by J. D. Wilkes
There are no phone signals either. Only old telegraph lines. But they, of course, are useless. They hang severed or slack from rotten poles, having fallen silent from the chirp of ancient keys. Weather vanes and windmills trace your new skyline, and the only “skyscrapers” here are grain elevators, steeples, and silos.
Curious about our “nightlife”? Try raccoons, possums, and coyotes. Even wolves are rumored to give chase through the creeping brume of night. Listen close and you’ll hear them. They scream, whoop, and holler like a pack possessed by Legion.
The gunplay you hear isn’t coming from any of your usual criminals back home. It’s actually the sound of those wishing to be self-sufficient. Therefore, whizzing bullets should come as a strange relief. So take it. You’ll need as many odd comforts as you can get. Out here you will wander on and on as the path winds and winds. Past places where dancing and public swimming are illegal, where town crests are the shields of boxelders, and Dixie flags flap wild in the wind.
“Does the Dixie flag piss you off?” Carver asks. “The ‘rebel’ flag, I mean?”
“Why?”
“Well, it orta piss you off. They drawed it up that way. I call it the ‘Fuck You’ flag.”
He says its X of stars forms an angry face that glares right back at you. No longer sagging at half-mast, they fly high down here, beating red as the cape of a toreador, despite a local ban in town. Despite the fact that Kentucky only ever seceded along its southernmost battle lines.
“That red you see, it’s from the rebel blood sucked up through the flagpoles. Drawn up from these ol’ battlefields. Yup, they bore on down, buddy. True as a Texas derrick! Frackin’ straight into them shallow hallow’d graves.”
But Dixie-phobes take heart. The Southland is not just some spook house, some bigoted hellhole. Hollywood gives us a bad rap. For the same unsophistication that leads to belligerence and prejudice in some can produce the finest qualities in others. Not far from where the scum of the earth park their trailers, the salt of the earth tend their lawns. The Old Folks at Home.
Their well-watered lawns and smiling dentures sparkle through the honeysuckle. Tidy country homes, complete with tire swings, window boxes, and Astroturf porches, display the health of gentle hearts. Hard work and hospitality are hallmarks of these remaining few. Those who carry on the old traditions.
WILDERNESS
The natural world is the real attraction though. Shadow, mist, and departing starlight, a light wind and the early morning dew. All of it envelops us as we plunge into the phantom serein, seeking our Kudzu House. Locust-chatter and the clickety whir of bicycle gears fill the air. It is a bucolic scene of hope, harmony, and risk.
Carver has told me these woods are known as “Burkeholder’s Deadening,” named for the old swamp logger who once owned the land.
As the story goes, Old Man Burkeholder went out one day, axe in hand, and “rung” his trees. That is, he felled them by cutting a swath into the bark to bleed them out dead. This makes logging easier for later. The trouble was he himself died before completing the harvest, leaving these morbid mansions standing in vain, hacked to smithereens and now supposedly enchanted.
And so it is said that persons will lose their way in the forest if they are not right with God. Lost and afraid, they will be forced to spend the night, only to escape the next day. Upon exiting, however, one discovers that not just a single day has passed, but an entire year! Carver swears up and down it has happened to him.
His voice is a hoarse gust that pipes forth from his lie-hole. But his twang is charming. You might think he’s the type to hassle the skinny likes of me. But, like I said, Carver is too much of a “people person.” He’s a true conundrum: a Native American redneck who likes music and jokes as much as he likes skinning bucks and running trotlines. Astride his bike, he leads the charge down the rocky way, throwing his head back, popping wheelies, and carrying on about something or another. Some story about God-knows-what.
“Hope we don’t get lost in here fer a whole year. I just started seein’ this gal from Calvert. Ugly as an ape but she’s got some perty tiddies.”
DENDROCHRONOLGY
“Lose a year in the forest?” you ask. “Impossible! How could you lose an entire year in one day? What could give a forest power like that?” Well…
As one of the old-timers at the drugstore says, when a man is concocting a scheme he’s got his “gears a-turnin’.” But he says the same holds true for the oaks, pines, and sycamores of The Deadening. Their “gears” are turning too.
