you if your church had sunk so far into complacency that you had to summon forth the horrors of Revelation to make their dead eyes spark and their asses move among the pews.  No, when Revis went to the well, he went to the obscure Old Testament, partly because he wanted to show off his pedantry but mostly because he knew no one would bother to check his scripture.

He had artfully allowed Belinda Pendergrass to precede his sermon with her admonition about Ruby’s and the evils lurking across the county line.  Her heavily powdered jowls shook with fervor as she described scenes of godlessness and debauchery; Dewey Pittman’s young wife had been lured there by the young hussies she worked with at the bank and had come back drunk as a bicycle and with, Doris stage-whispered, her panties in her purse.  Gilbert Manchen had been duped into marrying a buxom redhead from Chattanooga who had shown up with her “brother,” conveniently empowered as a Justice of the Peace, and the two were hitched inside the men’s room while the jukebox blared Johnny Cash.

Once Belinda had had her say, Revis mounted the stage.  It was nothing more than a single layer of cinder blocks covered with cheap, bristly red carpeting, but it served him well enough.

“Belinda has had a vision.  Belinda has seen the pit of sin, the den of inequity, the gaping jaws of the beast, drawing the members of our community into its grasp.   Drunkenness, whoredom, lechery – when my daddy was laid to rest on this ridge, he never would have known that on the other side of it was a hive of hell-bound heathens whose sins of the flesh will earn them an eternity of torment.  I worry about my daddy, down in that ground, the same ground those harlots dance on, the same ground the drunks stumble over and the same ground where the godless relieve their bladders against that cinder block wall.”

People grumbled and someone actually hissed.  Revis made a mental note that the image of drunks urinating on the honored dead packed considerable spiritual punch.

“Oh, they smile at you in the bank.  They smile at you in France’s.  They smile at you in the seed and feed, but their hearts are filled with lust, their stomachs are rotten with liquor, and their hands are the instruments of Satan!”

Men spat in disgust.  Women fanned themselves aggressively.  An old girl in the back may have lost consciousness.  My God, he thought, I’m going out with a bang.

“Our brothers.  Our sisters.  Our friends and neighbors.  Our children.  Belinda isn’t the only one who received a vision of the destruction of the wicked.”  With this, he thunked open his hulking Bible roughly to the middle where the book of Obadiah was marked with a Bic pen.

Revis stood motionless for a seemingly eternal minute.  His eyes, unblinking, scanned the crowd.  “Let’s read from Obadiah.”

It was uncharacteristically quiet as faces shifted from confusion to disbelief.  Some wondered if they had misunderstood.  The more suspicious among them (the Pendergrasses were always on the lookout for the irreligious) suspected him of preaching from foreign text.  The best most of them could do was to hunt around the middle of their Bibles and try to guess the placement of the elusive book simply by where Revis’ pen was.   “How many of you believe Belinda came here today by coincidence?  How many of you believe her testimony is a random act?  Maybe some of you think it was an accident.”  The faces that stared back bore a bevy of expressions, all variants on confusion.  “Now, how many of you believe in prophecy?”

“Obadiah was a prophet, and he foretold the destruction of a wicked place.  A sinful place, a foul den of debauchery and fornication called Edom.  The people of Edom, the children of Esau, brother of Jacob (or so he hoped; Old Testament genealogy had never been a passion of his) had lost sight of the word of God.  They lived in sin, drinking and whoring on into the night, carrying on like no one was watching.  But God was watching.  And God gave Obadiah a prophecy to share with Edom’s neighbors.

“Oh, the Israelites looked down on Edom.  They saw it for what it was and thought they were better than the Edomites and their wickedness.  But Obadiah Verse 3 says ‘the pride of thine heart hath deceived thee, thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high; that saith in his heart, Who shall bring me down to the ground?  Though thou exalt thyself as the eagle, and though thou set thy nest among the stars, thence will I bring thee down, saith the Lord.’  The Israelites set themselves above the Edomites and watched them fall into sin’s trap.

