The Vine That Ate the South

by J. D. Wilkes

  Dragonflies descend. Telephone bugs, bumblebees, and dirt daubers. All of Nature is protesting our arrival. We swat them away and escape through a curtain of wisteria. It hangs like the camo of an army camp.

  Once to the other side, we clodhop to a hill of sandstone where the scratch of a path leads farther into the woods.

  Along the way, I notice a rusty horseshoe hanging lucky-side-down in the fork of a redbud. With a solid tug, I find it is sunk in deep, grown over by the bark and solid as a wand of rebar protruding from concrete. It’s as if the redbud has found a human-made trinket to flaunt and prove that flora, like fauna, are no dumb creatures.

  CLANG!

  The ghastly chime rings out again.

  “It’s comin’ from around back.” Carver points with a head tilt.

  O the tintinnabulation of Hell! I’m giddy with ghoulish anticipation. My imagination runs wild. Could it be a mad blacksmith in a flickering cave? The devil’s hammer in a fire-lit pit?

  ARCHAEOPTERYX

  After scuttling alongside the rotting planks of a millwheel, we round the corner like pretend spies, past a scrapyard of failed industry. A redneck dump of old, rusty washing machines and iceboxes spill down the creekbank at random angles of mid-topple, each one looking like a freeze-frame of failure. In fact, they’re mired so deep in the muck, it’s as if they’ve been there forever—revealed only now by some archeological dig. Farm implements sit fixed in a stove of corrosion. The copper ball of an old moonshine-still lies splayed by a revenuer’s axe. It’s like a murder weapon buried in a potbelly. The ball is just a blown-out bucket now, collecting filthy tar-colored sump. It stinks to high heaven and everything around us is seized-up and foul.

  Out of the vagueness, the shape of a struggling bird emerges. A vulture roosts atop a farrier’s stovepipe chimney. It is slumping under the burden of a collar and bell.

  “Well I’ll be double-dipped,” Carver shout-whispers. “It’s that Bell’d Buzzard! I hain’t seen him in years! My brother’s the one what slapped that thang on ’im. Years ago. This bird is famous!”

  Ah yes, Carver’s brother. Skitch Canute. The only person I know who is crazier than Carver. That redneck’s gone and garroted a buzzard with a dog collar and a cowbell.

  Understand, Skitch Canute is the type of hillbilly who buries his money in canning jars and has a concealed carry permit to protect himself against a “zombie uprising.” He believes the Freemasons “run the show” and refuses to pay taxes. And he brags that he once beat a blind man to death with his own cane. Some Mexican over in Graves County, I believe. “Smart mouth had it comin’.”

  The buzzard shifts its weight from foot to foot, fanning the sun in a strobe of feathers. And then… its caw: Craghhhhh. A startling melody of pain.

  “Yeah, Skitch stuck that bell on him, that old jasper. He caught it and trained it to do tricks. He learnt it how to shake hands and take a bow. Then he heard that if you split their tongues in two you kin learn ’em how to talk. But it didn’t work. The bird just kept tryin’ to escape. Skitch stuck that bell on it so we could track it down.

  “But it finally got away and people started talkin’ about it. At least the ones in Skitch’s trailer park. So he thought it’d be interestin’ if it just became a legend. I’m the one who made up the name Bell’d Buzzard.”

  The old vulture lurches on the chimney, tending its sores and lolling its forked tongue. It is struggling against the collar with a time-hardened nervous tick. Poor thing. Visually, it is a throwback to the fearsome Archaeopteryx. Mange forms scales around its elbowed throat and molted beak, and it looks like some birdshot pellets have peppered it too. What a sad sight! But, relatively speaking, buzzards are fairly new around here, to this line of latitude. So you almost can’t blame the local yokels for picking on them. That’s just what they do. Hell, they don’t know any better. Hillbillies are part of the animal kingdom too.

  Peering into the senile eyes of this cryptic specimen, I imagine it to be the lost “Crow-a-Tone” of the Roanoke colony, or perhaps some reincarnated small-town crier ringing his alarm. Resembling only the dregs of the lowliest caste, its jagged feathers splay like the broken fingers of a begging slave. It’s a heartbreaking thing to behold. Harbinger of doom. Scavenger of ruin. If I had the guts, I’d put the damn thing down myself.