Here’s what I think he meant by that.
As you may recall from high school science, tree rings are a sort of sketch of a timeline, one that depicts every year’s worth of weather. Fires, blights, inchworms, and other natural causes leave discolorations too. Concentric as the ripples in a pond, they are readily viewable to anyone handy with a crosscut saw.
But here in The Deadening, perhaps there are markings left by supernatural forces as well: things like the Winds of Time, ghosts, and the nightly pelting of stardust. With each passing year, tree rings are riddled with mystic information, like a horoscopic wheel-chart or even an Indian mandala. And once its instructions are received from on high and its pith infused with magic, The Deadening sets its gears to turning, deciphering the details as the years go by and rotating its tree rings like, well, decoder rings.
There’s no real way of knowing, but perhaps these wooden circles are more like the inner-workings of a bank safe: free-spinning tumblers that move within one another in opposing directions around a common center. Their notches catch like sprockets until the correct combination is achieved, until the desired results are unlocked.
Whichever way these discs spin inside their bellies, the same old magnetism occurs. And when the time is right, the victims of The Deadening are summoned, and their destinies are meted out in no uncertain terms.
ARSENIC
We pedal along under the devastation of our strange summer trail. Dead limbs and Kudzu, deer stands and garbage. The air is speckled with gnat clouds, Japanese beetles, and cottonwood fluff. Ahead is a swarm of telephone bugs, the kind that mates late in the season and flies around connected at the gonads.
“You know why they call them telephone bugs, don’t ya? Because they say ‘hello’ and hang up.
“Yep. Well, it’s about a three-ire ride from here to that house,” Carver says, hopping his bike over some fallen limbs. I hop my bike and duck to miss getting a branch in the face.
“Four or five if we gotta do any serious clearin’. But if you go on any farther you’ll come to a chain-link fence with all this bob-warr loopin’ around top. That’s where the government puts all that shit in the warter supply. They do it late at night when everybody’s asleep. Fluoride, arsenic, lead. All the stuff that makes it taste like a garden hose. And, brother, that place ain’t on no map.”
Carver hits the handbrakes. I skid to a halt too, confused by our sudden stop. He pulls a rolled-up Kentucky atlas from his saddlebag and flips it to our county. After scanning the map a few seconds, he points to the exact spot where we stand.
“See. That dotted line is this old railroad grade. And looky what happens.”
As I follow his finger to the end, the markings disappear into a void of redacted information. A postage-stamp-size rectangle indicates a vague, generic slough.
“That’s a dad-blame lie! I’ve been there and they’s a big ol’ government complex with an electric fence, NO TREST-PASSIN’ signs, and concertina warr surrounding the whole place like Area 51. They’s tryin’ to pizen our brains and turn us all into zombies. You’ll see it fer yerself by the end of the day! What?! You don’t believe me?!” He swats my shoulder hard with his book as if genuinely insulted. His eyes look crazy.
“I believe you,” I assure him. Judging from the violent extra emphasis, I reckon I better believe him. Carver adjusts his crotch, mounts his Schwinn, and pedals away, satisfied he’s made his point.
Moss and de
ad leaves overtake the rail bed here. Coal, rusty spikes, and switch-arms poke out of the growth to remind us that this was once part of the great Louisville & Nashville Railroad. But farmers own the land we’re on now, so we are technically trespassing. For years this railway serviced the area’s main employer, a popcorn factory… before it exploded. I wasn’t there but I always imagined the townsfolk coming out to smell the destruction, or to gobble down a few tons’ worth of damage.
With no more businesses to serve, the railroad went dark and the government stepped in. They uprooted most of the tracks—though you still see a few lying around—and laid their claim. Except for the occasional civilian plat, the Bureau of Fish and Wildlife currently mismanages most of the forest.
Mr. Canute, as if in an old Western, advises that we “walk softly” until we are back on federal land, where we’re less likely to get shot.