“Now, how many of you think you’re better than them that drinks over at Ruby’s?  Because you stay dry most days and don’t carouse around till all hours, you think your noses are clean.  But they’re not, no sir.  Not by a long shot.  If you were true Christians, you’d try to help your brothers.  You’d try to help your sisters.  You’d try to help your friends and your neighbors.  You’d march in there and drag them out.  You’d run them out with baseball bats.  You’d stir a hornet’s nest such ain’t been seen before.  And you’d do it in love.  For every stinking drunk, every woman eat up with sin, you’d do it in love.  The law tells you that’s  not your right, and that they’ve got every right to carry on up there all they like.  But that’s man’s law.  And man’s law can judge you.  It can even convict you.  But when you stand before God’s court, man’s law can’t help you.  He’s going to ask you what you did to help your fellow sinners.  And you’ll have to answer, “Nothing.”  “Nothing, Lord.  Not a thing, because I was afraid to spend the night in jail.”  Each and every one of us, sitting here as pretty as can be on Sunday morning, ignoring that abomination across the ridge like an ugly cousin.  Go on and pretend it’s not there.  Go on and pretend you don’t know your neighbors are in there on Friday nights, neck deep in wickedness.  Go on and pretend.  And practice what you’ll say to Saint Peter, because it had better be good.”

“Panties,” Revis breathed, his voice barely more than a whisper, “in her purse.”

Hymns were played with exceptional fervor.  Women wailed and shuddered, lamenting their own sinfulness.  Men wept and tore at their hair.  The whole congregation was so utterly despondent over its failure to be virtuous that what came next could hardly be considered a surprise.  After the service, Revis disappeared quickly.  He knew well enough what was being planned and knew he didn’t need to hear a word of it.  Heads nodded vigorously.  Men spat.  Bill Lachney pounded his fist on one of the folding tables in the fellowship hall and pointed toward the ridge.

Revis left them there, his wrecker lumbering out of the gravel drive and down the hill before he could hear a word.  He would, after all, need to be convincing if he were going to maintain his innocence.

IV.

The sirens came earlier than he had expected.  Revis sat on his porch alone, with the exception of the Louvin Brothers, and let the cold canned beer dangle from his middle finger and thumb.  Multiple sirens keened over the Louvin Brothers’ close harmony and faded into the direction of his church and Ruby’s Supper Club.   It had been raining all evening, and the road up the mountain wasn’t likely to be kind to police cruisers.

He wasn’t actually worried until he heard the fire trucks, and he wasn’t panicked until he smelled smoke.  He had assumed that, at worst, Bill Lachney and his brothers and maybe Neal Berry would go in there with axe handles and smash a few bottles, with the women in tow shouting about Obadiah and the Edomites.  Maybe someone would even brandish a shotgun, but that was a long shot.  No one would get hurt beyond a broken nose or an axe handle to the ribs.  With some luck, one of the boys would be thrown in jail, and Revis would make a stink and get his name in the paper.  He didn’t say anything about fire.

Now the smoke was thicker, and a faint orange glow could be seen rising from the far side of the ridge.  This was trouble.

He had made a pot of coffee in an effort to sober up and sat back down on the porch and reasoned that the sheriff probably wouldn’t call until the morning.  The second the telephone rang, Revis knew he was mistaken.

“You better get over here,” the sheriff intoned in his unmistakable twang.

“Where’s that, sheriff?”

“Fuck you.  You know where.  Get over here and bring your truck.  We got a washed out road and drunks slid off it in every direction.”

“I’ll be there directly,” Revis replied, knowing the sheriff had already hung up.

Rain drummed on the M60’s cavernous hood as Revis carefully picked his way up the ridge toward Ruby’s.   The road’s sides were washed sheer, and he could see little more than a few yards ahead of his bumper.  First he saw a Plymouth half off the road, its rear tires still spinning.  Just past that, a red Chevy sedan sat mired up to its axles in red Early County mud.  Following that, a string of disabled vehicles led him to a site for which he was thoroughly unprepared: the burned out shell of Ruby’s, its squat cinder block perimeter surrounded by muddy police cruisers and fire trucks whose flaccid hoses lay impotently in the gravel.  Ruby’s was a ruin, its roof caved in and its patrons turned out like fire ants whose mound had been doused with kerosene.  Most of them seemed to have careened into trees and ditches.

