The Vine That Ate the South

by J. D. Wilkes

  Alas, all good things must come to an end as we descend softly toward the ground. “Danville Girl” concludes with a double “shave-and-a-haircut” ending and we stick the landing as if we were longtime bandmates.

  “Har har har!” Carver’s belly laugh shoots his cigarette across the room. Overcome with joy and banjo-eyed bewilderment, he swats his knee like an old-timer, slaps me on the back and goes, “Shoooo, brother! I didn’t know you could blow a Nigger-Whistle like that!”

  Awkwardness immediately fills the room. Raindrops snicker in the new silence as the drum contraption putt-putts to a stop. Fang and Cat drop their eyes in shame. That kind of language doesn’t fly in here among these good Christian folks. And that is as it should be, of course.

  The embarrassed couple stares at the ground while I nervously babble about anything to fill the silence.

  “Pardon my French, y’all,” Carver offers. “I reckon I got carried away. But really, y’all. That sounded really, really good.” Carver’s voice trails off in a rare display of guilt.

  “That’s okay,” Cat pardons. She is detecting Carver’s tiny mind but good heart. That or his ethnicity. Perhaps her own buried white guilt over smallpox-infected blankets and the genocide of Native America has saved us for now. Either way, it’s a pleasure for me to be in the midst of such smart, sensitive people, especially in a world infected by quite the opposite. A little more small talk and all seems forgiven.

  “Well, I suppose it’s safe for us to get outta here now,” I conclude.

  “We’d love to come see y’all play at that festival tomorrow.”

  “Please do, it’s at the Coon Dog Cemetery,” says Cat. “Y’all have a good time finding the Kudzu House. That sounds real fun.”

  “Bring your harmonica tomorrow,” says Fang. “Let’s do it again!”

  Chapter Seventeen

  DADDY Part 2

  The home I grew up in was practically all windows. Zero curtains. At night, the house lit up the neighborhood like a lantern. Mama must’ve had an odd aversion to drapes—or having to dust them—so our every move was visible to the outside world. Daddy mostly kept himself hidden in the basement while we moved about upstairs, bathed in 100 watts of blinding light. It was so bright, in fact, at night it turned the inside surface of our windows into a House of Mirrors, so there was never a way of discerning any movement that might be stirring outside.

  One evening, a strange fancy little man paid us a surprise visit. (Of course, we didn’t see him coming, or anything else outside for that matter.) He rapped at the door with a brass-knobbed cane and demanded to see my father. His red vest and cummerbund bulged beneath a black tux and tails, and his slacks tapered into a pair of spats. He had a round face that seemed frozen into a broad castle-toothed smiling crescent. I put him as a cross between Teddy Roosevelt and a chubby Guy Fawkes mask (what with his pencil-thin Van Dyke beard). And his squinchy eyes were as thin as stabbings.

  “He’s a bad man,” I remember thinking. “He’s got skinny eyes.” His voice was low but insistent, so my mother made haste calling Daddy up from his lair.

  Once the two men were face-to-face, a loud argument broke out. But the little man never stopped smiling. I heard my name bandied back and forth, but I was too young to understand the conversation. The door slammed shut and Daddy told us to shut off all the lights and get to bed. I did exactly as he told me. I ran to my room in a panic and tried to go right to sleep. I stared outside at the stars for comfort, but it all just looked too large and random. It’s as if every star, planet, or pinprick of light had been sneezed there from the nostrils of God. The thought of eternity only made matters worse. Suddenly silhouetted against the stars was the shape of the little man stepping into place right outside my window. Despite my calls for help, the odd fellow just stood there smiling down on me in the pallid starlight. Again, I whined and called out for my parents, but they never came. And no matter how long between uneasy fits of eventual sleep, I would still wake to see him standing there—his unyielding mad gaze forever fixed down on me.

  At some point during the restless night, more visitors assembled in the yard behind him. They ambled in a loose gathering, stirring like shadows cast by the moon and remaining there, or in my dreams, until the break of dawn. I must have finally fallen asleep from the weight of sheer dread.

  My father had his tragic “accident” the next day. Yes, he was finally dead and gone forever. The victim of “workplace negligence,” they said. But I suspect foul play—from the strange little man and his lurking companions.

