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.

He stepped off the porch and with a lazy spit in the clematis headed off towards the car.  On arriving, he had been half-tempted to leave it idling in the drive so she would understand just how brief he intended this visit to be.  The cylinders on that thing knocked something awful and he’d have to see to them sooner or later, but the damn thing was about to fall off its wheels as it was and he couldn’t afford to put any more money into it, especially with poultry prices sinking further each month.  He laid vengeance aside and turned the ignition off and let the old engine get as cold as you please.  Besides, these visits were never as brief as one intended.

His mother was a hard old woman and her small home smelled perpetually like stale coffee and the musty, medicated reek of the ungraciously old.  He blamed the smell principally on the lack of ventilation.  She kept the place shut tight, window and door, all through the summer because she got chills, even in the Early County heat.  She did nothing easily, and dying was no exception.  The old girl had been hanging on for more than a year now, well past when the doctors had said that she would ease on out of this world, but that was just like her.  Utterly without consideration.

At least once a day, Everhardt Painter, the only child of Bernadine and Joseph T., 22 years married, inveterate smoker, henpecked, bad feet, plaid shirt, and co-owner of a struggling poultry supply company paid his daily obeisance to his aged mother.  He preferred “aged” to “aging” for no other reason than that he hoped she was about done with it.

The Biscayne (black) started with a cough and backed out of the drive, its tires crunching on the chert road.  A recent lack of rain had rendered the road a dusty mess, and the small white house disappeared from view in less than 50 yards.  It was hot, the windows were down, and the smoke from his cigarette hung mingled in the fine brown dust as he sped back toward home.

He was in no hurry to get there and took the longest route possible, following a meandering road, little more than ruts, around some anonymous farm pond (he never had been sure which farm it went with) and an impossibly small block house belonging to a black family, several of whose children ran across the patchy brown yard in various states of undress.

When he arrived home, he climbed the creaking back steps and sat in the swing a bit.  He steadied himself with another cigarette.  He didn’t really want it and its burn was hateful to his parched throat, but he wanted less to go inside and confront the weight of his wife’s working day, which she had no doubt kept warm for him from the moment she got home and began work on whatever God forsaken casserole she was making tonight.

“Evert! Do you want bread or not?”

He said nothing and took a last long drag off his cigarette. He often wondered just when it was that his name had been shortened from the polysyllabic to an expedient slur.  Over the course of decades it had no doubt decayed without notice, and he was left with the ungracious diminutive.

“Reckon so.”

He rose and deposited his Red Wings just outside the arc of the screen door.  The kitchen smelled like cooking beef and he greeted his wife with a cold kiss on the cheek.  Without looking up from the skillet, she asked, “How’s your mama?”

“Hateful as ever.”

She no longer chided him for saying things like that and merely began spooning something that he assumed was canned tomato sauce over some chopped up peppers and onions in a broad white dish.  Cathy was a firm believer in the veneration of ancestors, no matter how shitty they had been on their way to old age.  To her, old folks were a treasure to be handled gingerly and their every request should be taken seriously, no matter how bizarre.  She regularly visited the nursing home with her church group and returned swelled with pride at having accommodated some old coot’s whims for another fruit cup or God knows what else.

Dinner was a plodding affair.  As usual, it featured the interrogation of their eldest son about the finer workings of his school day, to little avail.  He was at the particular age where he believed that the nuances of his social circles were too impossibly complex to explain to his parents.  He was also lamentably dim.  Everhardt had been forced to concede this fact when he had missed repeating the eighth grade by a very narrow margin.  He had swallowed the shame of the idea immediately and wondered openly if it wouldn’t do the boy some good, but Cathy wouldn’t hear of it and took several long meetings with teachers and counselors, ultimately emerging with the understanding that he would move on to high school by the grace of a few favors and a promise from the boy to do better.  Everhardt blamed Cathy’s side of the family, a genetic conflagration of the incurious and mentally torpid, and he had once said as much during a moment of stress regarding the boy’s flagging grades.   He was sure she had yet to forgive him.

