Up from Hell

Continuing my excerpts from the most recent draft of the new book, introducing the second major character...

In 1868, when Anthony Comstock was still rather new to the anti-vice crusade, a baby was born in the Missouri Ozarks to a sick young woman and her alcoholic husband. They named him Bernard but called him Barney.

      There were, according to one folk saying, only two routes out of the Ozarks: Heaven and Hell. This was bleak land, lost in the center of America. The people who populated it were the Scots-Irish and the rural English who had been displaced from their farms by sheep centuries before, who had been sent into Scotland to break that old nation and then sent into Ireland with Cromwell to kill Catholics and take their land, then sent across the sea to subdue America.

      These were not the merchants and planters who stayed on the coasts and prospered. These were small farmers, itinerant laborers, borderline hunter-gatherers, independents and drifters who could not compete with the slave-worked plantations and moved upward into the hills, then over the hills and across Alabama, Mississippi,  northern Louisiana, displaced by plantations or lumber or mills. Many stayed in those places to become sharecroppers or millhands, but others kept moving, slowly ever west, until by the last days of the great slave empires they were chopping the stubborn trees and breaking the rocky soil of the Ozarks. Then the Civil War came. Missouri was split in half, the prairies of the north loyal to the Union and the Ozarks—selling their poor crops southward, toward Louisiana and the Gulf—loyal to the slavers. Men went off to die in a losing cause, and if they did not die they came home to a land of resistant hills and rutted dirt roads now lost in poverty.

      There was one way to survive: work. Backbreaking work, in the clay, in the sun. And there were two ways to survive that work: liquor and the church. Many chose both, at least for a while, drinking as they worked and drinking more to kill the pain afterward, then dragging themselves to church on Sunday. But eventually one or the other master would demand absolute fealty. There were those who renounced sin to wed themselves to the church (unless niggardliness or cruelty were sins), and they were the ones who survived the hard winters and prospered a bit and passed farms down to their children. And there were those who lived to drink and sometimes fight and sometimes go whoring and now and then gamble on a horse race or a wrestling matching in the center of town, and they were the ones who looked happier for a while until they died at forty or fifty or they simply vanished, leaving wives and children and jobs to drift off to some river city where enough money could be cadged to pay for the next binge and a room in a flophouse until they found their way to hell. A harsh heaven and an easy hell, these were the only two ways out of the Ozark Mountains of Missouri.

      Bernard McFadden’s father chose hell. He seemed to want another path at first, as so many young men did before the sheer hardness of the place broke them down. He married a nice girl and fathered two children and took a series of jobs. But the horse track beckoned, and so did various small gambling scams, and most of all so did bourbon. He would vanish for weeks, leaving his wife to survive as best she could with the help of family and what work she could find washing clothes or cleaning houses. She became ill—tuberculosis, the scourge of the American poor—and he came back to take care of her and make it up to her. Then he drifted to the horses and the bottle again, and she threw him out. And then one more time she took him back, and then she threw him out again, and then he drank himself to death at the age of forty-one.

      His wife did not last long beyond him. She tried to raise her two children alone, but as the consumption drained the life from her, she had to give them up to relatives. The girl was raised in some normality by cousins, farmers to the north, in the richer flatlands. She would grow up a farm girl, marry, and vanish into the obscurity of the vast American heartland. But girls were considered easier to keep and more valuable around the house. Her older brother Barney, seven years old and with a stubborn, resentful streak that reminded his mother’s family of his loathed father, proved harder to place. He was put to work in an uncle’s hotel, assigned to help clean the rooms and run errands for the guests.

      Barney’s most vivid early memory is screaming in loss and rage as his mother left him with her uncle and walked away. She had been the only source of comfort and protection in his life, the only thing that he had once believed would stay. He pined for her return until the news came by mail a year later that she had died.

      He did not get along with his aunt, who would have much preferred a hired girl and resented the penury of her husband that left her with this stiff-necked boy. She would accuse him of stealing things, and when she wouldn’t believe in his innocence he began to steal things for real to defy her. Once he stole a pencil from a guest. It was clear who must have stolen it, and Barney’s sullen expression on being accused only confirmed it, but he would not admit he had taken it. His aunt beat him, in full view of the guest, but he would not admit. At the angry guest’s insistence, his uncle beat him harder, but still he denied having taken the pencil. He offered no alibis or arguments, he just denied. When he retold the story in adulthood he bragged about stealing the pencil, and about the fact that he didn’t even want it.