  “It’ll be fine,” Carver says, sensing my pity. “It’s lasted this long. And that’s fresh blood on its wing. It’s eatin’ well.”

  With our mystery solved, we say goodbye to the Bell’d Buzzard and slop our way back through the reek.

  Bullfrogs bellow in the creek like the reeds of a baritone woodwind. I heard once that stagnant water can change a frog into a turtle, or a moth into an owl, or a horsehair into a snake. Luckily the stench is getting fainter as we approach our bikes.

  I step on a branch that cracks a warning signal to a chattering field of starlings. Whoosh!

  A real sonic boom erupts as a million wings take flight. The force is incredible. We can feel it in our chests! Like a breath of thalassic power blown from the lips of the North Wind, the gust knocks us back and topples the barbecue shack to the ground.

  The birdcloud curls off into the sky like smoke. Miles of little souls bearing away news of our arrival.

  PERSPECTIVE

  We sally our bikes past the outskirts of Carter Mill, over to where the rail bed takes form again. Twin walls of divided forest flank our trail and diminish to the rippling ridge of the horizon.

  They remind me of the walls of the parted Red Sea, making Carver and me the children of Israel. Blink twice and now they are the high decks of two armadas in standoff. A breeze makes their masts sway as if truly upon the water. Crows’ nests drape with an ivy of netting.

  But this retreating perspective may also be viewed as an encroaching presence. Perhaps it is an embrace. Or maybe it’s the spread legs and seducing inner thighs of Nature, drawing us ever deeper into her bewitching vulval bloom.

  Over yonder, the mast of a bladeless windmill casts its shadow upon yet another outmoded farm implement that has rusted to a halt… and Eli Whitney weeps in Heaven. Somewhere out of sight a dog barks and a horse nays.

  “I once had a crippled dog named Arithmetic. When he ran he ‘put down three and carried the one.’”

  Now Carver is thinking of one.

  “Well, I had a dog with brass balls and no hind legs. We called ’im Sparky!”

  Chapter Seven

  THE UNBLINKING EYE

  In defense of the “Southern Fantasy Novel.”

  A Southern bestiary.

  The South today.

  Let me pause to ask a question. Is this story too far-fetched? Too “out there”? Well, then. I will remind the reader…

  Venturing into the wilderness in search of reward is a theme as old as the hills. My reward will be the bragging rights of having found the Kudzu House and the vanquishing of my foe, Stoney Kingston, the liar and thief of my One True Love. It’s something I just need to prove to myself. Or, as George Leigh Mallory said, I just need to go “because it is there.”

  Other precedents exist also. The humanities have long lauded the likes of such noble heroics. Like the deeds of Beowulf, Odysseus, Hercules, Merlin, Galahad, and Ivanhoe. Yes, I’ll grant you, their legends are set against far more voluptuous lands than this American South. They are based in antiquity or medieval Europe, surrounded by mystic mountains, forlorn fjords, and the sunless vaults of half-year darkness. Corpse-cold bastions and palaces of plenty. Teutonic old castles and thatched-roof cottages. Dark forests and bogs overrun with hobgoblins, gnomes, and ogres. Yes, I know, I know.

  But should it confound us to hear that our modern American South provides a similar spectral backdrop? Or will the reader deem my Southern Iliad and Odyssey an “Idiocy and Oddity”?

  Have millions of acres of protected Southern forests, swamps, and mountains escaped our attention? Or have we forgotten about our own hidden villains? What about our own Grendel, “Big Foot
,” and his hirsute kin? There’s the Skunk Ape of Florida, the Fouke Monster of Arkansas, and the Hoofenogger of Tennessee, just to name a few.

  Don’t believe me?

  EXHIBIT A.

  It is written, by our own American scribes, reports of Southern “giants” in a county not far from here:

  Among the passengers the other night bound for New York from Kentucky on the day express was a wild man, who occupied a seat in smoking car No. 158. He was accompanied by James Harvey and Raymond Boyd [who] were on their way to Bridgeport, Conn., to make arrangements with P.T. Barnum to exhibit their prize in conjunction with his circus. [The wild man’s] hair reaches nearly to his waist and falls over his shoulders, completely covering his back; his beard is long and thick, while his eyebrows are much heavier than those of an ordinary human being.

