Deer Hunters
found what was left of Smithy’s body suckled into the gray mud at the edge of
the lake on the top of Cheaha Mountain. The body was hidden away like a
forgotten Christmas present in the bulrushes. Smithy was now a part of the lake
at the highest elevation in Alabama and moved imperceptibly with the subtle
currents. Smithy suddenly had grace and a moral density he could never have
imagined. The flannel shirt and the Plain Pocket jeans he was wearing were
almost translucent. His feet were bare. Whatever he had in his pockets was
gone. He used to carry a big pocket knife and a wad of keys on a strap
connected to his belt. I think the knife was an Uncle Henry with a bone handle.
It had been a year since he had disappeared. His pit bull had starved to death
on his chain before anybody realized he was gone. Smithy lived alone on a small
farm littered with the ruins of wrecked tractors and ramshackle outbuildings.
He had never married. He didn’t have any friends. He had killed old man Snyder
in the road with a shotgun as he was bearing down on him in his
three-quarter-ton Ford.. They had been feuding for years over their property
line. Smithy’s corpse was a good forty miles from home, the longest trip he had
taken in years.
Smithy had dug the spillway out of the Big Lake on my grandfather’s farm. It wasn’t a graceful cut. Smithy plowed a ravine for one hundred and thirty-five yards through the growth of sweet gums, water oaks and tulip poplars. The sides were cut straight up and down. Tree roots curled out into the air seven feet above the muck like arms grabbing for a hand. From the top of Crooked Mountain a mile and a half away the ravine looked like a moccasin snake’s carcass strung through the trees. The mountain itself was a snake, a piece of Rattlesnake Mountain that reached south towards the flatlands and north towards the Appalachians.
The valley around my grandfather’s farm was a network of ruins –teetering wooden houses, graves falling into shallow yawns, dilapidated barns –over laid with brightly colored houses and trailers on green scraggily lawns. What had been small cattle farms and tiny cornfields were turning into residential properties. Smithy’s house was a rough-cut box cobbled together out of exposed insulation, sheets of fiberglass, and asphalt shingles. He and his shotgun were out of sync with the air conditioners, vinyl siding, and higher property values. But there were other notable features in the landscape. Scattered through the valley were long aluminum chicken houses that floated like moored dirigibles in the full sun, each spreading the smell of chicken shit for three-quarters of a mile in all directions. On the dirt road that wound through Crooked Mountain were piles of garbage mixed with refrigerators, melting horses, and cows with beetles swarming over their guts next to stands of deciduous azaleas and oakleaf hydrangeas. Objects, flora, and fauna, and practices from different worlds were jammed together in aboveground geological patters,. In the sixties one of the buses in the Freedom Ride from Washington, D.C., was burned on Highway 78 nine miles down the road. A man was killed. Just north was a old lynching zone from the early 1900s that had turned into the center for drug trafficking in the state. Two FBI agents had been murdered there by the redneck Mafia. Michael Tausig, and anthropologist who worked on the violent remnants of the rubber trade in Colombia, would describe the valley around my grandfather’s farm as part of a “culture of terror, a space of death,.” For Taussig, landscapes can soak up stories and practices and then ingest individuals in a whirlpool of sticky signifiers, coating the person in a prosthetic as natural as skin of a baby and as complete as anything the German sociologist Max Weber imagined with the “iron cage”. What neither Weber or Taussig directly articulates is the coordination between the body and the surrounding landscapes. The fit or coordination is more than an ecological adaptation,. It is he radicalized habitus in which the two landscapes are sewn together by the same ‘set of needles.”
Its not just a metaphor that ties Smithy to the ravine but a net of intertissular meshworks. The scar on his left forearm looks like it could have been from barbed wire ripping back under tension. I have a small one in the same place. The ravine is a larger scar,. From Crooked Mountain this is exactly what it is, a rip gored through the humus and red clay by a backhoe under hydraulic pressure. Manuel De Landa more eloquently describes this likeness as a consequence of common physical processes applied to landscapes at different levels, such as Smithy’s body and the grove behind the lake. . . the world pumping in between Smithy, the tractor, my grandfather, and their minds merges into a ghost that finds expression in scars.
