A Land More Kind than Home

“‘Maybe God doesn’t want Stump to say nothing else. You tell us all the time that nobody can ever know God’s will.’

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘You can’t. But the Lord doesn’t play no tricks. Evil plays tricks, and there ain’t room for evil in this family.’

I kept my head back on the seat and swallowed hard even though I knew I wasn’t swallowing nothing but air, and I tried to keep myself from getting sick. I felt my forehead start sweating because I knew that Mama would tell me that I was evil for being the one who hollered out for her and then letting her believe that it was Stump. It didn’t matter whether she knew it was me or not, I felt evil just the same.”

Jess holds himself responsible for Stump’s safety, certain that any future harm that comes to Stump will be the result of Jess’s violation of his mother’s order not to spy on adults. Jess is too young to understand that the circumstances he finds himself in are not his fault and that he has accidentally obtained knowledge that the adults in his life are attempting to keep from one another.

“I was afraid because I knew that church, and I knew the man who ran it as if he thought he was Jesus Christ himself, and some of those people who went to that church believed Carson Chambliss just might be. People out in these parts can take hold of religion like it’s a drug, and they don’t want to give it up once they’ve got hold of it. It’s like it feeds them, and when they’re on it they’re likely to do anything these little backwoods churches tell them to do.”

Here, Sheriff Barefield speaks directly to the theme of The Influence of Religious Fervor. He recognizes the potential danger that comes with the power that the church’s pastor holds and implies the pastor’s inflated sense of self-importance through the allusion to Jesus. Throughout the novel, Barefield is careful to allow the church its freedom to practice but also seeks to keep his community safe.

“My mind suddenly recalled the new sign out by the front of Chambliss’s church. It recalled the exact verses on it: Mark 16: 17-18 […] When I got home that night I took Sheila’s Bible out of her nightstand and flipped through the pages until I found the verses and whispered as I read them out loud: ‘And these signs will follow those who believe: In my name they will cast out demons, they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will place their hands on the sick, and they will get well.’

Things became clearer to me once I read that. A bad burn from a meth house explosion in north Georgia becomes a sign of holiness and power in western North Carolina.”

The biblical scripture that serves as the foundation of Chambliss’s theology shows that much of what proves dangerous about his practices results from literal interpretation of such passages. Chambliss’s unapologetic literalism plays a role in Stump’s death.

“All that hollering had scared me, especially after what I’d seen at Miss Lyle’s house, and I tried as hard as I could to keep from crying. I didn’t want my grandpa to see me, and I turned my head to let the air come in the window and dry my face. I wanted to stop crying once and for all, but I couldn’t. I’d just about given myself a headache with all the crying I’d already done.”

In the aftermath of Stump’s death, Jess is forgotten as the adults deal with the death and their own emotions and grief. The solitariness and loneliness that Jess faces are compounded by the fact that, as a young child, he is not only ill-equipped to handle grief on his own but also lacks basic information that could help him understand and process the situation he finds himself in.

“[Stump] was always hiding things he liked and things that belonged to him. You could open his drawers or look under his pillow and find all kinds of things: rocks, sticks, dried-up flowers, toys he didn’t want getting lost or broken. The only things he didn’t hide were the rocks that were ours together. We sat them on the shelves in our room that Daddy’d made for us. Me and Stump would look at our rocks together and try and find stuff about them in Daddy’s old encyclopedias. I knew Stump wouldn’t ever think about hiding any of those rocks because he knew we shared them. They were ours together.”

Stump values his small and simple treasures—especially the firefly Christmas ornament that Jess makes for him. The memory of hunting fireflies with Stump is a fond one for Jess and evidence of how closely bonded the brothers are despite Stump’s inability to speak. Jess possesses special insight into Stump, recognizing what is meaningful to him. In turn, Stump holds his brother in high regard, respecting him and valuing his friendship, as evidenced by him leaving their shared rock collection in the open for both of them to enjoy.

