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Scarecrows: Appalachian Tales by Steve Rasnic Tem

Steve Rasnic Tem has compiled a second new collection of short stories, “Scarecrows: Appalachian Tales,” that revisit the Appalachian states like Tennessee and Virginia, sketching memorable stories of the miners and kinfolk who live there.

When I read the story “Willie the Philologist,” the third story of the twenty-six stories  in the 180 page volume, I felt that this story accurately captured this award-winning writer’s love affair with  language. Explaining the term to Bill, the story’s protagonist, the author says, “That means you’re a lover of words, Bill. A bona fide lexical romancer…That was one of the things about words.  They let you love them…You could still love them, even when you didn’t understand them.” The narrator remarks, “People ought to be like that with each other, but too often we’re not.”

Bill, in the story, lives in Norton and just loves words like “gregarious,” “rue,” “pell mell,” “slapstick.” “He repeats them over and over for a time, but then their meanings always creep away, as if ashamed of themselves, and all he has left is their carcasses.” Later, he admits, “They can’t see that he just loves his words.”  This love of language and facility with it is true of Steve Rasnic Tem’s work, and it transports these semi-horrific stories into the realm of literary fiction.

Although I understand the wisdom of using the Appalachian setting as the unifying device for the collection (and, by the way, it’s not that easy to FIND a suitable unifying theme for short story collections), I thought to myself, “The author is a philologist, par excellence.”

Maybe his next collection will simply be titled “The Philologist?”

“The Cabinet Child” – The first story in the collection is set in 1901-1902 in Southwest Virginia.  Jacob and Alma are the main characters. Jacob seems to have supplanted caring about people, replacing that with caring about furniture.  “Sometimes, at night, she would catch him with his new acquisitions and talking to them as if they had replaced the family he no longer much cared for.” In time, “His family virtually abandoned him over his choice, but, as a grown man, it was his choice to make.” How did Jacob’s love of things rather than people affect Alma?  “Over the years, despair worked its way into her eyes and drifted down into her cheeks and the weight of her grief kept her bent and shuffling.”

“Smoke In A Bottle” – This one had a lighter tone than many, with a poverty-stricken family in St. Charles, Lee County, in Southwest Virginia  enjoying their father’s antics at Christmas-time. “We knew Christmas was over when Dad fell into the Christmas tree.” The town is typical: “I knew there was still a lot of good about the town, but it is not the kind of place you come back to.”  Eddie, a neighbor, gifts Willie with a Christmas tree and there is little for the family other than that. The narrator says, “I hadn’t been back in St. Charles in twenty years.  Not because I hated it.  When you live in a place as poor as that people think you must hate it and you can’t wait to leave. I knew I was poor, but I didn’t know I was that poor.” The alcoholic father of the story does his best to soften the blow of their poverty, including his Christmas tree shenanigans and sharing the wisdom that “You got snow, you’re a rich man” because “Snow was good for covering up shabbiness, and ugliness, and essentials missing.” A bittersweet story of life in impoverished circumstances.

The author and wife Melanie on their wedding day.

“The Bible Salesman”.

Daddy Frank is a state trooper and “Daddy always looked angry as hell, even in his sleep.”  Jimmy, Sam and Molly witness Daddy’s King of the Castle demeanor firsthand. They are witnesses when a Pakistani Bible salesman sweet talks wife Janet into buying an expensive Bible. The book would cost $200 in four $50 installments and Daddy Frank, when he discovers Janet’s faux passe, isn’t having that.  I instantly related to the line, “Might as well say some day they might visit the moon” in relation to any of the family visiting Pakistan (where the Bible salesman is from), only, in my case, the line applied to the Beatles coming to Chicago to play and me traveling  to hear them. My elderly Iowa parents were not on board.  I remember thinking that my chances of making it to the moon during my lifetime were better than my chances of seeing John, Paul, Ringo and George play the Windy City. (Probably why it was such a thrill when I actually did get to see them “live” in 1965 while spending a summer studying at Berkeley, 7^th row, San Francisco Cow Palace, $7 ticket.)