For all her failings, Cathy had the decency not to inquire about how the business was doing.  She knew it was standing on one leg, and that that leg was her husband’s.  Walker Bird, her husband’s partner, seemed to regard Early Broiler Supply less as a business and more as a refuge from his wife and daughter.  Bird was currently paying for the privilege, as the business was losing money despite the fact that they were the largest poultry farm supplier in the county.  Bird never figured into their dinner conversation because he never did or said anything noteworthy.   He merely sat in his small and ill-kept office, drinking coffee until noon and big sweating glasses of iced tea until four, at which time he switched to heavily iced whisky.  He did no work, at least none visible to the naked eye, and somehow managed to make the slim local paper last all day.

After a dinner whose high point was Cathy’s animated retelling of a potentially catastrophic bookkeeping error at the auto dealership where she worked (as the bookkeeper), Everhardt retired to a small room he had built on to the garage.  It contained little more than a desk chair that hadn’t swiveled for a decade or better, an old and drably institutional metal desk, and a small brown motel fridge full of Pabst Blue Ribbon.  And a jar of peanuts.

It was here that he pursued his only hobby.  An amateur genealogist, he stayed up late pursuing the narrative of his own parentage with few resources save an abiding interest in his own past and the will to pester his relatives out of half-remembered anecdotes.  He had meticulously catalogued photocopies of the inside front covers of family bibles, birth records, hand written accounts of phone conversations on yellow legal paper, and old photos.  In his poorly equipped study, he had built a narrative for himself and was drawing close to a roughly finished version of his genealogy dating to 1840.

He was mostly proud of the distance between himself and his pioneering forbears.  That his family didn’t come from potato famine stock or the detritus of the Georgia penal colony (God forbid) was an immeasurable comfort.  Everhardt had little interest in the curiosities among his ancestry, the mad old former sheriff, the uncle who was the first dry cleaner in Alabama, and the pioneering Scotsman who had foolishly laid a plantation in the rocky foothills north of Fort Payne and then became a born again Pentecostal and gave all his land to his slaves and lived out his days as an itinerant preacher.  The slaves knew better than to farm in that poor soil and sold their tracts for what little they could get for them, lighting out in every direction with their few possessions in tow.

Madness didn’t interest him, or Confederate valor, or maiden aunts starting schools for the deaf.  It was aristocracy he was after, and the holy roller Scotsman was as close as he had come so far.  He had climbed around his family tree for better than 6 years and had laid hold of more than a few rotten branches.   He had also stumbled across a pair of sisters who seemed to have had a small fortune, its origin a mystery.  One, Evyline, wrote terrible poetry, almost all hideously sanguine stuff about the Crucifixion.  According to his uncle, she married a “vegetable eating queer” out of St Louis and died young of the croup, back when people still died of that.  The other, Anne, married late to a Methodist minister.  Both built fine homes across the road from one another, and neither had children.

It was the mystery of their fortune, small though it may have been, that consumed him so.  He did not suspect there would be any left for him or anyone else, of course, but where had it come from?   They were the only daughters of a fat old postmaster who had retired just after the War.  He had done little for the Confederacy and could, according to his contemporaries, barely be relied upon even to get the mail from one point to the next.  Still, he had married the youngest sister of Everhardt’s great granddaddy and seemed to be the scion of whatever bequest that had allowed his daughters the luxury of building fine homes and marrying foolishly.

It had been some time since Ann’s house had been torn down to make room for the state highway, but Evyline’s house remained.  More than once, and often after too many beers, Everhardt had crept through it, flashlight in hand, looking for something cartoonishly obvious like a loose floorboard, but found nothing.  The house had sat empty since 1952, nearly 15 years, since Evyline’s husband’s nephew, down from St. Louis, had used the place as a sort of winter home.  He was a wealthy enough man, something to do with sheet metal, and stayed there infrequently, less than 3 months out of the year.  They had met a few times, him and Everhardt, and he was a nice man if somewhat clueless about the nature of his inheritance.  He had died at the disappointing age of 66 and since then the house had had no occupants.  Everhardt had been curious about it for so long that once when he was in Fairfield to get a new tag for his car, he had inquired with the Probate office about the owner of the house and land.  He was surprised to find out that it had belonged to Bernadine Bell since 1922, a year before she married J. T. Painter and three years before she gave birth to Everhardt.

