The Vine That Ate the South

by J. D. Wilkes

  Corporal punishment was used on full-grown high-schoolers. Public shaming too. He harangued those he thought were “oversexed” or “wanton,” or anyone else who dared voice skepticism. And over and over he insisted, just insisted, that the earth was 4,000 years old and the Devil put the dinosaurs’ bones in the ground.

  As much a florist of language as he was of lilacs and lilies, Brother Withers arranged verbal bouquets of fear, guilt, and gore. It was one gothic moral lesson after another: first-century martyrs, disemboweled for their faith; medieval saints rectally tortured with iron dildos; sinful souls howling in the agony of Hell; satyr-hoofed demons flaying the flesh of heretics. The student body also felt flayed and left for dead beneath Brother Withers’ funeral spray of prose. Suffice it to say, the man was roundly hated by everyone.

  Except me. I didn’t flinch, lest I miss the slightest pearl of wisdom. I found his gnarly diatribes exhilarating. I ignored what they said about him. Here is a man from whom I could learn the secrets of the hidden world.

  REVIVAL

  Indeed, among the church congregation, Brother Withers was a superstar. I witnessed him in full Southern gospel mode at a three-day weekend revival. The Reverend Cecil Tazewell’s Traveling Ministry!

  Yes, the right Reverend Tazewell! He was the fast-talking, Brylcreem-ed charlatan on a “Crusade for Christ.” He delivered the powerful Saturday night sermon that conveniently doubled as a commercial for his spray cans of “Miracle” aerosol. Yep. If the Devil’s in the details, this reverend was into retail!

  But his sales pitch was preceded by a sideshow. THE SAMSON BROTHERS POWER TEAM MINISTRY. Five adrenaline-crazed bodybuilders straddled the stage, tweaking on Jesus and perhaps crystal meth. With Clydesdale hooves, inappropriate bulges, and chiseled thighs clutched in perma-flex, they tore through phonebooks and screamed in fake Hebrew through their headset microphones. But CBers kept breaking in over their signal, filling the sanctuary with profanity and trucker slang.

  “Breaker Breaker! Where’s all them neckid wimmen out there?! Come on back to Big Red!” hollered one trucker.

  “Shut up, stupid!” came the reply.

  “Go to hell, Muff Diver! I gotcher 10-20. I know where you live!”

  “Bring it on, shit-for-brains!”

  Tazewell quickly stepped in and saved the moment, commencing his sermon over a hard-wired microphone.

  He recounted the plight of a married couple that had driven their dead daughter to his home. They had traveled cross-country some 2,000 miles in the summer heat. And, despite the smell, you can be sure that Tazewell most assuredly gave them the miracle they were hoping for. The Good Reverend had raised the dead!

  The crowd gasped. Brother Withers leapt, wept, and shouted things like “Hallelujah!” “Mustard Seed Faith!” and started going into convulsions. He hopped up on a church bench and ran pew-back to pew-back to the front of the cheering multitude. Upon reaching the first row, he jumped off, rode the Rev piggyback, and executed a perfect back flip into the baptistery. It was spectacular. The feverish throng of believers rejoiced as Brother Withers sloshed in the hog trough of holy water. A-splashing and a-singing and a-shouting. Why, with the way they were all carrying on you’da thought that tub had been filled with the very hemoglobin of Christ Himself!

  At one point, five hours later into the “Godstorm” (the hip youth-pastor term for a revival), Brother Withers even appeared to levitate a few inches off the ground. I saw it with my own eyes! As a result, the place went nuts. The Altar Call drew in dozens and the revival endured for a full three months more, eventually spilling into a tent outside. Scores of souls would be saved and hundreds of cans of Cecil Tazewell’s aerosol “Spray Blessing” would be sold.

  EXORCISM

  Church services went back to normal after Tazewell drove his little blue campervan back to Gibsonton, Florida, the place where carnies famously winter. Strangely, Brother Withers did not show up to teach the next semester. His only daughter, a fellow student in my homeroom, had gotten pregnant over the summer break. But she was not expelled. Not yet at least. Rather, she was suspected by the elders of having become possessed by an evil spirit: a local “demon of lust” known as Crypteroticles. I only know this because, while at school, I stumbled in on their little mid-morning exorcism.