An ambulance’s rear bay hung open, treating a semi-nude and wildly gesticulating man.  Revis immediately recognized him as a man named Canfield whose local claim to fame was that he had once grown a squash that bore an uncanny resemblance to himself and, unable to bring himself to slice and fry his own visage, attempted to sell it to museums as far flung as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who cordially informed him that his gourd was neither art nor really that similar to his own face in the Polaroid he had provided them.

Those patrons without cars huddled where they could, some still clutching bottles of Miller Hi-Life and attempting to keep their cigarettes aflame in the persistent rain.  The young physician was present also, making a grand show of treating the wounded, despite the rain and indecent hour, and suggesting that many of the wounds were caused by the collapse of Ruby’s shoddy roof and that “People have sued over less.”

Revis was still taking in the wet, smoldering catastrophe when the sheriff clamped his hand on Revis’ shoulder.  He turned to face the sheriff, whom he found holding the long, charred neck of a soda bottle an inch from his nose.

“Arson.”

“Come again?”

“I heard about your little sermon this morning.  Seems some of your flock took it upon themselves to interrupt these folks’ good time.  Someone threw an RC Cola bottle filled with gas through the back window.  Leon Canfield said he went running out the backdoor and got hit square in the gut with a hoe handle.  Said he was sure it was Ricky Treadwell.  Ain’t he one of yours?  Said he was shouting something about the “Edenites.”

“Edomites,” Revis said before he could stop himself.

“You and all your snake handling hillbillies up on that mountain are going to pay for all this, one way or another.  You can start by cranking that truck up and dragging every one of these sorry asses out of here.  Start with my car.  It’s buried neck deep over by the fire engine.”

Revis said nothing and retreated back to his still-running truck across the smoldering wasteland of red mud, wrecked vehicles, and displaced bar-goers.  He would start to work methodically, his powerful truck liberating the vehicles of the local constabulary as well as the patrons, some of whom were still achingly, knee-crawling drunk and becoming increasingly agitated by the rain and their cars’ conditions.  He cleared the last vehicle, a white Plymouth Valiant, ill-suited to the red mountain mud, as first light broke over the ridge.  He drove home a satisfied man, a witness to the potency of his own handiwork, reeking of red mud and ashes as dawn streamed through the pine woods.

I couldn’t be more pleased at the acceptance of your novel, though I had no doubt about it ever since I read the opening pages.  What I hope now is that you’ll come off the notion that you don’t want to go on with the work.  The novel is just what Lawrence called it, “the one bright book of life.”

The recipient is novelist Walker Percy; the novel in question is Percy’s seminal The Moviegoer.  The letter continues thus:

By the end of the month I expect to have killed Stonewall Jackson dead as a mackerel; which makes an excellent stopping place before I tackle the complexities of the Vicksburg Campaign.

The letter’s author, Shelby Foote, was hard at work on his own masterpiece, The Civil War: A Narrative.  His sprawling 3 volume, 1.5 million-word masterwork on the American Civil War took more than 20 years to write and is arguably the definitive work on the subject.  I say “arguably” because critics assail the fact that it reads more like a novel than “proper history,” something I consider to be a success rather than a failing.  If you want a line-by-line breakdown of the conflict, try some Bruce Catton.  Foote, on the other hand, crafts a heartbreakingly beautiful tale of the conflict while avoiding the tacky sentimentality of Ken Burns.

Percy (the adopted nephew of Lanterns on the Levee author William Alexander Percy), on the other hand, spent years honing his fiction and working on what Foote dubbed, “his apprentice novels.”  The Moviegoer, with its portrayal of New Orleans stock broker Binx Bolling’s post-war suburban ennui, would go on to win the 1961 National Book Award.

To be frank, I’m writing this entire piece to recommend Jay Tolson’s The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy.  Though most of the correspondence is from Foote (who, as a friend accurately points out, has the definitive Southern accent — when I imagine what God must look and sound like, it’s Shelby Foote), the collection reveals a deep bond between two masters of their craft and lays bare the anxieties, failings, ambitions, and ultimate successes of two giants of literature, Southern or otherwise.

School friends from Greenville, MS, Foote and Percy keep in close contact for over 40 years.  While Foote labors for decades on what he simply refers to as, “the narrative,” Percy soldiers on and writes Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, and several other novels as well as scholarly articles.