  Boyd and Harvey [had] built a man-trap for him […] and placed a big piece of beef in it. They watched the trap for three days.

  In his cave, [they] found the skeletons of small animals and skins of over fifty of the most venomous snakes.

  —“A Kentucky Wild Man,”

  Newark Advocate, 1883.

  But there are even more Southern monsters! Dare we ignore Johnny Creek of Maxon Mill, the Goatman of Pope Lick Creek, Fishhead of Reelfoot Lake, or the Gray Man of Pawleys Island? Their horrific faces have hissed at neither Anglo nor Saxon, Goth nor Visigoth. Nay, nary a Norman, in the shadow of Eilean Donan, has slain La Chupacabra. And never has an AIDS Wolf darkened the door of the old German Heidelberg.

  But ask any old hillbilly and you’ll get an earful. For these creatures, and the baleful lands they stalk, are strictly American, and Southern for the most part. They are as much a part of us as our penchant for fried chicken and turnip greens.

  LEVIATHAN

  And what of the great water serpents? Of course we are all familiar with the blessed text from whence all saints draw fear:

  […] with his sore and great and strong sword shall [He] punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and He shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.

  —Isaiah 27:1 KJV

  However, to my knowledge the LORD has yet to return for this epic final fishing trip. It has always been up to us, and the mortal likes of Nemo, Ahab, and Cousteau.

  Their tales recount many a serpent of the Seven Seas. But is it unimaginable that these great gilled beasts might have adapted to the brackish inlets and fresh waterways of America? How quickly we forget our elementary school lessons! What of Hiawatha’s giant sturgeon? Or the alligator gar found in Lake Barkley? Is it such a leap that Kentucky, with the world’s densest congestion of navigable rivers (and more coastline than Florida!) could hide the lumbering coils of such monsters?

  To be sure, it is indeed within the realm of Southern possibility! For here is…

  EXHIBIT B., written by the Southern hand of experience:

  A huge, strange reptile is reported from the Pond River bottoms of this county, many persons declaring to have seen it. Its presence is causing great alarm […]

  One man who described his experience with the monster, says he was driving a team of mules hitched to a wagon along the route which led through woods when he heard a great crashing in the underbrush and the great snake raced into the roadway onto the wagon. The snake, he says, became entangled in the front wheels of the vehicle and lifted its head above the dashboard with its huge mouth wide open. The driver says he leaped to the ground and ran, abandoning his mules and wagon. Glancing back over his shoulder he says he saw the snake overturn the wagon, whereupon the mules ran away, demolishing the wagon.

  —“Kentucky Section Is Terrorized

  by An Immense Snake,”

  Mitchell Evening Republican, June 2, 1925.

  There is no shortage of wild snakes, wild men, big cats, and goblins in our protected Kentucky reserves. What we lack, however, are likeminded warriors to go hunt them down. It seems as if folklorists, the ones who make it their business to collect these stories, are too busy sitting in their studies, composing longwinded essays on the nuances of Southern mythology. Apparently, they are content to just sit there and collect their knowledge secondhand. But where’s the fun in that?

  Yes, as adventurers, Carver and I are out to meet these monsters face to face. But we are on our own. You would think the boredom that comes with modern convenience would motivate a new warrior class: an Adventure Team dead set on doing battle with dragons. Call it some sort of backlash of bravado, or a war on post-modern apathy and leisure. Sadly, no. It’s a different breed coming up these days.

  THE RURAL PURGE

  As to the demographics of men in the the “New South” and how it relates to heroism… well, the times, they have changed. Indeed, in 1927, American agrarianism commenced its official decline. The majority of Americans began making their living by becoming employed by The System. As a result, the old homestead ways of life have ceased. That era has all but slid down the collective memory hole like so much slop down a sluice. Along with it, many a manly conquest has followed suit, replaced with virtual adventure, overstuffed furniture, air-conditioning, and TV dinners. Trite but true: technology has ostensibly solved most of our problems yet created entirely new ones to take their place.