  I had been sent by my math teacher to retrieve a stapler from the principal’s office. To get there, I would have to pass through the sanctuary. But just as I extended my hand to open the church door, it violently threw itself wide, causing me to leap back. After a curious squint, I slowly stepped inside.

  Once my eyes adjusted to the dark red-glassed inner sanctum, I beheld six men in deacon suits, holding down the supple bucking body of a teenage girl. Each was performing an ad-libbed ritual as she flailed on the floor, cussing in tongues. Sure enough, the demon’s own signature, full of crooked symbols and zigzags, had been scrawled across the pulpit in blood.

  The men were shouting in the Spirit and dousing her schoolgirl shirt with anointing oil. Well, it was really just a bottle of Wesson. “Kentucky-Fried Christian” grease.

  “In the name of Jesus we rebuke thee!” came the command as the musky circle of men rotated around her body, slinging oil while I stood watching. Heavy breathing from a hot, heaving body; sweat-kissed breasts; rolling, whorish eyes; the lolling tongues of men and angels. But each prayer elicited only moans and more sensuous movement upon the floor. In retrospect, it sounds more like an orgy.

  “Um, I’ll just be in here getting the stapler,” I muttered and hurried on toward the supply room. (Should children really ever have to walk in on an exorcism at school?)

  Days after, the whole town learned that Brother Withers had committed suicide, so ashamed was he of his befouled daughter. His “Altar ego” so wounded.

  Word was he had trudged to the outer edges of The Deadening, locked himself inside the loft of a dark-fire tobacco barn, and suffocated on the smoke.

  It is said that he was last seen through the busted louvers of the cupola, his silhouette writhing against the orange setting sun. The old-timers down at the drugstore said they also saw the outline of “skeletons dancing” around his body. And the daughter, who was later expelled, reportedly gave birth to a “kiddy pool of serpents.”

  So there I was, robbed of another father figure. Alas, Brother Withers’ last tent revival was to be the blue rain-soaked canopy of his graveside service.

  It would be my final one too, as the remainder of my adolescence concluded without his tutelage. I never received the gift of glossolalia (AKA “speaking in tongues”), I never “laid on hands,” and I never cast out devils. Woe is me. My fire-crowned Day of Pentecost never came.

  DISMISSAL

  A decade or more has passed and, thanks to the wisdom and retrospect of adulthood, I have given up. I have kept my faith but suspended the bulk of my religion, determining that “tongues” is nothing more than the unfettered id of the simpleminded faithful. It is the panicky cluck of repressed farm-folk who are at a loss for words to express their anxiety. So it’s not magic, it’s manic. Put yet another way, tongues is like spiritual scatting. Like jazz for Jesus. And holy-rollin’? Well, that’s just a punk rock show for God.

  Let me be clear: I don’t begrudge anyone their manner of worship. (Better to engage in charitable gatherings than to surrender to the nihilism of our Industrial Complex.) But, understand, this is where I come from and who I am. Forget nagging doubts. Nagging religion can be worse. Every natural impulse is questioned, every human desire squelched by the Kudzu-like growth of religiosity as it strives to fill in all gaps of understanding.

  Having said that, I still love God. He’s the only daddy I have now. But I trust these woods are no different than anywhere else I’ve traveled since graduating from Fellowship Assembly. North, south, east, and west, everywhere it’s the same scene:

  A thousand and one little jesuses judging, whining, scrutinizing, scuttling under the branches, creeping in the ditches, and peeping
out the gopher holes. Come what may, I will face them all as I tackle this day in The Deadening, terrible, swift machete in hand. Because I shall always be a man in search of hidden truth.

  “Yeah, I went to one of those churches for a while,” I say to answer Carver’s question.

  “Well, I hain’t goin’ to Heaven or Hell when I die. I’m gonna come back as a poltergeist. You know, like in that movie? Anyway, right up cheer is Carter Mill.”

  He starts pedaling faster. Faster than I can keep up with. I pop the derailleur and stand up to pedal.

  “You’ve got to see it,” he hollers. “It’s an honest-to-goodness ghost town!”

  Chapter Four

  HUMBUG

  Vampires.