“I could see my grandpa’s face. The reflection of that quartz rock sat right in between us. 

‘You look just like your daddy,’ he said.

I sat there with my chin on the table, and I stared at his fuzzy reflection. I thought about how I could tell him the same thing.”

Though they have never met before, Jess and his grandfather share a common bond through Ben, Jess’s father and Jimmy’s son. The bonds of family are important to the Halls, though the novel elsewhere suggests that Ben has strived not to be like his father, who has an alcohol addiction and abused him. The physical resemblance among the three male relatives is a reminder that some behaviors and traits—both good and bad—are shared across generations.

“I wondered what Stump thought about when he looked at the ornament up close. I wondered if he pictured me and him out in the fields chasing fireflies and trying to scoop them up in Mama’s Mason jars, or if he ever opened the quiet box and expected that he might find that firefly glowing. I never knew just what he was thinking, especially when he closed our bedroom door and was all alone with his box, but I hoped that firefly I’d given him made the world quieter for him.”

Jess’s love for his brother manifests as both protectiveness of and sympathy for him. Though he is too young to completely understand the nature of Stump’s disability, Jess recognizes that the world has been a difficult place for Stump to navigate. He hopes that the small things that Stump delights in are sufficient to make his life meaningful.

“I could hear the crickets chirping outside and some wind chimes tinkling, and way off in the distance I could hear the water running in the creek at the bottom of the hill. Everything was just like it always was except Stump wasn’t there with me.

[…] I closed my eyes and ran my hand across Stump’s side of the bed, and I imagined he’d just gotten up to pee, and I laid there and listened for his footsteps in the hall.”

After Stump’s death, Jess pretends that his brother is still living. That no one has said anything to Jess by way of explanation about Stump’s death exacerbates his denial.

“‘But why have you been gone so long?’

‘I just have,’ he said. ‘I just went away.’

‘Why?’

He sat there quiet like he was thinking hard about what he wanted to say next, and then I saw his head turn like he was looking at me over his shoulder. ‘Because sometimes we do things we can’t take back, and we need to go away and leave folks alone and let them forget us for awhile.’”

Though the complete backstory about the dissent between Ben and his father has not been revealed, Jimmy hints at its nature in a way that allows readers to draw conclusions about what it might have entailed. Jess, however, is too young to understand the falling-out between the two men. Jimmy attempts to explain it in a way that Jess might comprehend without providing Jess with any specific information; the distance between the father and son serves as another form of secret that invades the novel.

“I want to be pissed at Jeff and pissed at those boys for not having the balls or the sense enough to complain about him showing up to work like that, but then I catch myself. Slow down, I think. You ain’t got nobody to be pissed at but yourself for letting Jeff go with him. You knew better than all the rest of them. And that’s true, and I know it. I knew better than that. But for some reason I didn’t stop Jeff. I trusted Jimmy Hall with my son when I wouldn’t even trust him with his own. And then I got to thinking, This one’s on you, Clem. You ain’t got nobody else to blame but yourself.”

Sheriff Clem Barefield recalls the death of his son, which resulted from an accident on the job. Barefield initially blamed his son and the other employees for their failure to report their boss, Jimmy Hall, for negligence. In retrospect, however, Barefield views the situation differently and recognizes his own possible culpability. His observation that Jimmy could not be trusted to care for his own son becomes important when Jimmy is forced to care for Jess, his grandson.

“Sometimes, when I get to thinking about it, I wish I’d have blown his damn head off right there and left him laid up in the snow with his brains hanging up in the limbs of some old pine tree. I didn’t do it, but I’ll be damned if I don’t think about how easy it would’ve been just to take care of it all right there.”

Barefield sporadically regrets not killing Jimmy in revenge for the death of his son, Jeff, which was the result of Jimmy’s negligence. In these moments, he feels that if Jimmy were dead, this would erase his own emotional pain. His words become ironic in retrospect when Barefield kills Jimmy’s son, Ben, in a split-second decision.