  At the time of this writing, our most recent great advance has been the marrying of the party line to the television screen and an adjoining typewriter. Read: the “Personal Computer,” the “Internet,” and its corresponding “Information Age.” Unfortunate side effects include narcissism, the mass delusion of self-celebrity, and a willful surrender of privacy. With the collective knowledge of the universe at their fingertips, most prefer flashy manufactured news items and pornography. Shiftless magpie mankind has been outed to be! However, biologically speaking, the new men of the South are still the same as ever. I mean, they still have a tall, strong frame, but it’s solely the result of their genetic Y chromosome. Their Southern drawl is weakening with each passing year and their voices are getting softer. There are, after all, fewer cattle to call in and zero words of discipline allowed by society to be raised toward their children. So gone forever are the hard-hewn vocal rumbles, whistles, and hoarse overtones that evoke subconscious respect.

  And the worst enemy the post-agrarian male must face? His own body. Sad to say, the prime directive of his wiring is to store fat for survival. No longer required to work the fields in this reconstructed New South, the poor bastard is doomed just to sit there gaining weight like a blob in suburbia—plopped down like a wet column of dog food, stuck in the shape of the can.

  And there he’ll forever sit, beneath the pilgrim-hat-shaped roof of his tacky McMansion, steadily growing into his upholstery. (Hence the Southern obesity epidemic.)

  The resulting bedsores of the laziest ones have literally healed into the fabric of their couches and a new hybrid of monster is born.

  EXHIBIT C.

  A 480-pound Martin County resident has died after emergency workers tried to remove the person’s rear end from a couch where it had remained for about six years.

  The 40-year-old died Wednesday after a failed six-hour effort to dislodge their backside from the couch. Workers say the home was filthy, and the person had been too large to get up to even use the bathroom.

  Everyone going inside the home had to wear protective gear. The stench was so powerful they had to blast in fresh air. A preliminary autopsy on the body lists the cause of death as “morbid obesity.” The person died at Martin Memorial Hospital South, still attached to the couch.

  —“480-Pound Shut-In Dies

  After Six Years On Couch,”

  Channel 9 WFTV, Florida.

  But these half-human/half-couch creatures that dwell in squalor are of no interest to Carver and me. Neither is the evil blue flicker of the “Unblinking Eye” that televises their marching orders to just sit there and consume.

  Don’t get me wrong, I still believe in the South. For festering deep inside these temperpaedic bubbas w
as, and still is, a latent vanquisher. Is it so hard to believe that at least two of them, Carver and myself, have actually escaped their furniture to discover this within themselves?

  We have resisted the lure of the Sauron-like “CBS” Eye and other TV devils that would have us stay put. Now we seek out actual devils (what the Southern Pentecostals call “haints”). We delve farther and farther down the Old Spur Line, as its worming gullet swallows us whole, consuming us with concentric rows of rail-spike teeth. Still we spiral deeper and deeper into the yawning maw, giddy for what nightmares await!

  Ghosts and serpents. Wild men and wolves. Quicksand and landslides. Hookmen, goat-suckers, and giant spider webs. You can’t look me in the eye and tell me these things don’t exist down here.

  The “Warlord of all Bloodshed”

  Is under the floorboard of the woodshed.

  Yes, if ever the Devil was incarnate on earth, it is down South right now… hiding in the Kudzu. And I’ve got a machete!

  Chapter Eight

  THE STUBBLEFIELDS

  The barrens.

  A graveyard discovered.

  “Melungeons.”

  “Careful not to put yer eye out. It’s all run scald up cheer. Land’s got teeth.”

  I survey the ground where the Old Spur Line fades into a landscape of hardscrabble. Snapped corn stalks and fallen branches spike up out of the dirt like tusks. It’s the debris field of the long-gone Rosebank Plantation. Once lush with tobacco, now its dead, dry furrows crease Earth’s worried brow.

  “The Davis Twins both lost an eye horsin’ around out cheer in the Stubblefields,” Carver warns. “All these widow-makers and roots sticking up outta the mud kin trip ya up. If you accidentally fall, they kin pop yer eyeballs clean outcher skull.”