It had been damn near 5 years since he had been waiting for her to die, and he hated to think that his story would be the sort wherein a son sells his mother’s things and decamps for greener pastures. Nevertheless, she had kept herself shut up in that musty little house and him with it for ages.  Why had she lived there in that leaky little place when she could have enjoyed the high ceilings of Evyline’s house?  He had always assumed that the nephew had inherited it, but realized now that he was only renting it from his mother, if she had even asked for rent.  It would have been easy enough to move the whole family there more than a decade ago when that nephew died and he and Cathy were struggling to build a small farm house for their growing family, but Bernadine had said nothing.   Since then, the house had fallen farther into disrepair.   When he drove by last, the side porch was sagging between its columns and the backyard was littered with beer cans and cigarette butts, the telltale signs of high school revelry.

By the time he had reread the probate records over and over, as though one more glance would illuminate something in the austerely functional document that he had missed the first fifty times, it had gotten late and Everhardt was drunker than he meant to get.  He crawled in beside Cathy, somehow under covers despite the heat and humidity, and drifted uneasily to sleep, naked save a pair of blue and white striped boxer shorts that clung to his sweaty thighs.  Tomorrow’s poultry prices would be even lower and his business would be that much closer to ruin.

* * *

In the dark, silent morning he walked, yawning, off the porch in his old jeans and stained t-shirt, carrying a flashlight and brown paper grocery bag.  It was still before sunrise, but the air was Alabama warm and promised to be humid.  He stepped slowly through the first broiler house, long and mostly still, collecting the dead from the matte of chicken feed and dirt.  The other hens milled around, unaware or uncaring that their fellows had died during the night.  Some even perched on the dead carcasses, an act with which Everhardt had never quite come to terms.  They died for a myriad of reasons; age or sickness mainly, but there were a few robust specimens whose death was a mystery.  They had lived their entire lives in the broiler house, and when they died they became no more than a part of the ground underfoot.

This morning he collected nine in his grocery bag and carried it out to the rough edge of his field road.  He laid the bag gingerly on the ground, for even dead hens deserve a little respect, and set the bag alight with his cigarette lighter.  He watched as it caught and then piled some dry straw on top so it wouldn’t burn itself out.  He turned and made his way quickly toward the house before his nostrils caught the smell of burning feathers.

The screen door needed oiling fiercely and creaked as he entered.  Cathy and his son were still asleep as he slipped off his jeans in the draftless dark.  He started coffee in the percolator and woke his son roughly with orders to shower and to comb his hair.

The boy’s suit hung on his door, freshly pressed and hardly worn.  Everhardt’s suit wasn’t much different.  He only had the one, an all-purpose gabardine affair in a deep charcoal that served for funerals, weddings, and whatever else might arise.  He had always been a little sad that he was a one-suit kind of man.  His forbears had worn them exclusively and rough though they may have been conveyed a kind of quiet dignity which his jeans and plaid shirts (cigarettes in the front pocket and wilting in the humidity) could never hope to attain.

He stood in front of the long dresser, its mirror tilted slightly downward to accommodate Cathy’s stature, and tied his tie in quick, deliberate movements.  As he was beginning the second attempt at a half-Windsor, Cathy raised herself onto her elbows and looked sleepily at Everhardt’s reflection.

“I put the flowers in the refrigerator.”

She gave the sharp inhale that she always gave when she was about to swing her considerable hips toward the bed’s edge and plant her feet on the floor.  Everhardt had seen the ritual a thousand times and allowed it to play out behind him as he affixed a silver tie bar to the placket of his shirt.  Into it he wedged a black tie with tiny white polka dots.  In his son’s room the boy was tying his shoes.  Everhardt roughly adjusted the knot of his son’s tie and pulled his collar down in the back and walked out as the boy gave himself a last look in the early sunlight.

In the car it was silent, owing less to any reverence for Decoration Day than to the boy’s sleepiness.  He had never complained about the early hours inherent to farm life, but he had never been the sunniest personage before about nine a.m.  The boy also had never developed a taste for coffee, an anomaly that secretly worried Everhardt, but he operated well enough in the pre-dawn hours to avoid his father’s ire.