Crooked Mountain is a zone where ghosts and trivial events combine into layers of hauntings that reach through the landscape and bite, then vanish back through the thin topsoil into the red clay. Here the cunning of imprisoned rattlesnakes turns people like Smithy into pink meat for crayfish at the water’s edge, a baby Moses for insects and birds in the bulrushes. The kind of space found in Colombia flexes between charged supernatural landscapes such as the Indian body, the jaguar, whiteness, the commodity in one of its most surreal forms: the hallucinogenic root yage, and the biggest of them all – the rain forest itself. The horror of the Alabama woods is different. The extremes ae muted and are as elusive as the pileated wood pecker, a crow-sized woodpecker killed for its feathers, whose traditional habitat is vanishing with the clear-cutting of the old longleaf pines. Here economic fictions bend and torque with the religious in matter-of-factness that masquerades as normal business. Smithy dug the ditch my grandfather wanted for such much per hour. The straight business arrangement beguiles how intertwined, like honeysuckle around a sapling, Smithy and my grandfather’s dreams and nightmares were with the project of domesticating the wilderness through hard work and how hidden their own characters were in the digging.
Smithy didn’t go to church. The only time he ever mentioned God was next to the idea of killing those Japanese sons of bitches. He worked hard. His tractors looked like shit but they ran. The tractors, like the rattlesnakes he baked in his tool box in the August sun, were instruments of his will dedicated to accumulation and not preservation. Smithy didn’t accumulate objects but a singular view of himself as a compounding bank account. His body double was fond in the netherworld of banks, a thing made of interest and paper bills. This paper statue of himself mesmerized Smithy. No Madonnas in the woods or bloody Christ moved him. Smithy was the embodiment of a new saint. He smelled like diesel fuel. He was murderous. But his prosthetic covering was as smooth as any saint’s marble or as glossy as Gregor Samsa’s shiny black shell. What Smithy did is make true the retro of Weber’s iron cage into a steel or titanium coating indistinguishable from the person’s character. Smithy had $70,000 in his pocket the night he disappeared.
Crooked Mountain was like a big throbbing brain at the center of this landscape. It was the biggest ruin, the biggest grave, and the gravity that moved toolboxes, pine beetles, deer, sofas, hope chests, and packs of wild dogs across the landscape. From the top of Crooked Mountain, the whole valley could be seen. Smithy’s farm was north across Turner’s hog farm and the rock quarry. From the mountain it was indistinguishable from the other farms, just another open field temporarily rescued from the pine trees and broom straw, the first stage in a succession of plants and men who lived there and the wacked pH of the soil. Fields covered in broom straw, a stiff- bladed grass that can pierce the stomach of a cow, a signal neglect. The pasture had been overgrazed without fertilization. The pH of the soil is too alkaline and doesn’t support better grazing grasses. It is also indicative of an ecosystem restabilizing the conditions that are favorable to an alternative and previous ecosystem – one more suited to the zone than the artificial grazing pastures cleared from swamps and pine woods.
The spillway petered out in a stretch of dirt beneath a huge tulip poplar tree. In May the tree is covered withy bees and fat blooms. The honey from a tulip poplar won’t turn to sugar. I never made any money selling honey, sugar or no sugar. Smithy disappeared owing me money for five gallons of honey. That came to about thirty dollars. He thought the honey would help his arthritis. “Goddamn Japs. Those little fuckers messed me up in the war,” he told me as he conned me out of honey while rubbing his left shoulder. Smithy hated anyone who drove a Japanese truck. “I’ll bushhog around the barn next week, Shelton. Soon as I get done withy Murray’s septic line,” he said as he eyed my Toyota one ton. Smithy was last seen at a bar on Highway 78, an easy connection to that lake at the highest altitude. Witnesses recall Smithy bragging about how much money he had in his wallet. He had sold his backhoe. He was going to Florida to party. Smithy was never very smart. Some things are expected of a man who kept rattlesnakes in his toolboxes.
His body and the landscape he dug were fitted together like a set of holographic Rosetta stones laid against each other. Each was covered in a pictographic language of scars and barely visible tracings laid into fat layers and humus. Together there was a repetitive depth in which one small cut on Smithy extended into the larger cut of the ravine with but the slightest modification of meaning. Each is a trail cut by a trajectory of assemblages in movement. A molecular cloud of particalized occurrences, composed of pieces of objects and bodies drawn out of different strata of time and site, had moved across Smithy like a Portuguese man-of-war with its long, delicate tentacles marking him and then through him to the landscape he dug. When Smithy took off his cap to wipe his brow, there was a red line lefty behind on his forehead, splitting his head into two colored halves like an egg cut in two with a straight razor. He wore the cap too tight. Smithy had been beaten and then shot in the head. The bullet was never recovered. But the Bic pen-sized line it gored through his skull could easily be seen by the deer hunters who found Smithy in the mud. . .
