A Long Day at the End of the World Read online

  So I’d daydream about my father going back, down to the lake bottom where he was born.

  I’d imagine him trudging past a country gas station and general store, stumbling out toward a tin mailbox with the route number worn clean, where bloated cows hovered in his own father’s fields. And I’d see him climb onto the front steps of the porch, open the screen door, sit down to wait in the sunken rooms.

  * * *

  The chapel was packed. A Presbyterian missionary, Wayne Smith, a friend of my parents and a member of Jimmy Carter’s religious circle, began his eulogy with a story about my father, Jesus, and golf.

  Apparently, after his death, my father appeared to Reverend Smith on one of the shorter three-par holes at Big Canoe. My father returned to say that Jesus was real—His love was real—and then I think someone (either my father or the reverend) made a hole in one. As that miraculous tale unfolded, however, my mind drifted back to the drought—to the oaks that had in fact changed color early, shading orange and red beyond the chapel door. I jerked myself to attention. I tried to focus.

  But it didn’t help that the casket remained shut, draped in roses and lilies that hung nearly to the floor. I felt agitated and jumpy. I didn’t like that veil over his body.

  And I didn’t want to hear about golf or my father’s good deeds. I didn’t want to think about the drought or the pretty colors of fall.

  I wanted more. There had to be more. I wanted to be with him now in this place. I wanted to experience the dead and the living together—to become more alive in that opening unto death—even to become death for a moment. It was the most a body could do, I decided, watching Jesus floating high on the chapel wall, nailed to a couple of boards. It would be my inheritance.

  But as they lowered him into the ground, I learned something about myself. I learned I was a coward. I tried to imagine my father’s body but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get closer to his shriveled-up chest and slender bones. I couldn’t open the door of that coffin, feel the sway of muscle and tendon, the great transacting of flesh into dirt.

  And then to make amends for that error, I made another. I panicked. I tried to summon my love for the man again—to feel some love—and when that didn’t arrive I panicked more and turned off. Nothing washed over or passed through me. Not Jesus love or Father love or some Universal-type love. I didn’t feel anything at all.

  The flag was folded up. The pile of earth was ready. And I thought how beautiful the resort cemetery looked—a wild clearing in the woods traversed by meditation benches and flat granite markers. No wildflowers this time of year, just trees and bushes that looked exhausted.

  IN MEMORY OF RONALD CASTO HENDRICKS

  1931–1990

  They put the stone down when we were gone.

  7

  DE SOTO WOULD NEVER FIND HIS GOLD. He would travel throughout the South and he would not find what he was looking for. But early on he didn’t know this, of course. He was voracious and he was invincible. And when he heard about a treasure lode of freshwater pearls, he acted swiftly. At a mortuary house near the Wateree River, his soldiers pried open stacked wooden boxes and tore the pearls from the bodies of the dead—two hundred pounds’ worth, much of it darkened and stained by years of lying against rotting flesh. Men of providence, they took the pearls when they had the chance.

  8

  MOTORBOATS ZOOMED over the smooth water of Lake Tuscaloosa, bearing skiers who vectored random arrows across the black surface. Amid this playful scene, it was difficult to remember that a relentless drought gripped western Alabama, among the worst of the past century. It was difficult to remember because this was a fake lake, a large reservoir formed by a dam, which due to its very immensity had shown only a small drop under the severest of drought conditions. This was all good, of course, for boaters and Tuscaloosans who could go about their business as if the climate remained unstressed, whizzing around in their speedboats and inundating their big lawns daily.

  Such dams were not so good, however, for the wildlife here and elsewhere across the greater Mobile Bay Basin; as a matter of fact, we had apocalypse, mostly of the smooth fake-lake variety.

  The primary victims were freshwater snails and mussels, drowned by the deepwater dams of the regional power companies and/or the Army Corps of Engineers. These species needed free-flowing water to reproduce and thrive, especially shoals where shallow water raced over rocks. Scores of different kinds of bodies had vanished—more than fifty separate species along the Coosa River alone, a tributary of the basin, making the event a truly momentous one in the history of the living earth. In short, biologists considered the Coosa die-off among the worst North American mass extinctions since the demise of the dinosaurs over sixty-five million years ago.