“Old Men on Porches:  Moony Holler is the setting for this one, that features Claire, Daddy, Billy, Momma, Aunt Jen and places like Big Stone, Storega, and Kimmerjam.  Old, retired miners sit on the porches of the small mining settlement. “Those old fools wave at everybody what come by, friend or stranger.  If the Russians was to march up this holler, those old men would just be grinnin’ and a wavin’ them on!”  The story continues with poetic lines like, “The wet wind reached in and touched her face, pulling on her skin like she could just float out the window.”

“Nightcrawlers” – This short piece (poem) took me back to the childhood days when I would be part of a small group  catching night crawlers so that we could fish in the nearby Wapsie Pinicon River in Independence, Iowa.  It was always an exciting adventure to take a flashlight and go out to the green golf links and watch the night crawlers come up from the water-saturated ground of the neatly manicured greens. In this short piece “the worms danced there just like he said, their questing front and back ends pointing, then waving in distress.” The worms are under rocks in this story. The young person accompanying his father to the rocks says, “I wanted to go into the darkest woods where the worm songs go. But, to Daddy, they were bait.” I remember catching the nightcrawlers as being much more entertaining than sitting in a small rowboat the next day trying to catch fish. (We did catch a medium-sized catfish. Nobody wanted to cook it, so we put it in the beached boat, filled the boat with water, and watched it swim around for a few days before returning it to the river. But catching nightcrawlers was a great adventure for a young child.)

“Sundown in Duffield” – This one focuses on an unidentified horror in the cellar of his parent’s old house in Duffield, Virginia, off Pattonville Road, in Scott County.  John and Franklin, John’s grandson, go back to visit the house where John had lived as a child. Why the family left the house in the first place is a bit of a mystery, shrouded in lost memory. “John couldn’t remember how old he was when his family left the house, fleeing in the middle of the night with time only to throw a few things into the car.” They left at least sixty years prior and the town has now shrunk to 73 inhabitants. Now, John is failing. His sister has left John the house and John wanted “one final look.”   “How come he could remember the names of all these weeds and yet so little of anything important?”  “He could feel his annoyance rising like a fever he could not control.”  “He was of two minds.  His grandmother used to say that.  But in his case one mind was sharp and clear and the other overflowing with bewilderment.  John never knew at any given moment which one was going to show up.”  At one point, the narrator tells us that “He (John) wanted to call for his Grandson but at that moment he did not remember his (Franklin’s) name.”  The fitting coda to the story:  “In his experience, when someone said, “It will be okay, it usually won’t be.” This one was a favorite.

Melanie & Steve Rasnic Tem.

“Saved” – Walt sets off during a time near the pandemic to visit his 93-year-old mother. It is set in Virginia and Tennessee.  Walt’s brother, Frank, has sold their mother’s house and they are going to visit the nursing home where Doris Russell resides, the very same nursing home where their father died 10 years prior. Frank and his wife Peggy live nearby.  Doris is totally confused when Walt visits her. She thinks she is in her Daddy’s house. An “alarmingly pale young man too thin for his jet-black suit and wrinkled white shirt” is there to give a sermon, which began with an elderly couple singing, accompanied by tinny-sounding music from a tape player. The new preacher from Harlan County, Kentucky, the Reverend Parkey, delivers his “wonderful message for all of us.” Reverend Parkey is quite the talker. Among many other things, including his allegiance to the Bible, he says, “It’s never too late to be saved.” He adds, “I’m so ready to go to heaven, aren’t you? Won’t that be a wonderful day?” Walt is not impressed. In fact, Walt waves the young reverend away from Mother Doris. “It made Walt angry to hear this youngster speak to them that way, of heaven and paradise and the beautiful world to come, when this fellow knew so little of growing old, when death for them was so close.  This preacher was a young man who didn’t know what he was talking about.” (May I say, “AMEN?”)