Tolson’s collection is not only valuable as a connecting thread between two sharp literary minds; the book itself is readable from cover to cover, expertly edited and footnoted with explanatory bits for the more ambiguous references.  For fans of either writer, it’s a must.  If you’re new to one or both, it works as a pretty good introduction to the context of the works’ creation if not the works themselves.

Further reading:

UNC: The Walker Percy Project

YHP: There is exactly one way to make a mint julep

To say that director Martin Ritt plays it safe here is an understatement.  In 1958, a big budget movie about the South knew better than to touch on the issues of social and racial inequality that course through Faulkner’s work.  Ritt crafts a safe, “Sunny South” version of Faulkner with jovial black servants and scores of drawling but affable locals.  He hasn’t quite translated Faulkner to the big screen so much as he has sanitized him and extracted from his revolutionary fiction what amounts to little more than a gassy boy-meets-girl story.

Summer tells us less about Faulkner than it does the society that gave birth to it.  Ritt, once an accused communist whose schooling at North Carolina’s Elon University shocked him into a fascination with the rigidly stratified South, leaves no hint of his personality on this film.  The whitewash of Faulkner’s South is so weak-kneed and treacly that at one point, Ben Quick compares the size of a bedroom in the Varner manse to the size of his entire family home, prompting the black house manager to nod in a sort of familiar agreement, a scene seemingly designed to cement a bi-racial “us versus them” approach to Southern poverty.  Modern viewers’ eyes will roll early and often.

Still, Summer’s box office and critical success speak volumes about the prevailing view of the South, at least in contemporary cinema.  Watching this film, one gets a feeling that “it’s not as bad as all that,” that the black underclass is perfectly content to serve the aristocracy, that the grinding poverty of rural whites consisted of little more than lazily chewing tobacco outside the general store, and that the lily white flower of Southern womanhood need only receive an injection of strong farm stock to rescue her from the effete man of the New South.

If it’s Faulkner you want, you’ll only find him between two covers.  The Long, Hot Summer, however, plays less like “Barn Burning” and more like Song of the South.  Skip this and see The Accountant. Twice.

View the trailer here.

George Singleton

• Oxford American has a list of The Best Southern Novels of All Time.  1o novels, more or less all considered the greatest hits of the Southern Canon.  How many have you read?

• Finally, the surreal.  What’s more Southern than Sweet Home Alabama?  Love it or hate it, there’s something hysterically odd about hearing this perennial barroom favorite performed by a Finnish rock band backed the Soviet Red Army Choir.  I can’t wait for the comments on this one.

In Tobacco Road, his most well-known work, the Lesters, headed by the impossibly lazy and licentious Jeeter, are a sort of low-budget Snopes family.  Jeeter’s children have mostly left home for work in the cotton mills of west Georgia.  His daughter Pearl married a local railroad man at age 12.  The only children remaining at home are his disfigured daughter Ellie Mae and the borderline retarded Dude.  (Dude, however, eventually marries a disfigured “woman preacher” 20 years his senior and spends the rest of the novel idiotically crashing her car into various objects.)

In God’s Little Acre (made into a feature film, as all terrible books are, in 1958), Caldwell reprises his earlier hit with the Walden family.  Replacing laziness with a comically unbelievable “gold fever,” the Walden’s brain-dead paterfamilias, Ty Ty, occupies his time by digging vast pits on his fallow cotton land in search of a lode of gold.  The ensuing plot is of little consequence and seems to be little more than a shabby backdrop for his parody of rural idiocy.  The Waldens and their various in-laws do little more than have sex with one another indiscriminately and have mind-numbing conversations about the presence of gold on their crumbling farm.

Caldwell primarily traffics in ignorance and incest, making his characters either unbelievably stupid, unbelievably libidinous, or both.  In God’s Little Acre, Darling Jill Walden manages to sleep with pretty much every male in the novel, including a captive albino named Dave.  Her father is obsessed with her older sister’s breasts and often praises them loudly in public.  Also present is an impossibly dim and obese would-be sheriff named Pluto who may or may not have been the inspiration for Boss Hogg.