  My father’s last words to me were something he screamed from his room that horrifying night. His answer to my cries for help:

  “SHUT THE FUCK UP AND GET YER ASS TO SLEEP!”

  Chapter Eighteen

  WUNDERKAMMER

  An exodus from the forest.

  “Local color” described.

  A startling discovery in a forbidden place.

  For a good five miles we’ve avoided any fallen trees or washed out bridges. The storm has long blown over and taken its red balloons with it. Now we are left in a sluggish haze of humidity and mosquito swarms, and it sure would be nice to grab another coke.

  We trek off our path for a quick break. Bottom Road is an old access road that will lead over to Elva, Kentucky, about a mile away. Civilization is slowly starting to return, but, like Carter Mill, time and the elements have left many a shack standing in crude mismeasure. “Danville Girl” still plays in an endless loop in my head like a dusty 78. I consider it the perfect soundtrack for our trip into Forgotten Kentucky.

  “Up here is Elvie-town, where my uncle sold moonshine. This is where they found that murdered family.”

  “Another legend?” I use my fingers to make air quotes.

  “No, I swannee to the LORD, this un’s true.” Carver’s voice lowers to a somber deadpan. A rusted sign marks the lonesome whistle-stop of…

  ELVA

  “They discovered the whole family murdered here. They were draped up in the tree limbs, covered in blood.”

  “God. Don’t you have any happy stories?”

  “You really wanna hear a happy story?”

  “Nah.”

  “So… the only one alive was the youngest. A six-year-old girl. They found her sittin’ in the grass below all them dead bodies, just a-singin’ and a-playin’ by herself in the blood drippin’ down from above. All devil-may-care. Everybody thought she was evil, got skeert and runned away. They were so disgusted by the sight of that little witch they couldn’t get it outta their heads. So the whole town swore a pact that they’d keep the place hidden. Sho ’nuff, no one’s ever found it since. It’s called ‘Secret Mountain.’”

  “How do you keep a mountain secret?”

  “Aww, I’m just bull-shittin’ ya. That story’s counterfake as hell!”

  “Really?”

  “Maybe,” Carver pauses, “but then again… maybe not. Up cheer’s the old Elvie four-stop.”

  GENERATION GAP

  We stray farther down the road. It’s more a graveled easement owned by some local yokel, back-porch gawkers. And no offense to Carver, but I put the “tooth-to-head” ratio around here at about 3:1.

  Squalid hollers and trailer parks are strewn with broken toys, deflated plastic Christmas globes, flat tires, and dog crap. And I think to myself, What the hell happened to “Southern Pride”?

  Obstinate Scots-Irish blood! Still revolting against the sophistication of its royal overlords. Now it’s left them vulnerable to the seduction of low-brow identity politics and slacker-chic marketing. Redneck antihero belligerence in place of the hard-won pride that farming brings. One dead-eyed inbreed hangs stretched-armed from a low tree limb, his bare feet just inches from the ground. His slump-shouldered son stands drooling below, poking his daddy’s bare ribs with a pointy stick.

  “Wudder y’all lookin’ at, assholes?!” the three-year-old shouts at us. His daddy just hangs there like a gibbon, stoned and drooling.
>
  “Mind yer own business, Toodie, you little bastard!” Carver hollers back. “That little shit-head’s gonna be trouble one day.”

  I’m appalled at how much these morons contrast to the senior citizens just across the alley. I can see the old folks at home, watching from their porches, tsk-tsking the way their world has changed. Why, it’s as if these two generations aren’t even of the same species.

  Barn-quilts adorn the old folks’ outbuildings. Perhaps they use these hex symbols to ward off the evil spirits of Gen-X sloth and Baby Boomer decadence. They were, after all, nailed there by the “Greatest Generation.” They are the folks that had once built a dignified post-war country with their own two hands. They fended for themselves and stoically did what they had to do to survive the Dust Bowl, the Depression, and the War with the Huns. They went around putting things down, doing what they had to do. And the more I think about it, the more I believe those old bastards had something there. And what they had was a life packed with hard-earned meaning, a life more in keeping with the Bronze Age than with this new so-called “Information Age.” But, again, I digress.

  On up ahead and in a crisscross motion, one of these old octogenarian hellcats rides her lawn Snapper. Her wig dangles from the handlebars as she waves hello.

  “You boys comin’ from the warter?” I think I heard her ask.

