The Vine That Ate the South

by J. D. Wilkes

  “Davis Twins? Are those the same guys who started the Shotgun Wars back in the ’90s? We usta could hear them shootin’ at one another from my house.”

  “Yeah. Hell, we’d all hide out and shoot at the Davis Twins. I got peppered a few times but it ain’t nothin’ unless they’re a-shootin’ point blank. But when they started havin’ them swordfights I said no-thank-you. Hell, Buck Davis had one o’ his nipples chopped off with a hatchet!”

  “So now he’s got one eye and one nipple?”

  “Ha! Yeah, I reckon so!” Carver hoots.

  “Left eye. Right nipple!”

  PLACE MEMORY

  Here lies an ugly plat with a tragic antebellum past. Chimney stacks and Greek columns mark where the plantation once stood. Slave quarters survive in back, dangling with old chains. Chains that rattle when the wind is still. And in the shadows, ghosts in gray uniforms repeat the last minutes of their lives in an eternal loop. Civil War re-enactors of a different kind.

  In every nook and cranny, in any direction on God’s green earth, there is history to be learned. In fact, it doesn’t matter if it’s a shimmering sea of parked cars or the most suburban of front yards. There is a fascinating historical story unique to those coordinates. Never mind that all of this, everything, was once molten matter spiraling through space. That alone blows my mind. But imagine anywhere in the world, modern or mundane. It doesn’t matter. It was once home to something special. Perhaps there was a rare race of giant crocodile that crawled around there back in Paleolithic times. Or maybe Vikings plodded through the mud when Lewis and Clark were but twinkles in their daddies’ eyes. Imagine all those Thunderbolt Cherokee patting their mud-yurt villages into shape eons before the Trail of Tears led them to Hell. Man, I don’t know. A small-town kid has to cook up something interesting about his own backyard. Collecting folktales and courting ghosts is just another way for the rural-lonely to stay sane.

  Expert of experts, Carver Canute informs me we are actually in the land of…

  THE MELUNGEONS

  “This usta be where the Melungeons come to make whiskey. They hid over in that ditch. When the coast was clear they come out and turned this whole area into their squat.

  “They was mountain gypsies,” he adds. “They’re black, but they’re not black black. Nobody knows really what they are. They’re just gypsies, hillbilly gypsies. Abe Lincoln was half Melungeon!”

  “No way.”

  Melungeon is a hillbilly malapropism for the word mulatto. It is believed they are the descendants of the Turk and Portuguese immigrants that went missing from the lost colony of Roanoke. They eventually settled in deep Appalachia.

  “Yep, he got it on his mama’s side. They’s a Melungeon graveyard up ahead. I’ll prove it to ya.”

  It’s an obstacle course of cornstalks, roots, gopher trails, and wood, and it is starting to get old. We’re constantly having to walk around something. It takes all the brainpower I can muster to navigate my bike through the chunky maze, this terra dentata. A bunch of woodpiles form an archipelago across the field. Lumber piles… stick piles. To me, they look like pyres awaiting their witches.

  We hobble some five acres more to a crisp, verdant grove of pine and cedar, the trees, according to Carver, that demand the most respect.

  “Granny said the LORD likes the pines best of all His trees. Cedars especially. They take a long time to grow, their wood is true, and it’s in the Bible.”

  Or “bobble,” as he pronounces it.

  “King James.”

  “I would’ve figured your granny worshipped the Great Spirit, or something more… Cherokee.”

  “Well, she thought it was all the same thing. Just called different names. They’s actually a buncha Indian gods, but the White Man wanted us to just hold to the One. They’s the cemetery, see the sign?”

  Framed in white wrought iron, the message reads:

  ST. JUDE’S GARDEN

  COME BLOOMING YOUTHS AS YOU PASS BY,

  AND ON THESE LINES DO CAST AN EYE.

  AS YOU ARE, SO ONCE WAS I;

  AS I AM NOW, SO MUST YOU BE;

  PREPARE FOR DEATH AND FOLLOW ME.