These novels are naked farces, and to an extent that absolves them of their failures.  Unlike the best examples of the genre, however, Caldwell falls back on cheap laughs and absurd sexual situations to provide ballast to his leaden narratives.  Though both novels briefly light upon serious issues (misuse of farm land and the sacrifice of the small farmer at the altar of greater profits), neither does more than indicate Caldwell’s awareness of social injustice and ruinous farming policies.

In short, neither novel is worth the reading.  They survive largely because they lampoon poor rural whites, and that is the last socio-economic group acceptable to abuse.  It is difficult to imagine any work of fiction whose reputation survives into the 21st century that treats any other group so roughly.  Caldwell fails as both satirist and cultural critic, and both novels would be better off relegated to the scrap heap of forgotten books.  His narratives are plodding and amateurish, his characters achingly one-dimensional, and his books will almost certainly make you wish you hadn’t read them.

Who cares?

His novels are engaging, readable, and present us with a version of the South that is rapidly disappearing.  Burke’s primary interest is the Cajun South, the bayou South, the French-speaking South that is rapidly being subsumed by larger interests.  Yes, he trafficks heavily in nostalgia for a long-gone cane-farming Cajun world, but ultimately that is part of his charm.  His novels are mysteries and feature characters who are knowable and accessible.  Their covers are cheap, yes, and appeal to airport travelers looking for a few hours’ entertainment.  This is a shame, and I do not blame him for it.  My time in the publishing industry taught me just how little control authors have over the way their work is marketed, and I imagine that somewhere on the bayou is a man who deeply resents the packaging his work has been given.

I first came across his work while working for his publishing company and have enjoyed it ever since.  His work is woefully packaged  as glossy, embossed-cover airport bullshit, but it’s so much better.  He is, despite the packaging, no Dean Koontz and I am immeasurably thankful for that.  Burke engages his readers in intellectual gamesmanship, daring them to penetrate not only the mystery at the heart of the novel itself, but the complex social structures that surround his bayou culture and make it viable as a novel setting.

So what does it tell us about the South?  Not very much that we didn’t know already.  Unlike inferior novelists, Burke does not rely on the South as a dramatic foil, nor does he use it to advance his plot when poor writing fails him.  Instead, he creates a swirling bayou world that is both engrossing and utterly believable.  Much more than airport fare, Burke’s work is as engaging as it is accessible.  Ignore the cheap book jackets and enjoy the books themselves.

In The Half-Mammals of Dixie, Singleton unpacks the lives of Forty-Five’s sparse population in short, comic sketches.   Common themes here are childhood friendship, alcoholism, and the uniquely small town phenomenon of the cheating spouse that everyone is aware of but the cuckold himself.

More than anything, The Half-Mammals of Dixie is funny.  It will make you laugh frequently and occasionally aloud.  But, like jokes delivered in rapid succession, they can become muddled if read all in one sitting.  Each story, while related to the other pieces in varying degrees, works as a stand-alone narrative that doesn’t rely on the rest of the collection for buttressing, and that may be Half-Mammal’s greatest strength — pull if off your shelf at random and read a story to lighten a bleak mood.  I frequently ask my girlfriend to read them to me when cooking, doing taxes, etc.  It’s really unbeatable for that sort of thing.

While Singleton ultimately lacks the sophisticated prose styling of later Rash (buy yourself a copy of One Foot in Eden or, even better, Serena) or Berry’s inimitable sense of place, his work succeeds in providing sharp comic sketches of rural life with taut prose and impeccable narrative pacing.  But perhaps above all, there is no hint of corn-pone in Half-Mammals.  Singleton manages to keep the stories recognizable, relatable, and hilarious without once going for the low-brow “dumb cracker” joke.  There is not one single dead mule.  The humor is deft and original, and that alone warrants a read.

Sure, it’s not Faulkner.  But nothing is.

See also: George Singleton interviewed on IndieBound

And so we come to a book by Bob Brewer and Warren Getler alternately titled Rebel Gold: One Man’s Quest to Crack the Code Behind the Secret Treasure of the Confederacy and the less unwieldy Shadow of the Sentinel: One Man’s Quest to Find the Hidden Treasure of the Confederacy. The publisher seems to have tried out both titles to see which one would stick.  Regardless, it’s an ostensibly nonfiction book about a retiree who allegedly comes from a long line of treasure guardians and sets out to decipher their intricate code of carvings on rocks and trees in the Arkansas wilderness.

