"Berryhill" (1960/1976)

“You have filled the whole world with tombs and sepulchres; though it is nowhere said in your scriptures that you must grovel among tombs and pay them honour. — Julian the Apostate, Against the Galileans, fragment 90 (ed. Wright, The Works of the Emperor Julian, vol. 3, Loeb Classical Library 157, London: Heinemann, 1923), pp. 360–363.

“The coffin which contained the relics of the martyr was removed; but even the ground where it lay retained its healing power, and those who touched the dust were delivered from their diseases.”— John Chrysostom, Homilia in S. Babylam contra Julianum et Gentiles §74, in Select Homilies and Letters of St. Chrysostom, trans. W. R. W. Stephens (London: J. H. Parker, 1889), p. 146.

Murder was there in his proper form, and Jimmy Ware was possessed completely. He hacked the life out of the old three, as he had planned for so long. Nehemias groaned in his dying sleep, and Habacuc whimpered like a crushed dog. Sophronia made little bird sounds as she died. Jimmy hacked as the blood welled with its sharp metallic smell, and it was on his hands with a slickness more like graphite than grease or liquid. The three harmless old relics lay still.

A light post after heavier ones, this time on "Berryhill.”

First, this is a fine and very intelligent Lafferty story. It’s the kind of work that would teach well, since much of its power lies in the right words being in the right places—its language rewards close reading for how Lafferty pulls off the boyish, the spooky, the comic, and the horrific with a lot of idiosyncratic modulation. Yet that is not the approach I’ll take here, because I’m not convinced the story is understood as a narrative, not even by Lafferty's smartest readers. What has me considering this specifically is what someone said about Lafferty’s overtly religious stories being somehow different from his other stories. “Berryhill” isn’t overtly religious, so it’s a good test case for the “non-overtly religious” stories and demonstrating what one can miss.

On the subject of violence in Lafferty’s fiction, readers often get befuddled. Lafferty is only befuddling until he isn’t. Most Lafferty fans sense the pervasive importance of violence, but without considering the Catholic metaphysics that grounds it, and the semantic field in which his characters bleed, the idea that blood matters can’t do much critical work for them. All they can do is note, well, there’s a lot of blood here. The cartoonish violence is okay because it’s cartoonish and the brutal violence is not quite as okay. They seem not to know it’s the same thing.

I have my own sense of how the bloodsmell (one of his coinages) operates in his work. It is a vertical concept—part of an ongoing attempt to build a conceptual vocabulary for my reading Lafferty—and that’s the idea I’ll use here. When I coin a term, it’s because I need it. I tend to internalize it so deeply that I forget to explain how I later use it to reach an interpretation. This time it may be useful to show exactly how the bloodsmell works, which is where this post will end.

Like "Fog in My Throat," "Berryhill" is not a horror story for the faithful, except in its treatment of physical death itself. It is hellishly brutal on that matter, with three elderly murdered characters and a nine-year-old killer. I imagine it makes for uncomfortable reading for those unfamiliar with some of the themes I have recently discussed on the blog—especially aggressive Catholic art and redemptive suffering. Lafferty is not one to hold hands.

If you have read it, you know “Berryhill” is a bait-and-switch story. It begins with gossip about the Berryman family, a trio of elderly, reclusive siblings who live in a decaying house on the edge of town. For sixty years, the family—Nehemias with his black beard, Habacuc with his white, and Sophronia in her “ancient dress”—has been regarded as peculiar and unnerving (1 Peter 2:9). We are told they are “apart, repelled, unfriended, and unchurched.” Suspicion has grown into a persistent and “flavorsome” rumor: that the Berrymans survive by dining once a year on a stranger. This seems to be supported by a long record of local disappearances.

All of this comes through the narrator, and we should suspect that the point of view is filtered through the mind of a child—our protagonist, Jimmy Ware, a disturbed nine-and-a-half-year-old boy. His secret club, the Lost Creek Bobcats, disbands when his friend Paul Potter refuses to join him in visiting Berryhill. Paul, terrified, warns, “They’ll kill you if they catch you.” Jimmy calls Paul a coward. Paul runs home to his mother.

Armed with a pistol he named Pete and a “razor-sharp hatchet” named Mike, Jimmy sets off alone into the darkening evening, toward the house that seems to be “growing out of the ground.” It is covered in a “miasmal, heavier” darkness. Inside, he is greeted not with hostility but with welcome. The gaunt Berryman brothers lead him into a well-lit cellar. Lafferty cues us with EC Horror language. “It’s been a long time since we had a boy here,” Nehemias says. Sophronia adds, “My, it’s been a long time since we’ve had a boy for supper!” Jimmy is asked to sharpen a foot-long carving knife while a pot of water is set to boil.

Then the story turns. This will not be a playful. It is about evil. As the old men bow their heads to say grace, Jimmy takes out his hatchet and kills them both. He murders Sophronia as she enters with “a boiled goat on a great trencher.” Their “supper” is revealed as entirely mundane. Jimmy Ware, possessed by “red evil,” stands over the “three harmless old relics” and begins to laugh. Lafferty writes that Jimmy Ware got everything he wanted.

When I say that I don’t think this story is well understood, I mean that most readers interpret it only as a twist ending. They see it as an Alfred Hitchcock trick in which the child turns out to be the murderer. That reading overlooks two essential pieces of information.