Astraddle again and pedaling on for about a mile, we cross from private property to government reserve and then onto sacred ground. A one-room country church squats on brick columns. The watermark of a flood has left a drippy gray plumb line around the building. Many of its marquee letters have blown off in past storms. It just says: CH–CH
“What’s missing?” Carver asks.
“I don’t know.”
“U aRe!”
THE COMET
He tells me this is the “House of Yahweh,” whose well-house siphons the waters of the River Jordan through a transatlantic tunnel. Believers come from miles around with empty jugs to get their fill of the same waters that baptized Christ. Even hippies believe in the healing properties, describing the well as a sort of mind-spring of Mother Earth, as if Her chambers, like psychic brain synapses, flow with holistic power. But fewer and fewer pilgrimages have been made here lately.
“Brother Stiles built this church… snake handlin’ place, it was. But he give up on it a long time ago,” Carver explains. “He thought fer sure that Halley’s Comet was a-comin’ to wipe us all out. Said Jesus tolt him the tail was pizenous and that it was gonna kill everybody in Marshall County. Said it was the curse of an evil Indian spirit.”
It’s true. I remember watching the reverend try to warn us all on his public access television show. It was one of the many guilty pleasures Delilah and I had, lying in bed on a Sunday morning, eating cold Pop-Tarts and making fun of bad TV. I can still hear her laughing at the preacher’s black string tie hanging like a tiny stick-figure body beneath his huge head.
Like a man possessed, he would roll his eyes sunny-side-up behind those horn-rims, babble a bunch of gobbledygook, and erase his blackboard chicken-scratch as quickly as he had just scrawled it, breaking chalk with each lunging new idea. Then he’d stand down the camera. Clench-fisted and pop-collared, he’d scream into that gunmetal microphone as arcane knowledge gushed like black currents. Kindred red springs trickled between the knuckles of his furious fists, mixing with the ink of his sermon notes and star charts, all crunched into a paper wad. I remember them switching to a test pattern so they could stop to bind his wounds.
Delilah just about choked on her breakfast, and, yeah, I laughed along too. But I couldn’t shake the notion that he might be right. There was something salient in his prophecy… something familiar in his madness. It greased the creases of my mind like the blood trailed from a copperhead.
“So he packed up his family,” Carver continues, “and moved off to Cincinnati and left the church fer his cousin to run. But, hell, that old jasper didn’t know nothin’ about religion. Next thing ya know, he drunk up all the wine and spent the tithes on pot and porn. The church has been a-settin’ there empty ever since.”
As we pedal on up, I notice a field of a thousand miniature wooden crosses lined up in rows. It appears to be a mock graveyard for the unborn. Each little whitewashed cross mimics a miniature Christian marching off to Heaven. A vinyl banner rips in the wind, commemorating the millions of babies aborted each year. In the corner, a cartoon of a weeping Jesus holds a fetus like a pint-sized Pietà.
“What’s the difference between a man leavin’ church and your mama takin’ a bath?” Carver asks.
“I don’t know.”
“The man leavin’ church has a soul full of hope.”
It took me a second.
“Didn’t you go to one of them shoutin’ churches?” Carver asks.
“Yeah,” I seem to recall…
Chapter Three
GODSTORM
Memories of a Christian school.
An exorcism.
Struggles with Faith.
The sun kept an eyeball on me and Mama… a clouded Southern eyeball. It was quiet in the car and I was depressed. It’s a lonely feeling starting over at yet another new school.
Much of Marshall County still lay dormant under the few remaining stars of dawn. Mama took the corners slow, careful not to get caught in a speed trap or hit a deer. We had to keep the windows cracked on the Datsun because of an exhaust leak.
On past the DQ and the Western Auto, past the Piggly Wiggly and up to the white A-frame church. She hung a left into the gravel lot where other cars idled, waiting for classes to commence. Dew-kissed windshields fogged like sleepy eyes as they sat parked in a waking coma, anticipating the Gabriel call of the church-school bells.