The sun, no bigger than a half-dollar, hovered over the lid of his trunk as he drove west.  The church was the sort of rustic, whitewashed frame affair that adorns postcards sent by traveling Yankees home to their families as evidence of contact with genuine Southern rurality.  To the initiated, it was hot, stifling, and roughly furnished as it had been since before the War, a small white outpost of religion in the wet and whisky-running pine forest.  Fortunately, there was no need to go inside just yet.  He and the boy lifted the flowers from the broad back seat.  He was never more conscious of his heavy and ungraciously calloused hands than when he gingerly carried Cathy’s flowers to the cemetery.  He so rarely needed to be careful during his working life, but the flowers and the occasion, coupled with the sense of holy propriety that came with donning the suit, left him highly conscious of his own oafish incongruity.

Along the red dirt road were parked a number of vehicles, most of them black and rusting but freshly washed, in a reverent row leading to the cemetery.  Younger men parked down the road in the deference to the old and infirm, for which they reserved the spots closest to the cemetery.

Decoration Day was Everhardt’s only holy day.  He had never been a religious man beyond the necessary gestures of Southern life, but Decoration was altogether different.  It was tangible, observable; to butt up against one’s ancestors, to read his own name among the stones was a powerful thing.  He greeted the attendees warmly, a trembling handshake from old but alert Mr. Porter, and a ginger hug for Miss Upton, half-blind but immaculately dressed as always.   His son dutifully answered summons to “come here and hug my neck” from the old ladies who found him handsome and affable. He grinned sheepishly as the men queried him about the coming football season in which he would be a centerpiece.  The boy listened respectfully as Everhardt walked among the graves and gave brief explanations of each name and family.  Luster.  Lybrand.  Evans.  Rogers. Goggins.  McClendon.  Osborne.  Cash.  Each one warranted a small line, some mundanity about who had been the first in the county to plant peanuts or who had fallen drunk off the old railroad bridge and died young.  At certain moments, his son managed to seem genuinely interested, a highly respectable effort for a teenager to muster.

People lingered and caught up, exchanging news of friends and far-flung relations.  The men lamented chicken and hog prices, and the women worried over an infant not likely to live out the year.  They dispersed slowly, graves decorated, into farm trucks that growled slowly to life.  Everhardt and his son sat in the Biscayne and waited for their turn to emerge onto the highway back toward home.  It was past eight now, and Cathy was cooking breakfast in her dressing gown when they arrived.

Everhardt ate quickly, changed into his workaday plaid and denim, and lit a cigarette on his way to the car.   The shorter route to his mother’s house was still a ponderous one, weaving between valleys and avoiding the rougher but shorter red clay road that had washed out months ago.  The county had made no overtures to fix it besides nailing yellow detour signs to trees along the approach and erecting a flimsy barrier from railroad ties and scrap lumber.

She listened to a breathless and excitable Baptist preacher every Sunday, and because she was increasingly deaf, did so at a torturous volume.   Everhardt could hear sinners being excoriated with verses from the Old Testament before he had even shut off and exited his car.   Just as he did every Sunday, he entered shouting “Mama!  Are you in here?” knowing fully well that she was and always would be, positioned immovably in a threadbare recliner and sound asleep, indifferent to the sermon and insensible to her son’s ritual of care and worried resentment.

“We’re going to do something about that clematis today, Mama.  It’s ruining your siding.”  She blinked sleepily and her chest rose and fell sharply in a gesture he decided to interpret as assent, and he exited the way he had come in, off to retrieve a bow saw from his trunk.

Unfortunately, lacking the dash and wrenching love story of the Jones County narrative, no one has ever ventured to buy the movie rights.  Perhaps we’re better off that way

• If you happen to be in New York this week, come hear me read some short fiction at the Southern Writers Reading series.  It’s a great reading series that has featured several exceptional and noted writers from around the South.  Hopefully its reputation will not be sullied by the presence of yours truly.  7:30, Happy Ending Lounge on the Lower East Side.

• I have naturally saved the best for last.  Brannon, the Arts Editor here at YHP, has been hard at work for several weeks contacting Southern artists and collecting their work for the soon-arriving Arts section of YHP.  By “soon,” I mean tomorrow.  Check back first thing Monday morning to see an exceptional cross section of Southern artistry represented.  All artists have their own profiles and galleries, with more being added every day.