“It wasn’t too long after the sheriff’s boy died while working with Jimmy Hall that he dropped off into nothing and left Ben all alone. It was probably the best thing that could have happened to Ben. He tried to be a different man than his daddy, and I can tell you that’s good enough for some of these boys up here, but it wasn’t for Ben. He wanted to be a good man, a good Christian man. I just think his blood was set against him.

Maybe Ben thought he could run from it, and maybe that’s why he took his family off that mountain not long after Christopher was born. Maybe he gave up Gunter for the valley closer to the French Broad to escape a past that had already marked him with his daddy’s closed fist and a strong taste for whiskey.”

Adelaide reflects on the strained relationship between Jimmy and Ben. Her favorable opinion of Ben is important in shaping how readers respond to his later actions in the book: Ben tries to avoid repeating his father’s mistakes by not consuming alcohol. However, when faced with the death of his son, Ben does indeed begin drinking, which plays a role in the events that follow Stump’s death. Ironically, it is thus Ben’s love for his son that sets him on the path that led to his own father abusing him—a twist of fate that suggests the difficulty of overcoming a legacy of addiction and trauma.

“Julie and Ben named that little boy Christopher, but only Julie and the folks at church ever called him that. Ben always called him ‘Stump,’ and so did just about everybody else who knew him. Julie hated that nickname like it was poisonous, and she always called him Christopher. I never once heard her call him anything else.”

Julie’s refusal to use her son’s nickname signals her refusal to accept him as he is—i.e., someone with a disability—which ultimately results in his death. The reference to the nickname itself being “poisonous” is therefore ironic, and it’s also an indirect allusion to the poisonous snakes that Chambliss keeps. Though Stump’s death is not caused directly by a snake as Molly Jameson’s was, Chambliss is at fault in both instances.

“That child was touched, and I just don’t know what else you could call it. He never cried once as a baby, and by the time he was three years old those two kids knew he wasn’t ever going to speak. He’d hum sometimes or maybe even grunt when he wanted something, but that was about it. He was quiet, all right, but you couldn’t say he wasn’t peaceful.”

Adelaide’s description of Stump as “touched” is a regional colloquialism that means that he is thought to have some type of ailment or disability that affects his intellectual capacity. Nevertheless, Adelaide’s description of Stump as peaceful indicates that he is content with his life and therefore tacitly condemns his mother for attempting to “cure” him.

“‘Why’d they kill him if they thought he was innocent?’ I asked.

‘Because,’ she said. ‘he was someplace he shouldn’t have been, and sometimes that’s enough.’ And now, when I think about what happened to Christopher inside that church, I think the same thing.”

Adelaide recounts a story that her great-aunt told her that concerned a young Confederate soldier who was unjustly killed. As an adult, Adelaide recognizes a parallel to Stump’s situation. She feels that his disability left him unjustly vulnerable to adults who, not understanding that his lack of speech did not make him any less valuable, attempted to force their will upon him.

“I walked to the side of the house and stood in front of the cruiser and looked out across the yard and considered the old barn for a minute. It was sun-scorched and just about bleached white and appeared to be leaning to one side as if it might tumble over the high grass. I set off across the yard to have a look. I don’t hold with snooping because that’ll get you into trouble real fast in this line of work. But I can tell you it doesn’t ever hurt to take a good look around when you got the time.”

As Sheriff Barefield arrives at Chambliss’s home to question him, he directly references the theme of the danger of secrets and silence. The wrongness of spying on adult business has been impressed upon Jess, but here, the sheriff insists that such spying is problematic for adults as well; it is not only children who may learn more than is good for them.

“I guess you could say I collect them. I like to think they remind us that we can change into something new. That’s what the good Lord can do for us when he grants us salvation, Sheriff. He makes us new. All the old, dead life falls away from us.”

Chambliss refers here to the venomous snakes that he uses in his church services. He frames his actions as being in the interest of his parishioners and seeks to convince the sheriff that his motivations are admirable, comparing the snake’s shedding of its skin to Christian redemption.