“Scarecrows” – “Scarecrows” begins with a prison escape by a convict named Gibson. He and Frank Moore are working in a ditch not more than thirty feet from the woods. They make a successful run for it. Of course, that’s not the end of Gibson’s usually bad luck. He falls into the hands of “a crazy woman with a shotgun.  Gibson’s (bad) luck was at least consistent.” The old woman with the shotgun has an entire field full of creative scarecrows. They are even named and Gibson attempts to take the clothes of the scarecrow the old woman calls Hector. When accosted by the elderly woman in her sixties, she correctly identifies him as “a jasper,” meaning an outsider (who grew up in Maryland and lived all over the South.) Since Gibson tried to steal Hector’s clothing, the old woman decides that Gibson will make a good replacement scarecrow, even though he promises to simply disappear. Things do not go well for Gibson during his enforced stint as a substitute scarecrow. “Pain had been such a constant companion he’d barely noticed.” An interesting open-ended conclusion with Gibson being addressed as Frank, since he has chosen to lie to the field’s owner about his true identity.

“Miranda Jo’s Girl” – What happens to Miranda Jo Wheeler’s daughter is grim.  We hear of Betty and  the Willisville Store. There are references to Big Stone, Ender’s Ivy, Castle’s Wood and Drunkard Bottom. Made me think of how “different” children were treated in Sparta—or Nazi Germany. Not a cheerful tale but, sadly, more true to life than fairy tales with happy endings.

Steve Rasnic Tem.

“Mr. Belano’s Visit” – Mr. Belano makes a trip that he’d planned to take with his wife. Carla, the clerk at the Lowe Hotel finally calls the Point Pleasant Police when Mr. Belano doesn’t show up by the 11 p.m. curfew. A story of hotels, ghosts, faded photographs, and destiny.

“The Passing” -Granny Gibson has cancer. She is also a healer and a “seer.” Because her granddaughter unexpectedly becomes pregnant and the father runs off to Cincinnati, Granny Gibson has to work some special magic to make sure she is around to serve as midwife to her granddaughter—especially since the child’s mother (Granny Gibson’s daughter) has  kicked her out after learning that she is with child. “Granny could do lots of things, but seeing was her special talent.” She has a plan to rid her own body of the cancer that is eating her alive. As the story notes, “Cancer was the magic word they used for all the different ways a body would turn against itself.” Granny’s philosophy?  “Folks weren’t built to last forever and she’d grown content to take her turn on life’s big wheel.” However, Granny Gibson must attempt a plan that involves her terminally ill friend Rose, who is hospitalized, and what sounds like a voodoo doll and Black Magic. Only things don’t go as smoothly as Granny Gibson had hoped.

“La Mariee” – Focuses on Chagall’s painting(s). Jan is the admirer of a Chagall print. Line that resonated in this tale of Bristol, Tennessee, “…out of the relief of purposeful movement.”

“The Grave House” – A southwest Virginia setting. Annie is supposed to clean up “the grave house,” which is a mausoleum or tomb-like structure where relatives are buried. “She didn’t like the grave house, for sure didn’t like livin’ in the grave house, but she did like this part, makin’ the best out of a bad sigiation.” Annie’s father seems to have been a failure in life, if soft-hearted. “Nothin’ her pa made was ever worth much. Annie hadn’t made up her mind yet if that included her.” A spooky ending.

“Diorama” – Set in the southwest corner of the state, in Wise County. Aside from the cooked squirrel that Jake is offered, it centers on his relationship with Lily, who is suffering from breast cancer. (As a fellow survivor, I can relate.)  The diorama comes in in reference to medical museum of the Civil War or, as the author phrases it, “windows into a lost time and place.”

A twenty-something Steve Rasnic Tem.

“Deep Fracture”- This was one of my favorite stories. I think it’s because it is about a hidden city beneath the mines that might exist. (Or does it?) My home town of Independence, Iowa, has been making itself into a bit of a tourist attraction in the northeast corner of that rural state with an attraction called “Underground Independence.” The “underground city” part came about in my small home town when the river nearby (the Wapsi Pinicon) drowned the town and the city fathers simply decided to build ABOVE the flooded structures. You can now go visit “underground Independence” on certain special days of the summertime, which I did recently. https://www.weeklywilson.com/underground-independence-takes-us-on-a-stroll-down-memory-lane-in-independence-iowa-on-aug-19-2023/  This story got me thinking about, once again, setting pen to paper for something other than book and movie reviews. Great lines from “Deep Fracture:” “Shabby is the basic human condition.” “The need for maintenance never ends. Because of that, it’s doomed to fail.”