At the peak of Crooked Mountain was made from two pine trees nailed together. The top was cut off of a small tree, making the crosspiece and the post. A handful of twenty-penny nails were hammered into the intersection and it was cross-tied with a rope. You can see the cross driving in from Jacksonville. It wasn’t large enough to stare down at you; it was there like a man standing in the clearing between trees waiting for something to happen. It was a reminder of another body stuffed in the ground. All through the mountains were pieces of bodies. State Police Colonel Dothard told me Satanists used these roads for their rituals. They would bury the initiates alive in shallow graves for baptisms. Colonel Dothard looked stern as he explained this to me. But he and I knew there were real graves littered through the mountains. A coon dog was buried with a memorial plaque along a dirt road. Near the paved road was a small graveyard dating back to 1900 covered in garbage. Colonel Dothard didn’t know about the Indian burial ground dating to AD 1 at the foot of the mountains. The graves were mounds of large rock laid in careful pyramid-shaped piles and terrace walls. All of them were now hidden in the recess of a succession forest . . .
It was just after Smithy disappeared that my grandfather decided to fill in the ditch. He was always worried about a cow or a calf falling in. That is why I got permission to use the ravine as my personal landfill. I had just begun the restoration of what was called the Big House on the farm. The man and woman who lived for thirty years had moved out,. The well had gone dry. John Parker was used up. They moved mile down the road into a prefabricated house set right off the road at the entrance to a cut through the mountains. Stands of mountain laurel spread up the cleft of the slope, hugging the shade. Parker would sit, arms hanging down at his side on the narrow porch, wearing overalls and a T-shirt, and state straight ahead at the passing cars. The general store at Rabbittown was a minute away at forty-five miles an hour, so there was always a truck or a Chevy whipping by. Parker had no money other than what Opal brought in. She worked at the chicken plant. Parker didn’t go to church or watch TV. He couldn’t read. He knew Smithy. He had seen Smthy dig the ravine. He thought Smithy got what he deserved. “Son of a bitch”, he said. “Couldn’t even dig a goddamned ditch right.”
Smithy had dug the spillway out of the Big Lake on my grandfather’s farm. It wasn’t a graceful cut. Smithy plowed a ravine for one hundred and thirty-five yards through the growth of sweet gums, water oaks and tulip poplars. The sides were cut straight up and down. Tree roots curled out into the air seven feet above the muck like arms grabbing for a hand. From the top of Crooked Mountain a mile and a half away the ravine looked like a moccasin snake’s carcass strung through the trees. The mountain itself was a snake, a piece of Rattlesnake Mountain that reached south towards the flatlands and north towards the Appalachians.
The valley around my grandfather’s farm was a network of ruins –teetering wooden houses, graves falling into shallow yawns, dilapidated barns –over laid with brightly colored houses and trailers on green scraggily lawns. What had been small cattle farms and tiny cornfields were turning into residential properties. Smithy’s house was a rough-cut box cobbled together out of exposed insulation, sheets of fiberglass, and asphalt shingles. He and his shotgun were out of sync with the air conditioners, vinyl siding, and higher property values. But there were other notable features in the landscape. Scattered through the valley were long aluminum chicken houses that floated like moored dirigibles in the full sun, each spreading the smell of chicken shit for three-quarters of a mile in all directions. On the dirt road that wound through Crooked Mountain were piles of garbage mixed with refrigerators, melting horses, and cows with beetles swarming over their guts next to stands of deciduous azaleas and oakleaf hydrangeas. Objects, flora, and fauna, and practices from different worlds were jammed together in aboveground geological patters,. In the sixties one of the buses in the Freedom Ride from Washington, D.C., was burned on Highway 78 nine miles down the road. A man was killed. Just north was a old lynching zone from the early 1900s that had turned into the center for drug trafficking in the state. Two FBI agents had been murdered there by the redneck Mafia. Michael Tausig, and anthropologist who worked on the violent remnants of the rubber trade in Colombia, would describe the valley around my grandfather’s farm as part of a “culture of terror, a space of death,.” For Taussig, landscapes can soak up stories and practices and then ingest individuals in a whirlpool of sticky signifiers, coating the person in a prosthetic as natural as skin of a baby and as complete as anything the German sociologist Max Weber imagined with the “iron cage”. What neither Weber or Taussig directly articulates is the coordination between the body and the surrounding landscapes. The fit or coordination is more than an ecological adaptation,. It is he radicalized habitus in which the two landscapes are sewn together by the same ‘set of needles.”
