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

It’s a fine and very intelligent Lafferty story—the kind that would teach well, since much of its power lies in the right words in the right places. Its language rewards close reading for how Lafferty pulls off the boyish, the spooky, the comic, and the horrific with so much 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 something someone said about Lafferty’s overtly religious stories being somehow different from his others. “Berryhill” isn’t overtly religious, which makes it a good test case for the so-called non-overtly-religious stories, and for showing what one might miss if that distinction is taken naively.

On the subject of violence in Lafferty’s fiction, readers often get befuddled. Lafferty is only befuddling until he isn’t. Most devoted Lafferty readers quickly sense the pervasive importance of violence, but without attending to the Catholic metaphysics that grounds it—the semantic field in which his characters bleed—the claim that blood matters can’t do much critical work, or else does work extrinsic to the text’s formal arrangement. One ends saying is that there’s a lot of blood here. The cartoonish violence seems acceptable because it is cartoonish; the brutal violence, less so. This approach doesn’t understand it’s the same thing. Such, at least, is my impression from tracking how Lafferty’s readers approach the topic.

I have my own sense of how the bloodsmell—one of Lafferty’s coinages—operates in his work. It is a vertical concept, part of an ongoing attempt to build a conceptual vocabulary for reading Lafferty. That’s the idea used here. When I coin a term, it’s because I need it and have been puzzled; and I tend to internalize the concept so deeply that I forget to explain how I later use it to reach interpretations. 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 a half-horror story. Depending on where one stands, its horror differs: for the faithful, it is most horrifying in its treatment of physical death itself and in the spiritual corruption of a child. It is hellishly brutal on that score—three elderly characters murdered, a nine-year-old killer at the center. I imagine it makes for uncomfortable reading for those unfamiliar with some of the themes recently discussed on the blog—especially aggressive Catholic art and redemptive suffering. Lafferty is not one to hold hands, and this story was conceived during the pre-nucleation phase of the ghost story, so he was creating his techniques.

If you have read “Berryhill,” you know it is a bait-and-switch story. It begins with gossip about the spooksome 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 focalized through the minds of children—if not precisely that of our protagonist, Jimmy Ware, a disturbed nine-and-a-half-year-old boy. The peripeteia of Lafferty’s story is to pop this focalization out of joint. Jimmy’s 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 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 take it only as a twist ending. They read it as an O. Henry trick by way of Hitchcock: the child turns out to be the murderer. That makes it grand guignol, which it is not. Such a reading overlooks two essential pieces of information.

First, the three elderly characters are Catholics. We know this because their names are spelled the way they are in the Vulgate and the Douay-Rheims Bible, not in the King James Version. It is why the men are not named Nehemiah and Habakkuk, the names Sword-Drillers would know. This detail matters tremendously. 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. "Take and eat it; this is my body."

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.

Those who do not know Catholicism may not get Lafferty’s joke. This is the second piece of essential information.

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, usually 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 the precept 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 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 with blood wicket where, I think, Lafferty’s readers tend to let the cricket ball bounce off erratically. They fail because they won’t learn the metaphysics. It has nothing to do with metaphysical agreement. It has to do with not knowing the metaphysical tradition Lafferty is working with, hegemonic in the West for most of its history. Lacking necessary information, readers then make a series of cascading interpretive errors.

This can be well-intentioned error. Consider Kevin Cheek's essay "Outside the Cathedral." In it, he writes of "Ginny Wrapped in the Sun,"

“As I said, I have always been uncomfortable with the story, not so much because of its religious allegory, but because of the cavalier way it treats the pregnancy of a four-year-old child and the murder of another. What the religious references do give it is a framework upon which to hang these uncomfortable elements—a sense of depth and profundity that allow one to look past the difficult elements to see what the story is saying. Essentially ‘Ginny Wrapped in the Sun’ is telling us that the dinosaurs ruled the earth for over 50 million years, while we’ve only been here for fifty to a hundred thousand. And then it asks us what makes us think we will last?”