  Some of those drowned mussels would be carrying freshwater pearls, the same pretty orbs prized by both Natives and invaders. In a concordance of destruction, it was the Coosa that de Soto followed as he marched into Alabama.

  And with all the straightening and dredging and damming of the Black Warrior, the South sacrificed one of its most beautiful rivers. Once upon a time above Tuscaloosa, the Black Warrior consisted of a series of twelve shoals or rapids wandering southward, some as wide as a thousand feet. Waterfalls and streaming gorges cascaded down high bluffs on either bank. And in one location, the world’s largest stand of shoal lilies—a three-foot-tall tapestry of flowers springing from a sandstone riverbed—once bloomed its white, complicated blooms in the month of May.

  Now the graveyard of that expanse of white blossoms lay at the bottom of another fake lake: a thin blue spot on my map. Now only the ghosts of those flowers moved delicately underwater, swaying their perfect white heads.

  It was May and the ghost lilies would be in high bloom.

  For a moment I considered a short detour to gaze at the smooth water—pay my respects to a stand of white petals once the broadest and loveliest on earth. But not now, I decided. I needed to stay on my path. I needed to find another haunted place in the deeper hills.

  * * *

  Directly behind the main building at the Tri-State Crematory stood another fake lake—small enough, I suppose, to be called a pond. Such private bodies of water were common in the South. Homeowners liked to stock the dredged pits with fish and, if there weren’t too many snakes around, take a dip in their own personal swimming holes.

  On Center Point Road in Noble, Georgia, the lake functioned as the focal point of the Marshes’ sixteen-acre spread. At the east end of the lake, Ray Marsh had built the Tri-State Crematory in 1981. The main building rested close to the water down a long driveway, and the two outbuildings stood nearby. Ray and his wife, Clara, lived in a small house adjacent to the crematory property. His daughter LeShea also lived there. And eventually Brent Marsh settled one door down in a handsome stone house that backed up to the lake.

  For good reason, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had strong suspicions about the Marshes’ lake. When they first searched the grounds, authorities found a human torso and skull floating near a hidden bank, as well as many intact skeletons strewn in the surrounding brush. It was no stretch, then, to fear that Brent Marsh had stuffed bodies inside metal burial vaults, just as he’d done on land, and then dumped the loaded vaults into the water.

  In the early days of Tri-State, I believed they’d find my father’s body under that lake. It made sense—the final place of unrest for a restless man. He’d been born into a place and the big machines had taken that place away. A biblical-style deluge had come, though unlike after that Great Flood there’d been no promise not to flood the world again.

  And I think his personal flood set him loose, forever cutting his ties with the land. He could never go back to the old farm and fill his present with pictures of the past—never find a familiar slope of ground, a stand of known wildflowers, a beautiful curve of a blackjack tree. He never talked of that first home or any other place from his childhood. He never told me about a house or a yard or a garden or a fiel
d. No animals and no friends. He never told me any stories from his childhood, none at all—it was my mother who told the story about the flood—as if every image from that time had been erased by those apocalyptic waters.

  In fact, I wanted them to find my father dreaming in the depths of Brent Marsh’s lake. Of course to everyone else, especially my mother, it seemed like an awful possibility—bodies rotting together in a packed vault lodged in snake-filled black water. But for me it would frame his beginning as well as his end, and create some order where there was none.

  * * *

  A helicopter news camera distinctly showed the pines that ringed the black surface and the reflection of ragged branches against the sky. Later, only a glimmer of the lake’s jagged shape emerged by Internet satellite. And finally the lake did not appear at all in the photograph of the newly bulldozed field I carried on my pilgrimage day. Instead the lake floated beyond that picture, just beyond the field where most of the decaying corpses once lay in dense woods next to the crematory driveway.