Its not just a metaphor that ties Smithy to the ravine but a net of intertissular meshworks. The scar on his left forearm looks like it could have been from barbed wire ripping back under tension. I have a small one in the same place. The ravine is a larger scar,. From Crooked Mountain this is exactly what it is, a rip gored through the humus and red clay by a backhoe under hydraulic pressure. Manuel De Landa more eloquently describes this likeness as a consequence of common physical processes applied to landscapes at different levels, such as Smithy’s body and the grove behind the lake. . . the world pumping in between Smithy, the tractor, my grandfather, and their minds merges into a ghost that finds expression in scars.
Crooked Mountain is a zone where ghosts and trivial events combine into layers of hauntings that reach through the landscape and bite, then vanish back through the thin topsoil into the red clay. Here the cunning of imprisoned rattlesnakes turns people like Smithy into pink meat for crayfish at the water’s edge, a baby Moses for insects and birds in the bulrushes. The kind of space found in Colombia flexes between charged supernatural landscapes such as the Indian body, the jaguar, whiteness, the commodity in one of its most surreal forms: the hallucinogenic root yage, and the biggest of them all – the rain forest itself. The horror of the Alabama woods is different. The extremes ae muted and are as elusive as the pileated wood pecker, a crow-sized woodpecker killed for its feathers, whose traditional habitat is vanishing with the clear-cutting of the old longleaf pines. Here economic fictions bend and torque with the religious in matter-of-factness that masquerades as normal business. Smithy dug the ditch my grandfather wanted for such much per hour. The straight business arrangement beguiles how intertwined, like honeysuckle around a sapling, Smithy and my grandfather’s dreams and nightmares were with the project of domesticating the wilderness through hard work and how hidden their own characters were in the digging.
Smithy didn’t go to church. The only time he ever mentioned God was next to the idea of killing those Japanese sons of bitches. He worked hard. His tractors looked like shit but they ran. The tractors, like the rattlesnakes he baked in his tool box in the August sun, were instruments of his will dedicated to accumulation and not preservation. Smithy didn’t accumulate objects but a singular view of himself as a compounding bank account. His body double was fond in the netherworld of banks, a thing made of interest and paper bills. This paper statue of himself mesmerized Smithy. No Madonnas in the woods or bloody Christ moved him. Smithy was the embodiment of a new saint. He smelled like diesel fuel. He was murderous. But his prosthetic covering was as smooth as any saint’s marble or as glossy as Gregor Samsa’s shiny black shell. What Smithy did is make true the retro of Weber’s iron cage into a steel or titanium coating indistinguishable from the person’s character. Smithy had $70,000 in his pocket the night he disappeared.
Crooked Mountain was like a big throbbing brain at the center of this landscape. It was the biggest ruin, the biggest grave, and the gravity that moved toolboxes, pine beetles, deer, sofas, hope chests, and packs of wild dogs across the landscape. From the top of Crooked Mountain, the whole valley could be seen. Smithy’s farm was north across Turner’s hog farm and the rock quarry. From the mountain it was indistinguishable from the other farms, just another open field temporarily rescued from the pine trees and broom straw, the first stage in a succession of plants and men who lived there and the wacked pH of the soil. Fields covered in broom straw, a stiff- bladed grass that can pierce the stomach of a cow, a signal neglect. The pasture had been overgrazed without fertilization. The pH of the soil is too alkaline and doesn’t support better grazing grasses. It is also indicative of an ecosystem restabilizing the conditions that are favorable to an alternative and previous ecosystem – one more suited to the zone than the artificial grazing pastures cleared from swamps and pine woods.
The spillway petered out in a stretch of dirt beneath a huge tulip poplar tree. In May the tree is covered withy bees and fat blooms. The honey from a tulip poplar won’t turn to sugar. I never made any money selling honey, sugar or no sugar. Smithy disappeared owing me money for five gallons of honey. That came to about thirty dollars. He thought the honey would help his arthritis. “Goddamn Japs. Those little fuckers messed me up in the war,” he told me as he conned me out of honey while rubbing his left shoulder. Smithy hated anyone who drove a Japanese truck. “I’ll bushhog around the barn next week, Shelton. Soon as I get done withy Murray’s septic line,” he said as he eyed my Toyota one ton. Smithy was last seen at a bar on Highway 78, an easy connection to that lake at the highest altitude. Witnesses recall Smithy bragging about how much money he had in his wallet. He had sold his backhoe. He was going to Florida to party. Smithy was never very smart. Some things are expected of a man who kept rattlesnakes in his toolboxes.