  A Mystery Pitchman.

  Eerie noises in a ghost town.

  Not all tree limbs grow toward the sun. Cowering from the sunlight, the boughs of The Deadening curl over us like claws. Dozens of snapped limbs hang straight down, connected at the elbows by weakening strands of wet bark, the result of an old ice storm. They point down like stalactites, or “widow-makers” as they call them—so named for their tendency to break off and impale you while you walk underneath. I find myself holding my breath. The dangling branches remind me of the sleeves of scarecrows, hanging baggy off their armsticks. And the wind is currently making them pendulum like a vaudeville comedian’s broken arm.

  Beavers have dammed up the gullies. Their clay-caked huts block entire sections of the river into standing black pools. The little critters are laboring just feet away as Carver and I stand in awe of our World. What peaceful solitude and grim beauty! United we slouch in slack-jawed amazement, craning our heads up, down, left, and right, snapping off as many mental pictures as possible.

  Grapevines slither through the limbs like anacondas. The bulging tumor of a high catalpa cracks through its own bark like a swollen brain. Bursts of mistletoe mottle the branches as if stippled by the Great Pointillist.

  I still believe in God, I think.

  Off in the grainy distance, a glimpse of someone darting from tree to tree. A person, or persons.

  “Who was that?” I ask. But the skyline of Carver’s secret ghost town distracts him and he hollers.

  “Hey, look over here. They’s Carter Mill! You kin see the feed mill, the sawmill, the old hotel, the store. And right cheer’s the old broke-down barbecue joint!”

  Crooked wood-slat buildings slump in defeat, empty as a cicada shell. I shudder to think of the poor suckers who once called this flood zone home. I imagine its glory days being basically what I see now. No progress was ever made, businesses failed, and the only things that grew were the gullies.

  True to Carver’s word, there is a feed mill, a sawmill, a hotel, a store, and a barbecue shack. CLEM’S MEATS reads the ghost sign above some half-naked cartoon pigs. Like Porky Pig, they wear shirts, but no pants. They’re looking back to admire their own butts, as if hungry to eat themselves. But it looks like someone had once painted trousers across their lower halves. Faded brushstrokes hint of a latter attempt at censorship.

  “My grand-daddy said that Carter Mill is where the Night Riders usta hide.” The Night Riders being a vigilante group of early 20th-century unionized tobacco farmers.

  “He said the mayor found out they was all hidin’ in the hotel. So he tried to kick ’em out of town. But they bandied together, shot the mayor, and burnt down half the city.”

  “Did you just see something move out there?” I ask.

  “Probably some deer. I been huntin’ out here a few times. Back when I was off the sauce. They’s all kinds of turkeys, foxes, rabbits, squirrels, and coyotes too. Painters. Wampus cats. You name it, I’ve killed it. Damn, I wish I’da brung my gun.” Carver stands straddling the bicycle bar looking into the distance, distantly.

  “Yep. I was out cheer one day a-huntin’ for the White Thang. He’s this four-foot-tall albino Wampus cat cain’t nobody ketch. I heard him a-singin’. Sounds more like a cryin’ little girl. Or a banshee womern a-screamin’. Son, it’s effed up. Anyway, every time you see ’im, he’s about fitty feet ahead of ya. But whenever you get near, he disappears. But then he’ll show up again fitty feet ahead of ya. Hain’t no killin’ that damn painter.”

  He means “panther.” Carver hocks a loogie and twists his Wranglers, adjusting the fit of his crotch again.

  “So anyways. I come across this old boy layin’ out here half-dead in the woods… he had’t’ve been huntin’ by himself. Well, somebody musta thought he was a deer and shot him. That or the Thang got a holt of ’im. Or maybe he tried to kill himself and missed his brains… or maybe it was all just by happen-chance. Anywho, he was a-layin’ there all by hisself, bleedin’ out his gullet and tryin’ to talk, but only gurgles come out. He looked pretty bad so, um… you know. I had to put ’im down.”

  “Psssh!”

  “No, it’s true. I ain’t pride of it, but I wouldn’t let a dog lay there all fell-off like that, would you?”

