The Death of Sweet Mister

by Daniel Woodrell

  My mother was born less than a hundred yards from my house. She was the first generation raised in town and played in my yard as a child. I can see the roof of her father’s place from the porch when the leaves are down. Both sides of my family have been in the Ozarks a long time. It was hard from the beginning to eke a living from thin dirt and wild game, and it stayed hard. The Woodrell side (surnames Mills, Terry, Dunahew, and Profitt) have been here a bit longer than the Daily side (Davidson, DeGeer, Riggs, Shannon). Woodrells arrived on this continent around 1690 and settled in these parts during the 1830s, after Kentucky and Tennessee became too gussied up and easily governed for their taste. The early white settlers came here to avoid the myriad restraints that accompany civilization—sheriffs, taxes, social conformity. They sought isolation. There has never been much belief in the essential fairness of a social order that answers most readily to gold; it’s always been assumed the installed powers were corrupt and corruptible, hence to be shunned and avoided, except when you couldn’t and must pay them.

  A Davidson ancestor did kill a man in the center of town, before many witnesses, and land, livestock, everything that could be sold had to be sold to buy him out of a conviction, which was done. He’d killed his long-time pal, a man who beat him always in the wrestling contests featured at most picnics. They got drunk on Washington Avenue and decided to wrestle again in the street. Davidson won this time, as the other man could not stand unaided, and is alleged to have pulled his pistol in victory and said as he shot the pal at his feet, “Now I finally whupped you, I might as well kill your ass, too.” Once the money was spent, this became an act of self-defense and he never did a week in jail. That was over a century ago, but we still remember, and the family of the dead man does, too—as late as the 1970s there was friction when my older brother dated a girl with that name.

  I was raised on such stories in exile, and the old stories get rubbed together plenty in the retelling; dates and facts become blended. Did such and such happen in 1885, 1965, or not at all? Is that a DeGeer story or a Dunahew? The violent stories are the first I remember—they are many and fed me as a boy—but now I am more taken with how Grandma Mills lost a slice of nose to disease; how Dad got that patch of skin torn from his leg as a boy when barbed wire snagged him after he’d raided a garden for melons and the gardener spotted him; how Grandad Daily rode a mule to church in the 1920s because he wanted to impress girls. I like trains in the night, dogs baying after coons, the long hours when the wind sings as it channels between hills and hollers and flies along creek beds. I’ve known a thousand plain kindnesses here. It is generally a pleasure to live among so many individuals who refuse to understand even the simplest of social rules if they find them odious. This trait can, of course, raise trouble. I have had a few close relatives do time in the penitentiary, some recently, not for being thieves, ever, but always for refusing to take each and every piddling law seriously—trouble is bound to happen once in a while when you love life so wildly.

  I believe I became a writer because of my grandmother Woodrell. She was proud that she had attended school to the completion of third grade, but she was not quite literate. She worked as a domestic: maid, cook, housekeeper. My grandfather was a drunken bum and fled the family when Dad was tiny. Grandma toted three sons alone, one with leukemia, all hungry, hungry, hungry. At age nine my father became the sole support of the family. Uncle Mills James went off to the navy, and Uncle Alfred was dying in the main room of the house, so Grandma left work to care for him. Dad carried paper routes, was a rack-boy in a pool hall where he often slept to avoid hearing his beloved brother fight so hard for breath. On weekends he was given over to a Polish farm family, and he loved them and his days spent there, named me for their son, killed in the war. Dad never turned mean and he never turned criminal, though among his favorite memories from childhood was of the night there was a tapping at his window, and the adult Cousin C asked the boy to aid him in escaping the area, for good, and it was done and recounted gleefully. Could scarcely be a rougher upbringing, but Dad found books somehow and dove in deeply, reading whenever still for a moment. War introduced him to the wider world and better libraries, and he liked an awful lot of what he saw and read. It has always been difficult to earn a living in the Ozarks, each generation winnowed as folks depart on the “hillbilly highway” to Detroit, Houston, Cincinnati, Kansas City—Steve Earle sings a great song about this. When I was a toddler Dad took us on the hillbilly highway to St Louis so he might earn a decent living there and seek the education he’d dreamed about. He had three sons, a six-hundred-square-foot cracker-box house, with never fewer than five residents, sometimes seven. He worked all day selling metal and for years went to night college at Washington University. I have so many memories of him, a complete grown-up, doing homework at the kitchen table, empty beer cans shoved aside as he studied, smoke billowing from his Pall Malls. I always thought homework and school were great privileges. I loved literature young and haven’t been able to kick the habit yet. I think illiterate Grandma put something important into Dad that changed the future for all his sons who cared to notice. At twenty-three I declared that I would be a writer or a nightmare, and he said, “Let’s hope the writing pans out….”