First, the three elderly characters are Catholics. We know this because of the spelling of their names, which comes from the Vulgate and the Douay-Rheims Bible, not the King James Version. It is why they are not Nehemiah and Habakkuk, the names Sword-Drillers would know. This detail matters tremendously because the Berrymans have been slandered in the traditional way Catholics have always been slandered—namely, for their Papist belief in transubstantiation, in the real presence in the Eucharist. For cannibalism.

Let two examples illustrate this kind of slander. The first is found in Justin Martyr (c. AD 155), First Apology, chapter 26:

“And whether they perpetrate those fabulous and shameful deeds—the upsetting of the lamp, and promiscuous intercourse, and eating human flesh—we know not; but we do know that they are neither persecuted nor put to death by you, at least on account of their opinions.”

The second can be found in Tertullian (c. AD 197), Apologeticus, chapter 7:

“Monsters of wickedness, we are accused of observing a holy rite in which we kill a little child and then eat it; in which, after the feast, we practice incest—the dogs, our pimps forsooth, overturning the lights and getting us the shamelessness of darkness for our impious lusts . . . This is what is constantly laid to our charge.”

Now compare the cannibalism canard with what Lafferty has the townspeople say about the Berrymans:

Indeed the Berrymans dined but once a year. This was the most persistent and flavorsome of all the stories about them. And when they dined, they dined on stranger.

Second, non-Catholics may not get Lafferty’s joke.

Catholics are only required to receive communion once a year, though missing the Sunday holy day of obligation is a mortal sin. This is one of five precepts of the Church. It is usually is called the Easter Duty. Lafferty mentions it in his work several times, specifically when portraying characters who detract those who fail to perform it. (If you’re a Catholic, you have had an intimation of Purgatory from the confession lines at Easter.)

Current Canon Law puts it this way: “After being initiated into the Most Holy Eucharist, each of the faithful is obliged to receive holy communion at least once a year . . . . This precept must be fulfilled during the Easter season unless it is fulfilled for a just cause at another time during the year.” In the Middle Ages many Catholics only received once a year.

And why “dined on stranger”? Catholicism has a closed communion. It is a stranger meal if you aren’t a Catholic. In the ancient world even catechumens were sometimes not present for the Eucharist.

With all of this in mind, we can begin to ask what is actually going on in this little story and ask how Lafferty is using violence. It’s the semantic field, the sticky wicket where, I think, Lafferty’s readers tend to fail. They fail because they won’t face up to learning the metaphysics. It has nothing to with agreement. It has to do with not knowing the metaphysical tradition Lafferty is working with, so naive readers then make a series of cascading interpretive errors.

To use Kevin Cheek’s term, they think they can stand outside Cathedral and appreciate, not only without belief (they could), but without concrete knowledge about the beliefs (they will not). This like not knowing what a Cathedral is to the Catholics inside it. It is like looking at a beautiful building with stained glass but not seeing that the building houses the chair (cathedra) of a bishop, a man who is in direct apostolic succession to one of the apostles. It is not knowing the difference between the episcopate, the presbyteriate, and deaconate, and so not knowing this is building is unlike a local Catholic church even though both face east and have stained glass; even though the local church might be more architecturally impressive, it is lesser. In short, it is aspect blindness. Highly recommended for hardcore Lafferty readers.

This might seem trivial but someone very smart recently confused a metropolitan with the Pope in a discussion of Past Master.

So here is my foolproof, freshly patented method for not understanding what Lafferty is doing as an artist:

With all this in mind, what is going on in this story, and how is Lafferty using violence? Why is this not a nasty little story but can feel like one? This is what people, I think, tend to be pretty awful at explaining. That isn't critical condescension or gross arrogance; it is my recognition of something obvious: Lafferty readers choose not to address the writing on its own terms before coming up with their own. If folks don't know the metaphysics and the tradition in which Lafferty is working, they are vulnerable to a series of cascading errors. They definitely won’t understand this non-overtly religious story.

Here is a reading of the bloodsmell in this story.

It is doing at least two things. Old Catholics find a kid in their house and invite him to have “supper” with them, which is a Eucharistic trope, just as the meal at the end of Arrive At Easterwine is a Eucharistic trope. The young boy murders them while the men are saying grace, and then murders the old Catholic woman while she is about to perform a corporal act of mercy. The three die painfully, but they die as quintessential Christians performing the aforesaid corporal act of mercy: feed the hungry. Hence the pun on relics: "The three harmless old relics lay still." “Still” has a double function: lifeless but also enduring. If a reader encounters the word relics at this point in the story and doesn’t hear what the word is doing in the story, then that reader has read the wrong story—even if the same words appear on the page. There simply isn’t attunement to the text.

Old relics is the bloodsmell as redemptive suffering. It points to grace and salvation. The boy rejects grace, and that is the other side of the bloodsmell.

Murder was there in his proper form, and Jimmy Ware was possessed completely. He hacked the life out of the old three, as he had planned for so long.

There is a trinitarian element here and what Jimmy rejects, but I won’t push it.

To show how Jimmy got here, Lafferty has brought together the social and spiritual evil of what Catholics call detraction—what in Judaism is called Lashon hara. This creates conditions for greater evil to enter, where Lafferty introduces his pervasive theme, the demonic.

Berryhill Notes.pdf

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