     It wasn’t greed that led him to the crime, nor was it any sense of injured justice that made him deny it. In both cases, it was will alone that drove him. That will would prove to be his greatest ally in the years to come, although sometimes a troublesome one.

      Barney's uncle wrote to his brother in St. Louis—the oldest sibling of the family and the one who was legally burdened with the disposition of his sister’s children—that his wife could endure this terrible child no longer. So Barney was trundled back to St. Louis to await a new assignation.

      This other uncle and aunt wanted no part of him. They had no financial use for him, for one thing. They had little hope for him, either: Barney was scrawny, sickly, and hollow-eyed, likely to develop the same consumption that killed his mother, unlikely even to reach adulthood. And if he did grow up, he would probably turn out to be just another drunkard like his father. Raising him would surely be a waste of time and money until he moved on—to heaven, if he died soon enough and innocent enough, to hell if he had the chance.

      Barney was hired out to a farm couple across the river in Illinois whom his uncle knew. No statutes forbade the use of child labor in agriculture. Although "hired out" was a dubious term, as his new employeers were told that they could keep him working for them indefinitely, that they had legal charge of him, that his uncle and aunt never needed to see him again. The boy was told he would be paid for his labor, but in fact he found it nearly impossible to extract any cash from his new master, being told that the value of his work rarely equaled what he cost in room and board. For the whole transaction, his uncle took a lump sum in cash. Barney had been sold.

      Work on the Jenkins farm was brutally hard. It produced a range of crops—squash, sorghum, beets, apples, corn—and supported a population of chickens and a few larger livestock. It made money, more than most in downstate Illinois in the years after the Civil War, but to do so it required constant and tremendous effort from Jenkins, his wife, his hired hands, and the indentured Barney.  The ground sloped sharply. The high ground was rocky and poor. The low spots were boggy, great breeding grounds for flies and mosquitoes. Every slope, every shoulder of a hill, every ravine, had to broken by plow and shovel to yield life.

      For the first few months, this seemed to Barney like the greatest hell he had yet endured. But then he noticed something: the work got easier. Stones that had once defied him, remaining stubbornly fixed to the earth as he tried to raise them with his trembling arms, began to move in his grasp. The pickaxe swung more easily. He lifted rails onto fences by himself that he had once been unable to raise without help from a jeering adolescent hired hand. In his first ten years, Barney had known little time outdoors, little physical labor, and his food had been sparse and poor. His body responded well to this new life. He hated the tedium of farm labor, and he hated his mean and parsimonious master, but he liked the feeling of growing power in his own limbs. He liked to feel his hardening muscles in bed at night and the deeper breaths he could draw in the cold morning air. Barney would come to believe that his real life began during his first spring and summer on that rocky soil.

      With greater strength came greater willfulness. Barney no longer defied his masters in secret or took his punishment in silence. He argued with Jenkins, pushed him for more spending money, took whippings and financial penalties, but kept arguing. He started picking fist fights with other boys, especially the boys who had pushed him around when he’d first arrived, determined to undo his earlier shame with displays of dominance. He learned to bring together his muscles, his will, and his willingness to endure pain and so to make himself an indefatigable fighter. He won respect and fear, but exploited neither. He became neither a bully nor a leader, preferring to make his point once and then walk away in silent self-containment. Since his mother had walked away from him he had sought nothing from beyond himself if he could help it. He enjoyed brief violence and seeing respect in other boys’ eyes, but he had no desire for friends or enemies.

      Such was Barney’s enjoyment of conflict, and the force of his will, that soon he was fighting with God. There were no open unbelievers in rural Illinois in 1880, no niche for doubters or free thinkers. There were Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians. The Jenkinses were of the last, adherents of a hard, Knoxian Presbyterianism wedded grimly to the humorlessness, predestination, and emotional brutality it had first brought from Scotland a century before. Theirs was the same Calvinist God who guided Anthony Comstock, but without the protectiveness that Comstock knew. Barney saw his master beat him and cheat him, then ride the buckboard to the local church every Sunday to pay homage to the God of love and compassion. He knew how many of the worshippers around him in that white-washed plank church drank and cheated and beat their wives and children. He had no philosophy to back him up, no sense of what rejecting religion might mean or even whether one could do it, but he decided early that everything spoken in church was a lie. He saw no evidence of God’s will manifest on earth; certainly no divine justice smiting the wicked and rewarding the virtuous.

      And so Barney brought all the distrust he had learned of people to the supposed truths that people had agreed to propound. He denied God in his heart and braced himself for divine retribution, but none came, and never again would he listen to anyone’s received wisdom. From that point on he would accept as the truth only what he arrived at through his own experience.

To be continued...