The alleged treasure belongs to the Knights of the Golden Circle, an order who, as the book would have us believe, was ultimately behind the Civil War and who ran the Confederacy as a sort of shadow government.  I’m not joking.  After the war was all but over, the KGC apparently decided to squirrel away vast amounts of gold in the Arkansas hills in order to finance the next war of secession, which they believed would come relatively soon.  And so, we are faced with a book in which a retiree and his wife chase around the woods with Radio Shack metal detectors and unearth Mason jars full of coins.  Wheee.

I’m going to be completely honest here: I didn’t finish this book.  I couldn’t.  That’s why this post is so delinquent; I kept putting it off for another day, hoping to finish this book and be able to write a review of it so punishingly snarky that it would make the authors weep with shame and self-reproach.  But I couldn’t.  I thumbed the last 100 pages or so, which seems to involve some sort of Confederate helicopter.  Again, not joking.  What I did read (the first 200 pages or so) was a deadly mixture of terrible narrative pacing, absurd logical leaps, and brutal and oppressive boredom.

We are expected to believe the following, among other gems:

1. An immensely wealthy group was secretly financing the Confederate government.  At a certain point they decided that, rather than pouring their remaining funds into the existing war, that they would tuck it away and wait for the next national bloodbath.

2. This immensely wealthy group chose to stash its money in Mason jars in the Arkansas wilderness rather than use, say, foreign banks.

3.  The Knights of the Golden Circle entrusted penniless backwoodsmen with the treasure’s safety.

4.  That, while much of the country was starving and their own families were living at subsistence level, these backwoodsmen dutifully guarded a vast hoard of wealth that could have made them rich beyond imagination, and did so out of some fierce loyalty to a twisted version of Lost Cause ideology.

5.  That there is some sort of massive cache of Confederate gold stored somewhere in Arizona, but if you get near it, helicopters will come and shoo you away.

So.  Needless to say, this book doesn’t contribute in any meaningful way to the discourse on the Southern condition.  It is a poorly written and dreadfully boring thing and relies solely upon conjecture and the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief in order to get the least bit of traction.  So why am I writing about it?

Because, as sad as it may be, it’s an effort to tie Southern culture (or at least elements of Southern history) to a larger milieu of broad, vaguely Masonic conspiracy theories.  In this case, the Civil War just happens to be a convenient target.  Brewer and Getler wield Southern history like a weapon and use its history in the cheapest of ways (the cover of the book is so low-rent as to be offensive).  They are essentially cashing in on America’s vague fascination with the otherness of Southern culture and landscape and cobbling together a silly conspiracy as a means to sell books.

I don’t begrudge them their right to capitalism.  I just wish they would take it somewhere else.

Cracker Culture is McWhiney’s most well-formed manifestation of his Celtic thesis.  Other books, like the slim and morbid Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage, rely on it but don’t explore the idea in full.  Cracker Culture draws on 3 main points to link early Southern culture with Celtic heritage:

1. Early Southern people liked to get drunk.  Irish and Scottish people like to get drunk.
2. Early Southern people didn’t like to work and preferred to rely on herded cattle and swine to make a living, since it was easier than tilling and raising crops.  Same for Celtic peoples.
3. Early Southern people liked to have fun (see #1) and valued leisure above prosperity.  Same for the Celts.

Yes, these things are generally true.  And yes, much of Celtic culture that is lost even to Europe survives (or at least survived) in the Deep South.  In the chapter on hospitality, McWhiney quotes a Yankee traveler “The food generally amounts to no more than fried fatback and cornbread.”  And a Northerner noted ” that dyspepsia was a common complaint in Kentucky, as God knows it ought to be.”  That could describe the meals my grandparents spoke of and still ate into the 1990s.  Cornbread (which no one but Southerners truly know how to make — try ordering it elsewhere, and you get a vile, sweet yellow stuff unfit for human consumption), pork, buttermilk, field peas, and collards were a typical meal for my grandparents.

Celtic folk music also survives in the Deep South and informs Old Time and Bluegrass music to this day.