  Carver goes on to describe how he accidentally chipped the man’s tooth, shoving in the barrel of the gun. There was a mixture of fear and relief in the man’s eyes in that split second before Carver squeezed the trigger. Then… the thunderclap of mercy. A pink explosion of vaporous brains blew out the back of his skull as the sheer force of the gunshot sent the man sitting up for a second. But down he plopped into eternal repose. The poor old boy was off to meet his maker, bless his heart. Carver lights up a smoke and snaps his Zippo shut to drive the story home.

  “Are you kidding me?!” I nervously laugh out loud. “That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard.”

  I play along, but I often wonder how far from the truth his legends really stray. Fact is, I haven’t known Carver that long, so it could be true, I reckon. I wait for the wink, but this poker-faced murderer affords me no relief. He just looks crazy.

  THE DRONE

  Carter Mill was founded low in the toxic boglands of a forsaken holler, barren of charm or cheer. Cords of dead vines fray in gestural cross-hatched strokes, like a densely rendered woodcut. The crumbling column of a lone chimney stands like a headstone for a home.

  Black birds break the stillness with a rackety bray, and the wind squalls through the timbers with a chilling drone.

  “Hear that hum?” Carver asks.

  “Yeah, what is that? Seems like it’s always humming out here for some reason.”

  “I got my notions.”

  It emanates from deep within the woods. Some say it’s the sound of cicadas, but everybody knows they sing in the key of C#. After checking on my harmonica, I put this somewhere between B and B♭.

  Perhaps The Deadening is seething angst up from the underground. Up through the trees like a pipe organ, or giant lumberhorns, driven by the steams of Hell. I imagine a subterranean network of fibers forming lungs, constricting and expanding like a bellows. Carver tells me that some say it’s the sound of pressure being released from a tectonic crack deep beneath the nearby Tennessee River. It issues from vast chasms, as pent-up steam, water, sand, and coal grind, gush, and groan. Come to think of it, I’ve vaguely heard it all my life around town, coming from the woods in the distance. Wafting across the street to the drugstore.

  Rumors of a nearby “Hell Hole” are purported too. They say it’s a portal to Earth’s core where the chthonian screams of the damned rise to the surface as an immense white noise. I’ve heard “actual ‘Hell Hole’ recordings” on late-night AM radio. Some crackpot swore he dropped a microphone down into its depths to capture a more discernible wail of human suffering. Carver believes the droning comes from that secret government facility that puts saltpeter in the water supply (“soft peter,” as he calls it). But I prefer to believe it is coming from the haunted harmonium that pumps forever underground.

  NOSFERATU

  This particular neck o’ the woods is where our local “vampire cult” used to meet. They were really just a pathetic gang of teenage “larpers,” role-playing a game they bought
at some stupid store at the mall. But, as the world found out, the fun got out of hand.

  I’m not sure what exactly they called themselves, but they sure stood out around town. They would mince about in top hats and capes, tapping along the sidewalks with brass-bulbed canes. Some walked with black umbrellas—to protect them from the sun, I reckon. Blood dried in crusty smears around their mouths, and some even had their teeth filed into fangs. Remember, this was all set against the backdrop of a small rural farming community.

  So when they weren’t hanging out in churchyards, speaking in riddles and killing cats, they were meeting up in a Carter Mill shed to conduct their bloodletting rituals. But, like all things, it got old. So the ringleader—Rod Ferrell, I believe—talked them into taking it up a notch. The plan was to go and kill his girlfriend’s parents. He said it would be the ultimate “blood meal.” Indeed. T’would be a “grand feast” in which they would all “partake”… and other fancy vampire words.

  They met at night in hoodies, hopped in the car, and drove to her folks’ place. While the elder couple slept, the kids broke in and bashed their brains in with a clawhammer. I read about it in the paper. It even made it onto Oprah. So yeah, it’s true.

  I remember at the time thinking it was so ridiculous. Vampires? Really? Then again, I suppose small-town kids have to express themselves somehow, especially the creative ones who don’t go in for sports. Lord knows I can relate to that.

  Plus, these were the days before “social media,” so there was no way of accessing a larger goth movement to get a feel for the lifestyle. The limits of the Southern macabre were untested, and suburban latchkey kids were lawless and feral. Come to think of it, “Ferrell” is a fitting name for their leader.