“Almost A Legend” – Jake Carter is playing in the Coeburn game with the Coeburn Blues against the Dorchester Cardinals. A “ringer” is brought in—someone who was once a promising baseball player, a pitcher—maybe even in the major leagues—but has fallen upon hard times. The ringer, this time, is introduced as A. B. Collins. The crowd knows this is bogus, because his initials spell “A-B-C.” Jake ends up carrying the bogus pitcher off the mound and away from the post-game chaos. Has some particulars about small-town baseball leagues and how they operate (and cheat) in Appalachia.

“Cattiwampus” and “Bingo Thompson’s Flying Cat” – These two stories had a lighter tone, especially “Bingo Thompson’s Flying Cat.” The humor between Paul and Ralph in the flying cat story was a welcome relief, especially when the final line is, “Lots more interesting than last Saturday, huh?” The term “cattywampus” is one that my Norweigan/Dutch mother used a lot. When I was a child, I managed to take the word and subvert it into misstatements like, “Don’t push me in crookwards,” to the amusement of my parents.

“Crawldaddies” – This one, set in Rayburn Twist with Josh and Arlene and other assorted cousins who all seem to be inter-related is NOT humorous. You do not want to meet a Crawldaddy. Jake even says, “Josh kept thinking how scared his own son Trace would have been.”

“Lookie Loo” – More bird imagery. Jackson had moved to Monroe County, Tennessee. (His ex, Sheila, had moved back to Ann Arbor). Jackson sees some odd-looking brothers, “shambling between the trunk in a dense stand of trees, like apes with their too-long arms, faces a dark shaggy blur, and in the shadows with those baggy coveralls they looked like a family of Big Foot, or Cave Yellers as they called them in Kentucky.” Eventually, Josh—who is an aspiring writer who thinks that, some day, he may write a book about these interesting folk called “Strange Tales of the Smokies”— ends up in the custody of the strange creatures. Josh’s book would not have been critical of the inhabitants of the Smokies. “He wouldn’t be putting the locals down—it would just show how interesting folks around here could be. He’d finally have something to say about the world.” My daughter lives in Madison, Tennessee. She went to school at Belmont in Nashville, so Tennessee is a state I know much better than before 2005.

Powell Mountain Cedar Grove – is a poem, not a story, although it manages to tell a story of nature within its 69 lines: “Grandad says cedars come first, take the sun.  Poplars need shade, and soon take over.  But they grow so big they darken their own seedlings, die out.  Beech and hemlock grow last to fill the forest.” A short interlude.

Steve and Melanie Rasnic Tem.

Redbud Winter – is a story about aging. Ted decides to drive his late wife’s station wagon to Norton to see his daughter Janet. She lives with her boyfriend and her daughter, Abby, Ted’s granddaughter. “There comes a time when you have to stop driving, stop doing everything.”..”A few miles out of town, the tires making a pleasant splashing noise on pavement dark with layers of leaf rot, he smelled it for the first time.  The scent of death, clear and palpable, an unmistakable presence in his nose and lungs.” Things don’t cheer up much after that. You just know there is going to be some kind of mayhem with the car. And you’d be right.

“His doctors never mentioned a smell.  But doctors don’t tell you everything when you’re old. They don’t want to upset you when there’s nothing they can do.” I could add, from personal experience, that ageism is rampant in the medical community. Some doctors probably wish that, after age 70, they could just hand you a card that reads, “Waiting to die” and have you go stand in that line until your time. Young doctors, in particular, will talk right past an elderly patient, even if that patient (my mother, in this case) is of perfectly sound mind. It used to drive me mad when I’d be taking her to the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics for appointments. My mom was more “on top of” things than I’ll ever be, and she remained so until the day she died. Yet they wanted to speak to me, then in my 40s, and Mom was just “old” and, therefore, not worthy of being directly involved in the discussion.  So, maybe the doctor is trying not to upset you because “there’s nothing they can do” and maybe some of the younger generation of doctors are just NOT the compassionate types that made house calls during my youth and young adulthood.