  “Yes, ma’am!” I shout above the engine noise.

  “Well then! Watch out fer them woofs down by the crick. They’ll gitcha!” She gestures in a grabby-grabby motion with her creepy old talons.

  “We’ll be careful!”

  “It’s the dawg days of summer! That’s when they’ll gitcha!”

  The old lady spins her mower in a fleet 180, laughin’ and a-wavin’ good-bye. Sassafras, scallions, and mint shoot out from under her blades and the whole yard smells like a salad.

  Beyond that, trails of garbage bags and whiskey bottles lead past a “scrap yard” where someone has spray painted over the S on the sign. A lonesome cur sits chained to a Confederate flagpole out back, surrounded by electric barbed wire. And then there’s the failed video rental/tanning salon by the main road. And yes, it’s one of those “shut-down-because-the-owner-was-videotaping-naked-women” kinda places.

  MANAKINS

  Now we are passing the cabin of Keith Atkins, Marshall County’s resident visionary “folk artist.” Atkins, in an effort to glorify the days of Route 66, has converted his yard into a campy roadside attraction of outsider art, scrap metal, colored lights, and kinetic water fountains. He calls it his “Hillbilly Garden.” And it is a mess!

  He is perhaps more famous for having recently fought City Hall and won. Accused of creating an eyesore by the Elva town elders, Keith faced them all in court, decked out like a Snuffy Smith cartoon hillbilly, just to tick them off. Representing himself, he successfully argued his First Amendment right to junk up the neighborhood as he saw fit. Now “Hillbilly Garden” is sevenfold the blight it once was, with corrugated tin, hand-painted signs, muffler men, and Kmart dummies strewn six ways from Tuesday. His revenge story even made it onto national news.

  With victory securely his, Keith currently spends most of his time baiting the sheriff with sight gags and roadside mockery, painting signs like “Pot Garden, This Way ”—a bad pun that leads to a field of half-buried crockpots, skillets, and pressure cookers. He’s a hoot, I tell ya. And the Constitution of the United States of America is on his side.

  While passing his front porch—a still life of posed dummies with weather-beaten clothes and wigs—I am reminded of the one unifying peculiarity of all Southern folk artists: their unceasing affinity for mannequins!

  I ask you, gentle reader. No, I beg you! What is it with plastic mannequins and visionaries of the American South?

  I’ve seen it time and time again: mannequins, body-snatched from department stores, whimsically dressed-up and positioned on porches like grandpappies, or set in the driver’s seat of broken-down vehicles, or roped in the trees like lynched angels. It’s supposed to be cute but I find it unceasingly disturbing. Maybe it’s the anatomical correctness of it all, or the comfort level these artists have with dead eyes, frozen smiles, and stiffness. Perhaps it’s the way they like to dress them up and pose them. It just has too much of a serial-killer-lite feel to it all.

  I find myself distracted by the matte gaze of one particular dummy on Atkins’ porch. Plastic deadness encases it like a human decanter. (Does real flesh-and-blood scream from within?) A sheer muumuu swaddles around its ball-jointed frame, revealing the sun-faded, hardened rubber of its hips, arms, and neck. Kids have scribbled ballpoint pens across its dry-rotted cheeks, and a mussed wig of yellow doll hair sits askew on its head, looking like a rained-on owl. Cocked metal rods, like leg braces, run down into a pair of bunny slippers, and the whole thing looks like it’s been violently bent into a rigid Z, just to sit there crooked forever on the porch.

  As if caught in a magnetic pull, I follow the vague thousand-yard stare embalmed behind the dummy’s black eyes. I am utterly captivated! Yes, I am floating along a slow course set for the depths of those dead, dark portals. But just before I am sucked inside… lo and behold, it blinks! My feet slip off the pedals and I gasp. Indeed! IT IS NOT THE DUMMY! I AM THE DUMMY! Yes, its eyes are those of a real human being. Keith Atkins’ hatchet-faced mother-in-law, as a matter of fact.

  Bless her heart. Saddest thing I’ve ever seen.

