Deviled Noir
By: Terry Barr
Tags: Appalachia, Southern Gothic, Literally Literary, Religion, Nonfiction

So I decided to use the theme of Southern Gothic/Rural Noir for my Introduction to Literature course at Presbyterian College, which is situated in a remote place called Clinton, halfway between Greenville and Columbia, SC. I keep planning to nominate Clinton for one of the town makeovers that Ben and Erin from HGTV’s “Hometown” are proposing. If that ever happened, I’d ask them to start by knocking down that Confederate Monument situated in the town square. The rest would be up to them.

My course covers O’Connor’s Wise Blood, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (a travelogue of a family traversing 40 miles, surviving flood and fire, all to bury their beloved mother who just so happened to have cheated a bit with the town’s Baptist preacher, because, you know, nothing brings you closer to being redeemed than fornicating with a holy man), Portis’s True Grit, Capote’s In Cold Blood, MO Walsh’s My Sunshine Away, and Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone.

But we start with David Joy’s Appalachian deadwood tale, The Weight of This World.

I can’t give a plot summary of Joy’s novel, except to say that it focuses on two almost-brothers who go in circles in a place called “Little Canada,” way up above Asheville. They steal a pile of meth from a dead man and try to sell it to some Mexicans. The Mexicans could be Guatemalans or Salvadorans, but whatever the case, they don’t like meth-peddling trespassers.

I’ve never tried meth, and to my knowledge, I’ve never known a meth addict. I won’t ever understand the addiction, but it’s to Joy’s glory that I care so deeply about these two characters that it breaks me a bit to see their fictional fate, and I break this way every time I read the novel, which is now going on reading number seven.

I try to persuade my classes that the novel, though horribly, horribly violent, has a beauty and grace that likely run hand in hand, because the South is like that: addiction and salvation; religion and violence. My students haven’t heard of Jim Bakker, Jimmy Lee Swaggart, or Jerry Lee Lewis for that matter. It’s hard to tell them because at some point, your wise blood either knows these truths, or it doesn’t. Still, I make it a point always to read the passage quoted below, and even if they don’t believe it could happen this way, they might wonder later and see some form of truth.

One of the almost-brothers, Aiden McCall, recounts the legend of the woman he once bought OxyContin from, the so-called “unluckiest woman” the community had ever known. Her name was Gerty Brinkley, and as part of her misfortune, she saw her little girl Pearl get carried off by a black coyote, and her husband, who killed the coyote but couldn’t save Pearl, slash his throat while shaving one morning months later. She found her husband lying in his own blood pool, and as Aiden relates it, “That was before the cancer ate her” (39).

She came by her drugs, then, the hard way. Oxy, Dilaudid, “morphine suckers.” Aiden preferred the Oxy, but would settle for whatever she had, just like everybody else Gerty supplied. Gerty wasn’t spiteful or vicious, and she wasn’t necessarily even deluded. But, she did believe in Jesus:

“The old woman barely had a single hair left on her head…The veins in her head shone through her scalp and she wore a thick pair of glasses that swelled her eyes two sizes too big. It was saddening to even look at her, but listening to her was unbearable. She loved to talk Jesus, never would shut up about that water walker. Every time Aiden was there it was all he could do to get away in an hour for the likes of all her preaching, but he had to stay for the whole sermon to score the dope. She said she sold the pills to raise money for the church, all that cash funding Jesus’s doings” (39).

She could stand it all, Gerty could, because she knew that Jesus awaited her. But before the cancer could take her, a man named Bennie Hazel mauled her into “cube steak” just so he could take her last stash. You think Bennie would have been smarter because it was such a steady and sure supply that got cut off when he brained the poor old woman.

Definitely unlucky.

Of course, the killing part is that everyone knew what she was selling, so everyone knew when she turned that money over to the church where it came from, and so everyone could see that Gerty’s church’s one foundation was not necessarily “Jesus Christ, our Lord.” The church took the money, kept the money, and if Jesus was appalled or wept, no one from the church wondered or seemed to mind at all.

This isn’t the only scene in The Weight of This World that makes a reader darken about those professing to know the truth in God — those who claim to have the wise blood. But it will have to do for now, because a tease is just a tease.