“But like I said, I can see how you’d like those snakes. They shed skin, men shed skin. Skin grows back, sometimes it gets grafted on.”

Barefield responds to Chambliss’s use of the snake metaphor by building upon it in a way that signals Barefield’s knowledge of his criminal record. In likening Chambliss’s damaged skin to the shed skin of a snake, Barefield subtly makes clear his negative opinion of Chambliss. To Barefield, Chambliss is a snake who poses a threat to others, not an altruistic man with healing power.

“‘We’re all in need of some kind of healing, Sheriff,’ he hollered after me.

I opened the door to my car and slid onto the seat and watched him as he walked back toward the barn. The first drops of rain splattered on my windshield. I thought about what he said and I realized that I couldn’t have agreed with him more.”

Chambliss’s words are meant as a criticism of Barefield—an insinuation that Barefield himself is far from perfect. However, Barefield does not dispute Chambliss, which suggests that Barefield has Chambliss in mind as the one who is in need of healing (hence, filled with sin and wrongdoing).

“[Chambliss] put his arm across Julie’s seat and turned around and looked at me through his back window. It struck me as strange then, and it’s even more troubling to think about now, but he smiled at me. It was almost like he was proud to be playing the good guy all of a sudden—somebody who I’d come to protect now that Ben Hall had finally made him the victim.”

Barefield recounts the expression on Chambliss’s face, which indicates a proud and self-centered attitude of righteousness. Chambliss insists that he is in the right up until his death. Barefield recognizes Chambliss’s true nature in ways that other members of the community, who are taken in by his charm, are not.

“‘Don’t do that, Ben!’ I hollered. ‘Look at me! Turn that back on me!’ I could hear Julie sobbing over there on the far side of the car, and I could hear her struggling to get away from him. ‘It ain’t going to be worth it,’ I said. ‘I know it won’t. You know it too.’

‘No, I don’t,’ Ben said, and when he said that he turned his head and looked at me with a face I’d never seen on him before, and I can say that it was the only time in that boy’s life that I’d ever seen his daddy in him.”

As Barefield tries to convince Ben not to behave recklessly while holding a gun—fearful that Ben may intentionally shoot Julie or Jess—Barefield understands that Ben is fueled by rage and has the ability to commit violence. This capacity for harm is a trait that Ben despised in his own father and has been determined to avoid. Barefield, however, suggests that in this moment, Ben shows evidence of having inherited his father’s flaw.

“I watched Jimmy Hall as he walked toward that blue sheet, and I watched as he kneeled down beside it. I wanted to open the front door and holler at him, let him know that he shouldn’t do it, not because I was afraid that he’d damage the crime scene or contaminate the evidence but because I knew that he might not be ready, might not ever be ready, for what he’d see under there. But I also knew that fathers want to see what’s become of their sons, and sometimes they can’t forgive themselves if they don’t.”

Here, Barefield witnesses Jimmy discovering that his son, Ben, is dead. Barefield has held a grudge against Jimmy for 20 years, blaming him for the death of his own son, Jeff. However, in this moment, Barefield feels compassion toward Jimmy because he can empathize with the pain he is experiencing.

“It was something to see [Clem Barefield] standing there by Jimmy Hall, both of them just a few feet away from Ben’s graveside, and even then only twenty or thirty yards away from where Jeff had been buried twenty years before. These two men who’d hated each other for so long stood there side by side with nothing but their dead sons in common between them, both of them having believed, at least at one time or another, that the other man was to blame. They’d hated each other until they were both broken, and I reckon that’s when they decided it was time to leave all that behind and get on with their healing.”

Adelaide’s words at Ben’s funeral speak to the theme of The Pursuit of Justice and Healing. Though, at times, Barefield has been driven to harm Jimmy in retaliation for his role in Jeff’s death, it is only when he kills Jimmy’s son that he (unintentionally) obtains a form of revenge. Now that the two men are “even,” their feud can end as they find common ground in their shared grief.