  Two blocks from my home there is a big old cemetery and in its acres many relatives are at rest. I walk through often. Sometimes in an odd corner I find kinfolk I hadn’t known were buried there. A Davidson murdered and left in a cave, never solved. A Mills dead in a horrible wreck that we don’t believe was an accident—no proof, but we know the name. Dead babies, flu victims, all that sorrow. I think about the carts pulled by hand across Appalachia, kids and hogs trailing, the years of scratching a subsistence living from ruined dirt. The dirt was always thin but became thinner with the arrival of progress. When the timber barons came to the Ozarks they cut the great forests down to stump and mud and the mud thinned more with every rainfall. They took all the timber. They left us the stumps. This is the Ozarks I needed to know, and know to the bloody root, in order to write as I do.

  —Daniel Woodrell

  Originally published November 29, 2010, on MulhollandBooks.com. Reprinted with permission.

  QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  Much is made of Glenda’s abilities with the opposite sex. As Granny says, she “could make ‘Hello, there’ sound so sinful you’d run off and wash your ears after hearing, then probably come back to hear it again.” Do you think her attractiveness and ability to parlay it into personal gain ultimately helps her or hurts her?

  As Shuggie says early in the novel, “The idea that Red was my dad was the official idea we all lived behind, but I wouldn’t guess that any of us believed it to be an idea you could show proof of or wanted to.” Do you think Red is Shuggie’s father? Or is it the mysterious Baron? What different reasons might Red and Glenda have to sow doubt into Shuggie’s mind about who his father might be?

  There’s very little mention of other kids Shuggie’s age in the novel. Why do you think that is? Do you think that Shuggie has time to be with his peers? Do you think he would get along with them?

  As the secondary male characters in the novel, Basil and Carl both offer dilutions of Red’s pure evil. Both of them are more likeable characters than Red, but at the end of the novel, both prove perfectly willing to exact their revenge on Jimmy Vin. Do you think that Basil and Carl are truly different from Red? Do they care for Shuggie any more than Red does?

  Maybe the most joyous scene in The Death of Sweet Mister is when Shuggie and Carl help Granny with her paper route, but the fun is quickly dampened by Shuggie’s discovery of the blood-covered house in the aftermath of Red’s murder. Why might Woodrell choose to juxtapose two such drastically different scenes? What effect did it have on you as a reader?

  The sexual tension in Shuggie and Glenda’s relationship culminates in the scene in the kitchen at the end of the novel. When Glenda refuses Shuggie, he justifies touching her because “Everybody else does.” To
what degree do you think that Glenda is culpable for Shuggie’s actions?

  Why do you think Glenda is willing to leave town with Jimmy Vin, leaving Shuggie behind? Is Shuggie correct that her decision to go is based on what happened in the kitchen? Does she have other options?

  With his T-Bird, stories of faraway places, and kind words for Glenda, Jimmy Vin is certainly a far cry from Red. Do you think that he ultimately had better intentions for Glenda? If the two of them had managed to get out of the Ozarks and into the world, would her life have gotten better? Would Shuggie’s future be brighter if he were living with Granny and Carl?

  For the bulk of the novel, Glenda assures Shuggie that he’s different from the world around him. “You’re not the same as any man, Shug. You’re not. You’re my sweet mister, see, and that’s special.” But by the end of the novel, Shuggie has changed. Is Shuggie’s transformation into a person more like Red complete? Is the change irrevocable?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DANIEL WOODRELL was born in the Missouri Ozarks, left school and enlisted in the marines at seventeen, received his bachelor’s degree at twenty-seven, graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and spent a year on a Michener Fellowship. He is the author of nine works of fiction, including the novel Winter’s Bone, the film adaptation of which won the Grand Jury Prize for best picture at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and received five Academy Award nominations. The Death of Sweet Mister received the 2011 Clifton Fadiman Medal from the Center for Fiction, an award created “to honor a book that deserves renewed recognition and a wider readership.” His first collection of stories, The Outlaw Album, was published in 2011. Woodrell lives in the Ozarks near the Arkansas line with his wife, Katie Estill.

  By DANIEL WOODRELL

  Rene Shade Novels

  Under the Bright Lights

  Muscle for the Wing

  The Ones You Do

  The Bayou Trilogy (omnibus edition)

  Novels

  Woe to Live On

  Give Us a Kiss

  Tomato Red

  Winter’s Bone

  Stories

  The Outlaw Album

  Contents

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Reading Group Guide

  How Much of the Ozarks is in Me?

  Questions and Topics for Discussion

  About the Author

  By Daniel Woodrell

  Copyright

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2001 by Daniel Woodrell

  Foreword copyright © 2012 by Dennis Lehane

  Reading group guide copyright © 2012 by Daniel Woodrell and Little, Brown and Company

  Cover design by Ploy Siripant. Cover painting: Mark Laver, The sun it has passed, now it’s blacker than black, from his Rural Disasters series. Cover copyright © 2012 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  ISBN 978-0-316-20615-0