Child of God

Sheriff Turner descends the steps of the courthouse until he reaches water: The rain has turned the streets of Sevierville into a lake. Deputy Cotton picks him up in a rowboat. The sheriff jokes about Noah and his ark.

As they go to pick up and distribute the mail, the sheriff and the deputy check on people in town. Someone exploited the flooding to rob the hardware store. The owner, Eustis, and the sheriff wonder whether God intended people to live in a place so often beset by disaster. At the post office, the postwoman enquires about all of the people who have gone missing from cars on Frog Mountain.

As they distribute the mail, the sheriff and the deputy give a ride to an old man named Mr. Wade. He relays that a woman thinks the flood is a punishment levied by God on the people of Sevier County. Mr. Wade thinks that only the total moral corruption of everyone in the county would merit such a punishment.

Mr. Wade tells the history of organized vigilantism in the county. This is the history of two warring groups: the White Caps and the Bluebills. Mr. Wade condemns the White Caps as a gang of thieves and murderers who preyed on the weak. However, he also lambasts the Bluebills, a group formed to counter the White Caps’ abuses, for their cowardice in never directly confronting the White Caps. Mr. Wade praises a man named Tom Davis, a school teacher who became deputy sheriff then sheriff, for fighting the White Caps despite their attempts on his life. The era of White Capping ended when Tom hanged two White Caps for murdering a mother and father in front of their daughter. The entire town—including the wives of the condemned men—gathered to witness the hanging. It was done incorrectly, and it took the men over 10 minutes to die, disturbing the crowd.

As they arrive back at the courthouse, Mr. Wade mentions a hermit who used to live on House Mountain. People taunted him to come out by throwing rocks into his cave.

Spring arrives. Lester watches two hawks in flight that are either mating or fighting. He knows that all living things fight. Day after day from the mountain, he watches as the fields are plowed and the leaves grow on the trees; he hangs his head and cries.

Awake in his cave at night, Lester thinks he hears a sound he used to hear as a child lying awake in the dirk: the whistle of his father on his way home. However, the sound is just an underground stream emptying into the “unknown seas at the center of the earth” (175). That night Lester dreams that he’s riding a mule through a forest on a day of absolute beauty, yet he’s full of sadness and dread: He has resolved to ride to his death.

On a morning in May, Lester sneaks up on John Greer, who’s digging a septic tank for his house. Lester—unrecognizable in a dress and a wig made from the scalp of his victims—carefully aims his rifle at John and fires. He misses, hitting the shovel as John swings it past his shoulder. Startled, John turns and sees Lester frantically reloading, “an apparition created whole out of nothing and set upon him with such dire intent” (176). Lester shoots John twice before he makes it into the house. Lester rushes after him, but as soon as he makes it in the door he’s blown back out by the blast of a shotgun. Greer, shot through the upper chest, goes to inspect what he’s shot.

Lester awakes in a psychiatric hospital in a drug-induced haze. His arm is missing. The nurse doesn’t know what the doctors did with his arm, only that it was shot off. To Lester’s chagrin, John Greer is alive.

After a few days, a group of vigilantes distracts the deputy on guard and sneaks Lester out of the hospital. They drive into the hills and order Lester to take them to the bodies. They suspect that Lester killed the women to have sex with their corpses. When he denies killing anyone, the vigilantes loop a steel cable over his head and lead him to the scaffold of an old sawmill. Lester agrees to take them to the bodies.

Instead of taking the men to the sinkhole (where the bodies are), Lester takes them to the cave he lived in prior. He leads half the men (half wait at the entrance) into the cave system, down the watercourse toward the vaulted cavern where he once kept the bodies. The men played in the caves as children but are unfamiliar with this one. Suddenly, Lester stops and crawls through a fissure in the rock. The men wonder if they’ll be able to move the bodies through such a small gap. Then they realize that none of them are skinny enough to fit through it themselves: Lester tricked them. After some argument, they turn around. None of them can remember the way out.

Lester spends three days looking for another exit. With nothing but stone to lie on, he sleeps little. The flashlight starts dying on the third day, when he finds a chamber of bison and elk bones. He takes a tooth from a jaguar’s skull and continues, before he encounters an abyss and turns around.

Eventually, Lester finds a cave with a crack to the surface. For the following days and nights, he widens the crack, digging first through dirt and then through flaking sandstone. Though not hungry, he searches in vain through rodent middens for an overlooked nut. Envisioning how the vermin and insects of the cave will take over his body after his death, reducing it to bones, Lester longs for escape, for a “brute midwife to spald him from his rocky keep” (195).

Five days after entering the cave with the vigilantes, Lester digs to the surface. There he sees a cow and a barn. He rests in the cave until nightfall, then sets out. The landscape is unfamiliar; even the stars look different. He finds a road and follows it away from the mountains. Honeysuckle perfumes the air. A church bus passes Lester, who hides in the weeds. When he emerges, he and a boy watching out the back of the bus lock eyes. Lester is disturbed to realize that the boy looks like him.

Lester finds his way back to the psychiatric hospital in Sevierville. Emaciated, one-armed, and covered in red mud, Lester presents himself to the night-duty nurse, stating, “I’m supposed to be here” (197).

Lester isn’t charged with any crime; instead, he’s sent to a state psychiatric hospital in Knoxville. There, he’s kept in a “cage” next to a man who used to cut open people’s heads and eat their brains with a spoon (198). Lester has nothing to say to this “crazy man” (198). Noticing that the door of that man’s cell is secured with a bent spoon, Lester asks whether it’s the same one. He gets no response.

In April 1965, Lester contracts pneumonia and is transferred to another hospital for treatment. Two days after he returns to the psychiatric hospital apparently cured, he’s found dead.

The hospital sends Lester’s body to a medical school in Memphis. There, it is brutally examined: “He was laid out on a slab and flayed, eviscerated, dissected. His head was sawed open and the brains removed. His muscles were stripped from his bones. His heart was taken out” (199). In his entrails, the medical students read omens of worse monsters to come. When the class ends three months later, Lester’s remains are scraped into a plastic bag and buried in a cemetery outside the city for criminals and the mentally ill. A minister from the medical school performs a basic service.

Later that year, a farmer is tilling his field when suddenly his mules and plow disappear into a sinkhole. The farmer, Arthur Ogle, peers cautiously over the edge into the earth. He feels a cool wind and hears the distant sound of running water. The next day, two boys rappel into the hole. They find no trace of the mules. Instead, they find on stone ledges the bodies of seven women.

Sheriff Turner and his deputies descend into the sinkhole to extract the bodies, which are covered with mold and fungus. The deputies loop rope around each of the corpses and pull them up. Except for the gray flesh sloughing off of them, the bodies appear reanimated by the lifting rope. The bodies are bound in muslin and loaded onto a trailer, which descends into the valley. It is dusk, and nighthawks fly up from the dusty road “with wild wings and eyes red as jewels in the headlights” (208).