I’m not going to take apart Cheek’s argument in detail, but it’s a mistake to think “Ginny Wrapped in the Sun” is merely a story with religious references with important stuff hung upon it. There isn’t evidence in the essay that Cheek accounts for its religious allegory, which Lafferty thought allegorized reality.

Let’s think about that. I can only imagine what Lafferty would have thought of the line about dinosaurs once ruling the earth, given his belief—grounded in Genesis—that man alone was granted dominion. But set that aside, because that isn’t what the story is about. I’ll also set aside the fact of Lafferty’s willingness to flirt with Young Earth Creationism.

Lest this seem uncharitable, there is nothing wrong with reading Lafferty this way, only that it is like reading James Joyce as if he were devout and thinking one can say what Joyce is essentially doing. We are all welcome to appreciate but not understand art on its own terms. That is what most acts of art appreciation are. I do it often.

Since Cheek uses the word essentially in his comment about the dinosaurs, I am going to steal it. Lafferty is probably doing something else—essentially doing something else. He’s saying: stop doing things the way you are, people; you’re making God angry. One thinks of how Lafferty sometimes uses the word “people” in the vocative case.

“They, too, will drink the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath.”— Revelation 14:10

That is essential Lafferty. Embarrassing stuff.

But it's also why Lafferty is not counterfiguring Mary as the Woman of the Apocalypse to pose a general problem about humanity’s longevity, as if humans were other fauna, from dinosaurs to dodos. He is telling an anti-Christological horror story. His point is that because so many contemporary men and women see the world as they do, amnesiaclly, there could be consequences soon, so he imagines them.

The story is essentially saying, you men and women, made in God’s image, now see yourselves as being like dinosaurs—you no longer know what you are. You have forgotten your own nature, that you are in Mine Own image, and could be in the image of the Man I became of the Blessed Virgin, she who is clothed in the Son.

That is to say Lafferty would have thought that Kevin Cheek is not what Kevin Cheek believes himself to be, something that could be anything like a dinosaur or a dodo. For Kevin Cheek will always exist; he has a soul. There will only be one Kevin Cheek. There will only ever be a finite number of human persons in eternity—an idea that lies near the heart of “Ginny.”

To build on Cheek’s metaphor, there are two ways of standing outside a cathedral as an unbeliever. The first is to appreciate the cathedral without faith but with essential information. The second is to try to appreciate it not only without belief, but without knowledge.

This latter stance is to appreciate the cathedral without understanding what it is to the men who built it. It is seeing the structure with stained glass, yet not seeing that it houses the cathedra—the chair of a bishop in direct apostolic succession to one of the apostles. It is not knowing who Jephthah or Cornelius is in the stained glass and seeing colored light. It is not knowing basic things, such as the difference between the episcopate, the presbyterate, and the diaconate; not realizing that this stone structure is unlike an ordinary parish church, even though both face east and glitter with colored glass. The local church might be more architecturally impressive, yet it is profoundly lesser in important ways. Such seeing is not a lack of personal faith, but a case of aspect blindness in the way Cheek misidentifies what he calls the difficult elements, ones of “cavalier” treatment child pregnancy and child murder. Do you believe it is more likely that Lafferty is being cavalier or that this is Lafferty’s calculated act of artistic provocation? One can be “outside the cathedral” in a manner apart from any tenets of belief. Highly recommended for hardcore Lafferty readers.

It is not trivial. Someone very smart recently confused a metropolitan with the pope in an introductory discussion explaining Past Master. Lafferty made the point it was a metropolitan. The mistake means the person doesn't know the organization of the Church or the role of Christ's indefectibility in the novel or the structural nature of Catholicism on Astrobe, which is interpretatively important in its final passages. As Lafferty said, Past Master was the novel most overtly about his religion. Metropolitan is a term in that religion.

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 "Berryhill," 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 bloodsmell in “Berryhill.”

It is doing at least two things. Kind and gentle 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 is not punched by what the word is doing in the story, then that reader has read the wrong story, even if the same word appears on the page. There simply isn’t attunement. The reader has only seen luridly colored light.

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. Possessed.

Berryhill Notes.pdf

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