Fellowship Assembly read the hand-painted sign. A ten-foot red neon cross blinked off and on, and then went dark. Twilight sentinels triggered by the dawning sun.
After Daddy died in “The Accident,” it took everything for Mama not to send her one and only child out into the world wrapped head-to-toe in yellow caution tape. Between her smothering and his absence, I was, and still am, lost when it comes to being a young man. I think too much. I read too much. I draw too much. Hell, I probably register somewhere on the Autism spectrum! But I don’t care. I need to get out there and kick some ass, if for no other reason than to get my ass kicked.
Mama told me over and over, “Hush, honey. Never you mind all that. The meek will inherit the earth.”
Well, Charles Darwin would disagree. The lord-of-the-flies culture at my high school had only made matters worse for me. They called me “Crap Knife”… I’ll tell you about that later, as you’ll need time to prepare for such a lovely story.
So Mama, bless her heart, began her search for a Christian school. Apart from the Catholic school (which “would never do”), this was the only other game in town. Fellowship Assembly, an “education ministry” sponsored by an adjoining Pentecostal church, would be my new school. The “campus” was but a single A-frame sanctuary surrounded by three tan mobile homes that served as classrooms. The playground was a see-saw.
BROTHER WITHERS
A man met us at our Datsun and walked me to class. Mama blew a kiss, but I ignored it with feigned independence. As I heard the car pull away, nobody knew I was holding on to every departing pop of gravel under her tires.
“Are you th-aved? Do you know Jesuth?” sputtered my new teacher, Brother Withers. Outside of school, he was known as Mister Withers, the small-town florist with the ironic name.
“Yes, sir,” I answered as we walked into a dim room of filing cabinets and boxes. I can still smell the old textbooks, pencil shavings, and chalkboard dust.
“But have you re-theived the gifth of the Holy Th-pirit?” he pressed. His wispy blond moustache did nothing to mask his harelip and “not gay” lisp.
“What are those?”
“Have you ever th-poken in tongth? Have you been fire-baptithzed?” With each question his nervous wink seized with increasing violence.
“No, sir.”
“Oh ho-ho-well then!” he sang smugly. “I gueth you’ve gotta long way to go! The true fruit of God’th favor! The true rewardth of Heaven! You don’t even know!”
His chuckle signaled delight in my lost spiritual state. But whatever these “gifth of the th-pirit” were, I wanted to possess them. And this, I was sure, was the kook to show me how!
CHERUBIM
During our praise
service at morning assembly, while the pent-a-caustic preacher sang “Jesus” as if it were pronounced “Cheeeese Sauce,” I tried my dang’dest to channel these mystical gifts. I even closed my eyes and lifted my hands up in praise like a TV antenna, maneuvering them as if to pull in a better signal. But the harder I tried the worse I failed, and the worse I failed the harder I tried, until I finally peeked to see if anyone was looking at me. No one saw me except some cute girl. She mouthed the word fag from across the room.
I started attending the church-school’s Sunday services too. I stood in awe as the congregation babbled in tongues like a bunch of chickens. Even small children joined in the fray. One morning the pastor’s three-year-old son came and sat beside me. Upon the Invocation, we all stood to praise the LORD. That’s when I felt the child’s tiny breath blowing hot on the back of my arm as he ululated in the Spirit. This sensation left me shuddering, as if someone were walking over my grave. What is this? How is it possible that this toddler can speak in tongues, but I can’t? Surely, there’s no need for an innocent kid to be “slain in the Holy Spirit.” Then again, consider the following:
But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.
—Matthew 19:14 KJV
Yes, but I ask, isn’t He the same, unerring One Who inspired our church-fathers to decree an “Age of Accountability”—an exception that pardons children from judgment? Yes, He is the One and the Same. But inconsistency, come to find out, is the name of the game.
Back in homeroom, Brother Withers “suffered” us all. He ruthlessly enforced the dress code, measured my shaggy hair with a ruler, and all but demonstrated how to clench our butt cheeks together correctly.