  We descend into the shady dank of St. Jude’s Garden. It is a moist, echoing grotto from another time. A Stonehenge of mausoleums. Each footstep meets a cold cobblestone that floats in a billiard carpet of moss. This path leads us inside a ten-foot-tall inner ring of looming tombs, and I find myself dreaming of the restfulness that could be had here. O to find my own little plot! That special hole in the ground that sighs for me. Coffinwood cradling like a bassinette. Such enveloping comfort, I scarcely can wait!

  The occasional kicked pebble ricochets off the granite as our strange procession leads us out to the rest of the graveyard. Bowing pinetops close in around us, bathing us in gray. Another crumbling mausoleum stands ahead, accompanied by obelisks and more cooling cedars.

  What a find! admires my inner archeologist. The crypt comes complete with gargoyles, medieval traceries, and little glass vignettes. The vignettes are cameo-shaped portraits preserved behind a lens of lacquer. Like little lockets of trapped souls, each disc faces sunrise awaiting Christ, marking the catacomb of one God’s-honest Melungeon.

  “They’re real!” I squint to admire them one at a time.

  Stern, swarthy faces stare back from behind a haze of varnish. Crickets chirp between the stepping-stones.

  “That’s what they look like?”

  “They’re like old Eye-talians fresh off the boat on Elvis Island,” Carver answers. “They buried ’em out here ’cause they’s Catholic. Back then they usta think the priests were devils. My Grampa Zeb said he once seed a priest without his beanie on. He said he seen his devil horns.

  “Check this out.” Carver picks up a lump of cement about the size and shape of a softball.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a grape. Look up yonder.”

  Craning my head back, I see the outstretched wings of a concrete angel atop a forty-foot pedestal. She stands tall, wielding a terrible, slow sword and dangling a seductive cluster of grapes above the earth. Rebar sprigs out from the bunch like realistic stems.

  “When the final grape drops, it’ll be Judgment Day.”

  “What are you going to do with that one?”

  “I’m gonna keep it.” He shoves it in his pocket and disappears around the bend.

  I take another parting glance at the eroding grapes of wrath and count a remaining… three.

  “Holy crap. The end is nigh!”

  Carver pops his head from around a gravestone to pssst me over to the corner of another mausoleum.

  “Look,” he whispers. “You kin see their bones.”

  I walk over and peer down into a washed-away corner. Through marble and dirt I can make out the calcium remnants of a Melungeon body. A section of skull sits half-buried in a hole of powdery silt.

  “How’d you find this place?” I ask.

  “Skitch used t’come out here on his dirt bike looking for Big Foot. He’d pop whip-its off the fresh graves around back.” Carver stares silently for a second and continues: “Skitch is an asshole.”

  “Yeah.”

  “When we were kids, he locked me in the clothes dryer and left it on fer a whole ire. I had to go to the hospital fer first- and second-degree burns.”

  “What can I say?”

  “We done said it. Skitch is an asshole.”

  All around the outside of the tomb are the flattened headstones of an even lowlier class. Melungeon soldiers, forgotten by their country. The gardens cease to bloom along this lonely row where the leaves won’t lie. No wind. No rain. Even Nature herself didn’t bother to water their weeds every Decoration Day. Sadly, the only things that grow here are the gray hairs and fingernails of the coffined dead.

  The shadows of branches rake across the epitaphs.

  EARLY ANTONIO FUGATE JR.

  USA

  “LIKE SOLDIERS IN THE FIELD,

  DRUMMERBOYS MUST
ALSO DIE”

  1851-1864

  HYMAN CORNETT

  USA

  “BLOODY FIELDS BLOSSOM BLUE IN TIME”

  1833-1864

  ELECTRICITY X

  DEAR SON

  USA

  “MAMA WAS A DYNA.

  DADDY WAS A MOE.

  EVERY DYNAMO MAKES

  ELECTRICITY.”