  And while the actual image receded, the myth of the fake lake continued to accelerate, a growing strand in a tangle of Tri-State images. Over time I even developed my own esotericism on the subject, conjecturing that a fake lake’s membrane, always of the smooth variety, offered two distinct pathways: a mirror to the sky or a window to some unknown depth. Reflection or passage. Up or down. Your primary orientation, I theorized, had a lot to do with who you were.

  And the utter emptiness of Brent Marsh’s face allowed for such projection. Did he kneel by the shoreline, for example, and gaze into the pond’s flat glass? Did he trace the pines and oaks that framed a halo against the sky? Or, after a long day of digging and dumping and alchemical blending of concrete dust and bone, did he just stare at his own face blankly—his blank face gazing back—his picture always sliding away beneath deeper water?

  9

  THE SHIT FAIRY’S EARLIEST RECORDED VISIT to our family came in 1983. Though no one in the family knows exactly when, or how, that mystical being received its name in the greater world, we now understand that year to be the opening address to our family, the initial appearance of the uninvited guest.

  I was finishing my first year of law school when I got the call. My mother had metastasized breast cancer and she’d probably die. Chemotherapy. Radiation. Surgery. Round after round. And then, without notice, the Shit Fairy vanished, leaving my mother alive (and still alive today) to identify her malefactor.

  To me, the Shit Fairy was simply a name given to misfortune. It was a blackly funny metaphor about a human inevitability: Bad things would happen to you that were out of your control. My mother would get cancer by virtue of the Shit Fairy’s appearance, and then her body, bolstered by a good immune system or the former’s exit, would do its best to fight off the disease. Sometimes you’d lose and sometimes you wouldn’t. And then sometimes the Shit Fairy would throw you a bizarrely inexplicable event—maybe an event lying somewhere between life and death, or more accurately death and then another death—like abandoning your father’s body at the Tri-State Crematory for five years. And though the entity itself provided no real supernatural solace, you could say the name out loud and the saying provided some comfort. Somehow, somewhere, consolation lay in the words.

  By all accounts my mother seemed to have acquired the term from friends. But beyond that, where did the title come from? Did the Shit Fairy have any historical or legendary parallels? It was, after all, a “fairy,” and a long past existed concerning such beings.

  Searching for predecessors, I found that many southeastern tribes told variant stories of the Little People, and as I had at least one legendary ancestor among the Cherokees, I was especially interested to find their connection to that tribe. For the Cherokees, the Little People were largely good-natured folk who lived in undeveloped places such as rocky cliffs and caves. They assisted humans in many ways—gathering corn in the dead of night, or guiding lost children through the mountain forest. Only if mentioned by name or disturbed in their homes did the Cherokee Little People cause problems, and then events we might today attribute to bad luck—broken bones, illness, death—would be charged to them. I wondered if my north Atlanta suburb—born of digging and scraping and moving the earth—had disturbed an ancient dwelling place of the Little People, if the Shit Fairy had marked us for a visit way back then.

  * * *

  I thought of the Shit Fairy as I rolled into the Alabama countryside, climbing higher into the Piedmont plateau, because of the heavy flowering of churches along the road. Whereas my family of lapsed Presbyterians had the Shit Fairy to explain events—a theology based solely on the personification of bad luck—most Southerners had Jesus to ascribe causation to. And out here the houses of Jesus, the churches, grew more dominant as the ground became more hilly and the broken-down mobile homes proliferated in the exposed dirt—exposed either from erosion, backhoe, or simple neglect and then dotted with black-eyed Susans. Which is not to say there were more churches in the country than in the city or the suburbs—Tuscaloosa County as a whole boasted over three hundred houses of Christian worship—just that they stood out against the sad and scarred land, the lush and yet weirdly unbeautiful land.

