8.

My father’s parents lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains. In their drafty clapboard house, heated only by a cast-iron woodstove, they had learned that silence was almost the only solace in their impoverished, death-omened existence, through which roamed alcoholic brothers and daughters, preachers addled by superstition, and stained, unshaven men no one knew. Both were in their eighties by the time I was a boy, though they might have been two hundred, they were so hunched and calloused, wrinkled and resigned.

When we visited their house, set back from a one-lane dirt road, the men, great-uncles and uncles and cousins and in-laws, crowded into the living room and smoked and, like my grandparents, spoke little, and when they did it was of God or sickness or football. On clear days, they’d go outside and shoot green soda bottles with 12-gauge shotguns or listen to the cousin who brought his banjo play “I’ll Fly Away.” The women stood in the greasy, dark kitchen and watched my grandmother fry chicken.

I never liked the visits to this house in the holler. Enamored of our clean, modern ranch house in a bright leafy suburb sixty miles away, and also of the latest technology (such as Atari or handheld computer football), I frowned on what I saw as backcountry squalor.

But it was more than that. I had genuine fear. The primitive house of my grandparents threatened my youthful persona, made of brand names and the quest for hipness. With its archaic woodsmoke, the dwelling summoned me to leave my thin hobbies and get into visceral mountain matters: hunting, deer meat, hounds, rusty pickups, Camel cigarettes, flannel, tent revivals, Bibles well thumbed, faith hard as flint, the Devil.

For the past ten years, I’ve been addicted to the music gathered by Harry Smith in his 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, a disquieting dream from the mountains of Appalachia, through which Doc Boggs, Clarence Ashley, Furry Lewis, the Carter Family, and Blind Lemon Jefferson wail their weird mixtures of winter dirge and gallows humor. The music critic Greil Marcus describes what it’s like to listen: you are “cast into a charnel house that bears a disturbing resemblance to everyday life: to wishes and fears, difficulties and satisfactions that are, as you know, as plain as day, but also, in the voices of those who are now singing, the work of demons—demons like your neighbors, your family, your lovers, yourself.” I don’t know if I believe in direct genetic inheritance, but I suspect that this music speaks to me so profoundly because my very DNA recalls the haunted souls of my Blue Ridge ancestors.

There is another, more disturbing event that convinces me of my Appalachian birthright. When I was in graduate school in New York City, I got a call from my dad. My grandmother had died the night before, and he wanted me to come down for the funeral.

The next day I found myself in a weary funeral home. Black dust covered the low-hung ceiling and the crimson carpet hadn’t been cleaned in years. I sat with the other mourners in metal folding chairs. Before us was the minister, and behind him, elevated on a small stage, the open coffin. I had never seen a real corpse before.

The last time I had visited my grandmother, about a year earlier, she had looked terrible, almost bent double. Unable to raise her head to look at me, she tilted her rheumy eyes upward and held out her hand. Arthritis had contorted it into a claw. She smelled of earth and wintergreen snuff.

Sweating in the overheated funeral home, waiting for the minister to stop, I decided that I didn’t want to see my grandmother dead. I would walk quickly from the building after the benediction.

But I didn’t. I veered to the corner of the room and loitered alone, while my relatives paid their respects. When the crowd cleared, I stole up to the coffin. I stared at the face, its rigid closed eyes, and glancing around, I held my index finger only inches from her dead hand. But before I could touch it, I heard approaching voices and exited out a side door.