The photo above, in keeping with the theme here, is unrelated.  It’s a Walker Evans shot of some miners’ homes in Birmingham, AL in 1935.  It appears for no other reason than that I like it.

“Reading the South” will be an ongoing series about beginning an understanding of the South through literature, music, and art.

A reader wrote me this week inquiring about a number of things, and where to find good Southern writing was at the top of his list.  My answer was long and, I admit, a bit of a tirade.  However, he brings up a good point: where does one go to find good Southern writing?  And what qualifies as Southern writing, anyway?

The first thing one has to do is shake off the idea of “The South” as a monolith.  There are an infinite number of Souths, and we each experience them differently.  The man who operates a shrimp boat in Bayou le Batre has a specific South.  The dentist in the suburbs of Alpharetta has a South of his own, too.  A chemistry teacher in Chattanooga, a lawyer in Gulfport — all varied existenses in a mulitude of subcultures, but united by something we call the South.  But what is it?

In his seminal Mind of the South (stay with me now — this is where it gets deep), WJ Cash opens by asserting that there is “a profound coviction that the South is another land, sharply differentiated from the rest of the American nation, and exhibiting within itself a remarkable homogeneity.”  Simply, when Southerners identify themselves as Southerners, they are setting themselves in opposition to everything un-Southern.  We assume that the description alone carries with it a description of our values and even hints at our personalities.  Of course, Cash puts it better:

Nevertheless, if it can be said there are many Souths, the fact remains that there is also one South.  That is to say, it is easy to trace throughout the region…a fairly definite mental pattern, associated with a fairly definite social pattern — a complex of established relationships and habits of thought, sentiments, prejudices, standards and values, and associations of ideas.

In short, we are bound less by a common experience than a common idea of the South, and that idea is changing rapidly.  The South changes and is changing, and we change with it, if only imperceptibly.

So how do we meet Southerness head on?  How do we engage with it, grapple with it, and ultimately claim some understanding of it?  The answer is that we probably can’t, but we can damn well try.  We are an expressive and expansive people, and our art is the best place to start.  Here are a few places to begin reading the South as it stands, alive and breathing:

The Chattahoochee Review: a great journal with varied content, much of which is available online.  Of note is their “Podcasts” section, which contains interviews with authors, as well as lectures if you feel like making your commute educational.

Black Warrior Review: Experimental and definitely not just regional, BWR contains some highly innovative work.  Well worth checking out.

StorySouth: Self-Explanatory.  A great online hub for reading current authors.

The Louisiana Review: A much more regional thing.  Online content is scarce, but back issues are cheap.

Reading the South is an experiment.  It’s about working through what it means to be Southern and to be engaged with Southern arts and letters.  Let’s talk it out.  Tell me what you think.  We’re just getting warmed up.

Ron Rash’s Chemistry and Other Stories isn’t new.  It’s a couple of years old, but it wears them well.  Rash is a professsor of Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University, and his title should give you some indication of his subject matter.  He is a prolific writer of poetry (poetry, of course, is always dicey and never having read it, can’t comment either way) and fiction.  You might know the name from more successful novels like Saints at the River and The World Made Straight.

The short form style of Chemistry gives Rash the chance to explore a broader Appalachia and populate it with figures who are equal parts tragic, exuberant, and  punishingly honest.  The titular story depicts a family struggling with a father’s terminal illness and his patiently abiding interest in a remote, evangelical church.  Other gems like “Speckled Trout,” (winner of the 2005 O. Henry prize) “The Projectionist’s Wife” and the seemingly out-of-place “Honesty” are well worth the effort.  Rash works in an Appalachia whose traditions and struggles aren’t dying or dead but are very much alive, despite the soft fatalism of his oeuvre.

Chemistry is also exceptional in the way it deftly avoids cliche, which the Appalachians are particularly full of.  Martin Amis once said a writer’s primary work is to do battle with cliche, and Rash has succeeded where scores have failed.  Though the characters are familiar — old men gossip about a legendary fish, an abusive husband consoles his recently-assaulted wife — they aren’t tired, trite, or predictable.  His characters share a sort of fatalistic resignation, and it may be just that soft note of defeat that resonates so familiarly with those of us who know Appalachia intimately.