Yes, many if not most Caucasian Southerners are of Celtic extraction.  However, what McWhiney misses is that the Deep South is an extremely cosmopolitan place.  McWhiney loves to contrast the Celtic Southerners, with their love of whiskey, horse races, and knife fights, with the staid Ango-Saxon Northerners, with their pasty complexions and general love of industry and hatred of all things fun.  Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

The first problem here is that Southern culture (specifically music and cuisine) owes a great deal to African culture.  The banjo, after all, is derived from an African lute.  McWhiney also glosses over German, Dutch and English settlers and especially over the heavy population of French who settled the Southern Gulf coast (fun fact: Demopolis, AL was founded by French exiles from the Napoleonic Wars).

The second problem is that many of the attributes he ascribes to Southerners are endemic to basically all people.  People of all stripes enjoy fun and will generally avoid work if possible.  Were early Southerners primarily Celtic in descent?  Yes.  Does a Southerner’s distaste for work and love of fun equate a connection with Celtic culture?  Not in the least.

McWhiney’s idea is valuable in that it illustrates the connection between the New World and Old Europe as it pertains to the Deep South.  It’s certainly worth a read.  However, it also neglects large swathes of Southern culture and goes to great length to connect the slimmest of threads from Dixie to the Celtic hinterland.  Does it deserve a place on your bookshelf?  Sure.  Does it deserve to be taken as gospel?  Not a chance in hell.

This is due in large part to the sad fact that Reconstruction never quite ended.  The Southerner endures endless fusillades at his own heritage; never quite erudite enough, never quite progressive enough, always a little late to the party.  The Southerner is both curiosity and cancer, welcomed for comedic value but spurned for ideological rigidity.

Needless to say, it is difficult to learn about Southern culture in universities.  Such classes are a rarity and, when they do exist, focus entirely on the unforgivable brutishness of the plantation system.  There is, however, more to the South than slavery, plantations, and the Civil War.  So where do we go to actually learn about Southernness?  Good news, friends.  Here’s a list.

If you haven’t investigated the topic before, start here:

1.  The Big Three: The Basis of Your Education in Southernism

Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity

UGA’s James Cobb provides a compelling and comprehensive survey of Southern identity that pulls no punches where failures are concerned, yet does not shy away from the complex cultural history of the South.  Not overly academic, but more than deep enough for the novice.  Start here.

The Mind of the South

W.J. Cash’s mid-century masterpiece on the Southern psyche and its formative elements.  Read this next and enjoy the sensation of falling down a rabbit hole.  Cash’s assertions about the formation of Southern identity are as accurate today as they were prescient 60+ years ago.  A must have.

The Burden of Southern History

C. Vann Woodward’s work rounds out what I consider “The Big Three.”  Granted, I slightly despise this book.  Woodward’s primary thesis is that if you are a Southerner, you have a pathological difficulty interacting with the world.  He spends the better part of the book providing supporting material on why Southernism is a pathology rather than a culture.  Of course, he was at Yale at the time of its publication (1960), a time when doing pop-psych on the South was terribly en vogue.  So if I hate it so much, why do I recommend it?  Because it perfectly illustrates how the rest of America sees the South.  Enjoy your outrage.

2. A Deeper Understanding

Once you’ve passed through the Big 3 and are ready for some deeper reading, I recommend the following, in no certain order:

The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism

Eugene Genovese’s slim volume on Southernism and its attendant spirit, a unique brand of agrarian conservatism (don’t mistake the term — it would be a complete stranger to today’s “conservatives”) is a fascinating and quick read through the genesis of the Southern political identity.

The Idea of the American South

Michael O’Brien’s book is not a page turner and is only recommended for the serious student of Southernism.  It’s not exactly engaging and its thesis is often elusive.   However, its contents are eminently useful for understanding a particularly formidable period in the South’s history. Not for the timid.

The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver

I hesitated to put this on the list.  Weaver is a highly polarizing figure commonly noted for his books on political theory (Ideas Have Consequences, Visions of Order) and his Southern Essays can be challenging and even maddening. Again, not for the timid — these essays require focus but are highly rewarding.  Certainly, some of the political stances are dated (at best).  Overlook these, and you’ll be highly rewarded for your efforts.