“Old Crow” features a talking crow. Birds remain major images. I’m attributing this to the author’s home  and its influence on his work. (See previous review of “Everyday Horrors”). After “Old Crow” comes “A Jack Tale.” A few notes I jotted down on “A Jack Tale” include “Jakob was tired, old, and he wondered if he’d ever tell another tale.” Thomas Oliver (a pig) features in the story and Jakob is Old Death’s Companion.” Those two shorter stories bring the final tale, “The Return.”

“The Return” – Joel goes back to revisit his childhood home after 40 years away. “The sun’s setting fast on this old town.  You should have come back sooner,” say the locals.  “Despite its problems, this had been a good place to grow up.  He could find no justice in its abandonment.” “When you grow up in a place you never imagine it going away.  People don’t last, but it seemed to him a town should.”

This line spoke to me when I realized that every single school I have ever attended, except for some classrooms on campus at the University of Iowa, has been torn down. My elementary school: gone. My 1^st through 6^th grade school:  gone. My high school: gone in 2013. The school I taught at from 1969 to 1985: torn down. The school where my mother taught for 40 years: gone.  Very off-putting to have institutions of higher education disappear before you do.

Joel gets a room in a hotel, but the landlady, after checking him in, seems to have disappeared. Joel’s memory is fading. His memories of his dead wife, Celeste, are growing fuzzy. “On the way back through town he tried to find the spot where their house had been, but as hard as he tried he couldn’t remember the address. He drove back and forth through the neighborhoods for hours with no luck…He wasn’t sure whether it was Friday or Saturday.  Perhaps it wasn’t even the weekend.” Not only can Joel not find the landlady, he cannot find the house where he was staying.  “He couldn’t find the place.  He drove from one end of town to the other and beyond, trying every road, sometimes driving at a crawl to make sure he didn’t miss it, and found no indication of its existence…Joel couldn’t think of anything logical to explain this omission, or what a next reasonable step might be.” Joel seems to be losing it, in more ways than one: “He could remember nothing else and knew that what he could remember only yesterday had faded away.” I am happy to see that a writer as talented as Steve Rasnic Tem is not in Joel’s mental state, and neither am I. (Long may we remain cognitively alert and firing on all cylinders.)

CONCLUSION: Silver is an ongoing motif, signifying death in this and in others of the author’s stories. (“The morning came up all silver, and he was aware that something new was about to begin.”) Bird imagery re-emerges. The poetry of the prose is even  augmented by some actual poems, in this collection. Death, dying, and deterioration are continuing themes, with our old adversary, cancer, always lurking in the shadows. But there are some truly ingenious and intriguing plots, as in the stories “Sundown in Duffield,” “The Passing,” “Deep Fracture,” and “Scarecrows.”

As a writer older than the author I limited myself to three stories a day, to keep from depressing myself over the indignities of aging and the inevitability of deterioration, decay and, ultimately, death. Once I got through my own unwillingness to deal with being in the last decades of life, I could enjoy the spot-on descriptions and empathize with  the protagonist’s poetic language.

I can both relate to Steve Rasnic Tem’s stories on a personal level and appreciate his accuracy as a narrator. This collection, unlike “Everyday Horrors,” even has a couple of more lighthearted stories., which I enjoyed.

What I see happening in films  by older directors (Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Robert Zemeckis, Ridley Scott, Pedro Almodovar, etc.) is a recognition on the part of many of these creative types of their legacy. Many of them seem to be acknowledging that their opportunity to create is coming to an end. Not all dwell on it; some do. It seems natural, when we come near the end of our life. [*PLUG INSERTED HERE FOR RETURNING TO MY BLOG FOR MY PRESS COVERAGE OF “SUNDANCE” FROM 1/29-2/2).

While “Everyday Horrors” is almost universally somber in tone, “Scarecrows” has poetry, and even a couple of lighthearted entries. It is as well-done as any horror short story collection you’ll find—if you can categorize observations on life and living  as “horror.” (After all, the book reviewed just before this IS entitled “Everyday Horrors.”) It’s literary fiction examining the human condition, with an emphasis on the last chapter of life and  imaginative plots executed with Steve Rasnic Tem’s usual competent and evocative poetic language.