  1850-1865

  It’s obvious that many of these poor “colored folks” were conscripted Union soldiers sent to the frontlines. Carver says that as non-Africans they were born free men, but they were isolated and poor. But it was a time when poverty was at least noble, and even commoners had a higher purpose. You wouldn’t know it from these unkempt graves though. Lost to time, they are unfit for tribute. The wind whistles a belated requiem as my mind wanders:

  Is there really no God? No Heaven? Is it really all for nothing? Are we not owed an explanation of some sort? If so, what a waste! I really hope there’s a God. And not an all-knowing One, because then I’d be angry at Him for all the evil and suffering. Yeah, I hope He’s kind of a dumbass. With coke-bottle glasses, mismatched socks, and maybe his fly is open. Because how can you stay mad at that?

  Chapter Nine

  SIN EATER Part 2

  He hears The Call inside the void where his heart would be. For within his chest cavity swings a canvas pouch upon a brass cuphook, screwed into the timber of his ribcage. It brims over with the iniquities of the townspeople, leaving trails that run down like coffee stains. His gut rattles with the trinkets and toys swiped from the bedsides of sick children. But he is a thief of more than just whatnots and doodads. He drools with an insatiable appetite for disease, death, and destruction.

  Unfortunately, these horrible features are wholly hidden to the outside world. That’s because he is a shape-shifter too. Were he to walk about town, you’d just see a homeless human charity-case with a harelip and a lazy eye. You’d see another poor old middle-aged soul, afflicted with acute inbreeding, Asperger’s, or some other snag of fate. That’s his disguise! But his sad face, drooping posture, and thrift store wardrobe can’t hide the truth. He may go about his day with his little Elmer Fudd cap pulled down low, fitting in as best he can. But he doesn’t fool me!

  I truly believe him to be a “Sin Eater” who, like Christ, is a devourer of man’s evils. He takes on our transgressions so that we might be cleansed. Anyone can see that! But you choose not to.

  Why, just look at his gin blossoms. Weren’t those once the blemishes of our late town drunk, Nub Prather? And those venereal sores around his mouth? Why, he got those off that Ruby Walters floozy. But come on! Think about it! Ask yourself how that’s possible! She’s been dead some sixty-odd years now!

  Chapter Ten

  SOUTH ELECTRIC EYES (S.E.E.)

  A secret code unlocked.

  The Realm of the Red Snake.

  Gunplay.

  Farther on, a row of tender Little Lamb statues marks the graves of babies. Vandals like Skitch, or winter ice, have cracked off some of their noses and tails. And there’s another building on up ahead. It looks to be the office of the groundskeeper, or the sexton, positioned right where the Old Spur Line would resume.

  “Am I wrong or is there a light on inside?” I ask.

  “Yeah, it looks like they’s somebody in there. Hard to tell with them stain-glass winders.”

  It doesn’t stand to reason. Clearly, no one has worked these grounds in over half a century. The overgrowth of honeysuckle, holly, and general disrepair suggest this place has been long abandoned. A glimmer of life, however, flickers within that house ahead.

  “I have no memb’ry of ever seein’ this place before,” Carver wonders aloud.

  The little grass-roof building sits in a coppice of pine at the corner of the graveyard. It looks transported from some Swiss mountainside where alpenhorns and yodeling echo off the Matterhorn. A trackside telegraph wire sags into an opening in the roof.

  A strangeness of calm descends. The cloud ceiling lowers and encircles us with a wreathing fog. A cold snap at midday seems odd, but it’s been looking like rain for a while.

  We bike through another obstacle course of roughage. Limestone, crawdad mounds, and woodpiles. We hop off our bikes and stealthily walk them through the mist and up to the gothic stained-glass window where we detect the deep whitewashing sound of static. With only a small bullet hole in the glass to peek through, it is difficult for us to see what’s going on inside. But, sidling up, I giver a squint.

  In the corner of a dark office slumps the silhouette of an old man dressed in red flannel and suspenders. I see maps and faded charts tacked to the walls. Toppling towers of books clutter the checkerboard floor. Mildew, holy water, and the faint perfume of artificial flowers waft lightly through the bullet hole. Antique medicine bottles twinkle along the windowsills, and the little room is awash in the sunset glow of analog radio tubes. The furious tapping of Morse code is all we can hear now. Carver leans our bikes quietly against the building’s hedges.

  “What’s in there?” he whispers.

  “Some old-timer is sitting up in there on his ham radio or something. He must’ve turned this old place into his radio shack,” I reply.