  Nailed to a pine tree on the right side of the road, a white sheet of paper asked that I Please worship God and Jesus. It was one of maybe a dozen I’d seen since the suburbs—handwritten messages on regular copy paper fastened to trees and fence posts. Edicts in black marker sent directly from the Holy Ghost, they said things like Please do God’s work as he wants you to and Please do what God tells you to do and Thank God for the gift of Jesus and Please do God’s will today. Someone certainly had gotten the Spirit and needed to tell the driving public all about it. And as strangely unbeautiful as the land along the highway appeared, gouged and neglected, these pieces of paper actually were beautiful. Almost transparent in the morning sun, black letters floating against wood, they seemed like little flags of the apocalypse, gently prodding us to be good.

  New stands of short pines rose from timber company clear-cuts. A black rectangle of an old trampoline leaned against a worn-out brick house with too many inhabitants and too many cars. A place called Sunshine Valley offered lots and mobile homes for rent, while the Piney Woods Church, a nineteenth-century brown brick church with a well-tended cemetery on the other side of the two-lane, offered some version of salvation.

  I say “version” because there are so many churches with varying practices in the county. It’s nearly impossible to appreciate the cultural dominance of Christianity in the Protestant South—the felt presence—unless you’ve spent some time here. Only years of exposure might enable one to navigate the theological distinctions among, say, the Church of Christ, Church of God, Church of God-in-Christ, and Church of God-of-Prophecy. The general demographics present an easier account.

  I know, for example, that over fifty percent of Alabama’s citizens characterize themselves as fundamentalist—believing in the literal truth of the Bible, the word-for-word truth—a figure three times greater than that found in a progressive state like Massachusetts. Fundamentalists, however, are not to be confused with evangelicals. The former merely occupy the right wing of the evangelical movement, a movement that also includes liberal Democrats and moderates like Jimmy Carter. And yet the movement is not so heterogeneous as some like to maintain. Across the nation as a whole, five times more evangelicals describe themselves as conservatives than as liberals.

  Beliefs, of course, have practical effects—for better or for worse—and one particularly conservative church has held sway in this part of the country since before the Civil War.

  In fact, a good deal of the existing cultural disturbance in the Deep South can be tied to the historical efforts of the Southern Baptists. This statement is hardly controversial. The political influence of the group cannot be minimized, particularly regarding the very place I now drove through. Sometimes called the “State Church of Alabama,” the Southern Baptists,
just over a decade ago, claimed membership of one in four Alabamians and two in three of the state’s churchgoing citizens. (More recently, the huge nondenominational churches, mostly fundamentalist in their own right, had appropriated a portion of the Baptists’ traditional constituency.) Unfortunately, at every juncture the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)—the umbrella organization of affiliated churches—employed its broad influence to usurp basic civil liberties. The scars left by its actions are as evident as, and entwined with, those left on the land by poverty, unbridled development, dams, extinctions, and the nearby strip-mining for Alabama’s high-grade coal.

  And yet unlike the Shit Fairy’s, the denomination’s origin and history are well documented. In 1845, Southern Baptists broke away from the national organization because the rest of the country’s Baptists, particularly those in New England, would not sanction slaveholding missionaries. Thus the Southern Baptists emerged as a staunchly proslavery group and based their defense of that practice on a “literal” interpretation of the Bible. Specifically, the SBC pointed to Noah’s condemning of Canaan, the son of Ham and presumed progenitor of the black race, as the “servant” of “his brethren.” (Canaan, it appears, deserved such a fate—along with the millions of Africans born to slavery and degradation in the future—because Ham had seen the nakedness of his drunk father, Noah, and had not seemed particularly embarrassed by it.)

  Armed with the “firmly established” scriptural belief that God intended slavery, and that African Americans were inferior, the SBC fought hard against racial equality at every step in Southern history. First, their spiritual backing of slavery provided a religious underpinning for the Civil War. Later, having lost that argument, the Southern Baptists maintained that the Bible condoned—indeed, ordained—segregation. In this way, emboldened by religious zealotry, the SBC would struggle against federal antilynching laws, desegregation, and all manner of civil rights well into the second half of the twentieth century. Over time, the actions of the Southern Baptists put them directly at odds with historically separate black Baptist congregations, such as Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.