His body and the landscape he dug were fitted together like a set of holographic Rosetta stones laid against each other. Each was covered in a pictographic language of scars and barely visible tracings laid into fat layers and humus. Together there was a repetitive depth in which one small cut on Smithy extended into the larger cut of the ravine with but the slightest modification of meaning. Each is a trail cut by a trajectory of assemblages in movement. A molecular cloud of particalized occurrences, composed of pieces of objects and bodies drawn out of different strata of time and site, had moved across Smithy like a Portuguese man-of-war with its long, delicate tentacles marking him and then through him to the landscape he dug. When Smithy took off his cap to wipe his brow, there was a red line lefty behind on his forehead, splitting his head into two colored halves like an egg cut in two with a straight razor. He wore the cap too tight. Smithy had been beaten and then shot in the head. The bullet was never recovered. But the Bic pen-sized line it gored through his skull could easily be seen by the deer hunters who found Smithy in the mud. . .
At the peak of Crooked Mountain was made from two pine trees nailed together. The top was cut off of a small tree, making the crosspiece and the post. A handful of twenty-penny nails were hammered into the intersection and it was cross-tied with a rope. You can see the cross driving in from Jacksonville. It wasn’t large enough to stare down at you; it was there like a man standing in the clearing between trees waiting for something to happen. It was a reminder of another body stuffed in the ground. All through the mountains were pieces of bodies. State Police Colonel Dothard told me Satanists used these roads for their rituals. They would bury the initiates alive in shallow graves for baptisms. Colonel Dothard looked stern as he explained this to me. But he and I knew there were real graves littered through the mountains. A coon dog was buried with a memorial plaque along a dirt road. Near the paved road was a small graveyard dating back to 1900 covered in garbage. Colonel Dothard didn’t know about the Indian burial ground dating to AD 1 at the foot of the mountains. The graves were mounds of large rock laid in careful pyramid-shaped piles and terrace walls. All of them were now hidden in the recess of a succession forest . . .
It was just after Smithy disappeared that my grandfather decided to fill in the ditch. He was always worried about a cow or a calf falling in. That is why I got permission to use the ravine as my personal landfill. I had just begun the restoration of what was called the Big House on the farm. The man and woman who lived for thirty years had moved out,. The well had gone dry. John Parker was used up. They moved mile down the road into a prefabricated house set right off the road at the entrance to a cut through the mountains. Stands of mountain laurel spread up the cleft of the slope, hugging the shade. Parker would sit, arms hanging down at his side on the narrow porch, wearing overalls and a T-shirt, and state straight ahead at the passing cars. The general store at Rabbittown was a minute away at forty-five miles an hour, so there was always a truck or a Chevy whipping by. Parker had no money other than what Opal brought in. She worked at the chicken plant. Parker didn’t go to church or watch TV. He couldn’t read. He knew Smithy. He had seen Smthy dig the ravine. He thought Smithy got what he deserved. “Son of a bitch”, he said. “Couldn’t even dig a goddamned ditch right.”
* *
* * *
* * *
*
In the dreamworld of Alabama I imagine Jesus’ dead body stretched out like a buck on the hood of a truck. He hasn’t been shot in the abdomen; the wound in his side is a gaping hole made by a large-caliber-rifle shot, and his body has been mangled. The crown of thorns cuts into his heads, just as if they were antlers pulled out from his skeleton into the air. The ropes have cut deep straps into his limbs. His back and flanks are crisscrossed with cuts from a Taiwanese hunting knife. He looks like a bloody Rosetta stone. The body is dumped at the meat processing plant, drenched in beer. And then the first miracle – after three days he comes back to life. The wounds close. The second miracle is perhaps even more remarkable. Some wounds don’t close. They remain open and are fitted to Thomas’s hand and his hands alone - no one else touches Jesus - just as if they were the bullet and the ropes that killed him because this dreamworld is fitted for him and him alone.
In the dreamworld of Alabama I imagine Jesus’ dead body stretched out like a buck on the hood of a truck. He hasn’t been shot in the abdomen; the wound in his side is a gaping hole made by a large-caliber-rifle shot, and his body has been mangled. The crown of thorns cuts into his heads, just as if they were antlers pulled out from his skeleton into the air. The ropes have cut deep straps into his limbs. His back and flanks are crisscrossed with cuts from a Taiwanese hunting knife. He looks like a bloody Rosetta stone. The body is dumped at the meat processing plant, drenched in beer. And then the first miracle – after three days he comes back to life. The wounds close. The second miracle is perhaps even more remarkable. Some wounds don’t close. They remain open and are fitted to Thomas’s hand and his hands alone - no one else touches Jesus - just as if they were the bullet and the ropes that killed him because this dreamworld is fitted for him and him alone.
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