  “Weren’t you in the Boy Sprouts?”

  “The Boy Scouts? Yeah. Why?”

  “Don’t you know what all that beepin’ means?”

  “Let me see.” I crane my head and listen.

  RADIO

  I was always a sucker for radio. Shortwave, longwave, medium-wave… whatever. It was a relaxing mystery. I reckon it’s the one good thing I got from my father. He left a faint AM radio on at night when I was very young. But he kept it tuned between the stations so the signals would flow together and form secret messages. All night he would lay there listening with his eyes wide open. His long white hair unfurled beneath a skeletal frame, his arms folded in an X across his chest.

  I didn’t need a radio though. If I held my teeth apart just right, I could use my fillings as conductors. Eventually, I’d fall asleep as a mouthwash of voices mumbled in my jaws. To this day I can still tune them in.

  Every crash of static. Every garbled communiqué. They remind me of the flickering beacons at sea. Vague indications of distant warnings along the horizon. Wayward, undulating profundities, like electric flotsam and jetsam, fading in then fading away.

  Ghostly memories of my father come and go in the same way. Dark, disturbing dreams of trouble, moving between the wrinkles of my brain. Weaving like a copperhead from my right hemisphere of “Love” to the left marked “Hate”… frontal lobes tattooed like the knuckles of a sinister Southern charlatan. I bet it’s the same Blood Snake of Brother Stiles’ televangelism. Restless as a shark and slithering into the darkest depths of my gray matter.

  I have my doubts about the events that led to my father’s demise. Do they think I’m a fool? Does Mama think I don’t know? It was all something of his own making, the result of the weird company he kept or the peculiar books he read. It was each poor decision, each fork off each crooked path that led to danger. And nothing short of murder! And not some freak work-related “accident.” Give me a break.

  CONSPIRACY

  I squint harder to hear the message. In my mind’s eye the dots and dashes begin forming a rhythmic synesthesia. I can feel the words forming flavors of sound. I can taste the solder and flux. The tones are deep pulses that resonate in the veins of my mind. Slowly, I begin to comprehend the old man’s words. Each completed character builds upon a growing understanding, and now sentences are sliding together to fit into a whole paragraph. What seemed at first to be a random sequence of blips and chirps has become not just information, but intense, arcane knowledge. My eyes well with tears as I struggle to grasp… THE TRUTH!

  A pencil on the old man’s table lifts to hang mid-air.

  “What’s he sayin’ up on that squawk box?” I can hear Carver ask me through the fog.

  My legs weaken beneath me. My eyes
roll up in my head. I steady myself with a cedar limb and squeeze its needles into my fingers.

  “What’s the matter? What’s he saying?” Carver talk-whispers.

  “Gimme some whiskey,” I order in a cracked voice. “Something’s going on.”

  Carver pulls a flask out of his pocket and hands it to me.

  “What does it say?”

  “I don’t know.” I take a tug at the bourbon. “It’s all in Latin or something,” I lie. “Something about the Freemasons. And God and stuff.”

  “Whoa!” Carver whispers in a breathy state of exhilaration.

  “Skitch thinks Freemasons run the world. They kilt JFK and are breedin’ a master race using the DNA they gethered from the UFOs at Roswell. They try and trick you by wearin’ them funny little shriner hats, drivin’ them buggies around in parades. They want you to think they’re raisin’ money fer cripples but it all goes to buildin’ an army of super soldiers they’s engineerin’ to whoop Jesus at the Rapture.”

  Carver is out of breath. It’s as if he’s been waiting to tell me this all his life.

  Truth is, I was lying about the Freemasons. I just thought it would distract Carver for the time being. What I actually heard was something absolutely unexplainable. I am at a complete loss to put it into words. But I believe it involves a higher order of spiritual energy, a magnificent darkness contained within this county and inside these woods. A pantheon of powers concentrated in a “Realm of the Red Snake”(?) To explain it any further is to defy the power of mystery… and to expose the limits of language. Who am I to utter such unfathomable heresies? I swear. These words, these notions… they have permanently scarred my brain. Like a branding iron, searing down into a tin of TV dog food.