  FOUR WAY

  At the junction of 999 and 1210 is the FOOD OWL, a country store that sells Chester-fried chicken, 86 Octane gasoline, “pipin’ hot” tamales, and lotto tickets. There’s a rusty Red Man Tobacco thermometer from the 1970s nailed by the entrance and a tin door-pull embossed with the logo of a defunct bread company. It’s a picture of a smiling Beaver Cleaver-lookalike having a sandwich. Although we’ve only been in the woods a few hours, it’s good to see signs of civilization again. Carver stops in for some Camels.

  “You still want a coke?” he asks.

  “Sure.”

  “Leaded or unleaded?”

  “Do I look like I’m on a diet?”

  The screen door squeaks open and slams shut on its spring-action hinges. “Hey Dolly!” Carver hollers. The obese woman at the counter turns away from her judge shows just long enough to mug the look of indifference. No nod hello, no nothing.

  A pit-stained gray XXXL DALE JR t-shirt hugs her toad-like figure. No doubt some NASCAR t-shirt cannon fired it at her years ago. “It’s free, I’ll wear it,” she must’ve said smugly. Well, it’s better than the one she usually wears. The one that reads:

  P.M.S.: Puttin’ up with Men’s Shit!

  There’s a food counter in the same back corner where a makeshift Goodwill booth is set up. Grade D beef, Mexican bathtub cheese, and secondhand clothing make the whole place stink. It’s a mix of sweatpants, tacos, and feet. I hang back for some fresh air, sticking my head into the ice machine outside by a roadside Vietnam vet. He’s waving an American flag and sitting on one of those aluminum walkers with a built-in potty. That thing you hold yourself up with or stop and take a dump in.

  After a while cooling off, I see Carver come bounding down the wood slab stairs. A cigarette bounces in his green teeth as he tosses me my coke and flips a wooden nickel to the old soldier. It lands perfectly in his begging hands.

  “Don’t spend it all in one place!”

  Leaning in to him, Carver adds, “Personally, my grand-daddy tolt me never to take no plug nickels a-tall.”

  The drunk vet squints his sad eye at the token.

  “You might wanna giver a chomp. Make sure it’s the real McCoy.” Wink wink.

  “Hey. Don’t be a jackass,” I say, trying to keep from cracking up.

  “Taker easy, hoss. It’s fer a free cup o’ coffee.”

  “Thanky, sir.” The veteran goes back to mumbling insanities at passing cars and waving his tattered flag. Each torn stripe blows like fringe in the wind.

  THE LODGE

 
; “I’m so hungry I could eat the ass end out of a rag doll.”

  Carver’s only dietary restriction is that it “ain’t fancy” or “high fallutin’.” In fact, it must be Fallutin’-Free. He slurps down his tin of KELLY’S BRAND PORK BRAINS ’N MILK GRAVY and chases it with a coke. I hork down my Zagnut and a bag of VALU-KIST brand HAWG CRACKLINS.

  Now that we’ve got some protein in us, it’s time to backtrack down Bottom Road. Past Toodie and his brain-dead daddy; past the barn-quilt and the lawn-mowin’ granny, and all the tumped-over grain bins that lie belly-up in the cornfields. But over along the edge of the returning Deadening, a certain three-story cinder block building stands alone and vulnerable. Its backdoor… ajar!

  The old Masonic Lodge.

  “Well hell hell, lookee there. We gotta go sneak inside.”

  “Hold on. You mean break into the Masonic Lodge? What about their blood pact? Remember Jack the Ripper? You of all people should know the Freemasons take a blood oath to protect their secrets, for cryin’ out loud.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means they’ll kill you if you tell anybody what they’re doing.”

  “Naah, we’ll be okay.”

  “Well, you don’t know that, Carver. I’m sorry but I’m not gonna risk it.”

  “What, are you pussin’ out on me and goin’ home?”

  “No, but I’m not going in. I hear these guys are into some dark shit.”

  “Well, find your own way to the Kudzu House then, buddy. This is what’s happenin’.”

  What can I do? He’s the boss. So we head up to the courtyard, past a rotten rick of firewood, a pyramid of stacked lead pipes, and some old porcelain Gulf signs. A cane-back chair sits pitch-poled off the porch. The steps are littered with unswept leaves, cobwebs, and dead spiders curled into arthritic claws. Sections of gothic wrought iron fencing lean against the banisters in a rusty heap. They have zigzagging lightning bolt spearheads like you’d see in a horror movie. Under the overhang, an ancient Edison bulb still burns from a dangling wire.