Canyon Country Carnage
A TALE OF ALABAMA FAMILIES WITHOUT FORGIVENESS
Thomas is fifteen years older than Gail, the salon they have fashioned as a team a low-key ‘Mom-and-Pop’ place where they back what they cut with a promise that the customer will like the work for at least a fortnight. They back each other up as well, as happened on my last visit. “You missed a spot, near the crown,” Gail intoned gently.
“So I did,” breathed Papa after we all froze for the moment necessary to survey the situation.
“She’s got a good eye,” offered I, sitting down again to allow for the removal of the offending tuft.
“Course she does,” snapped seventy year old Papa; “Mama spotted me, didn’t she?”
We all laughed, and dear Thomas kept me in that chair transfixed for another hour, finally providing the story that Gail promised he would tell when I came to her one Wintry afternoon in December, during which interlude six months ago she spilled a bit of her own transfixing tale. Part of what life has come to mean to me these two unlikely heroes of the South represent.
For now, the reader might recognize that her orphan’s onerous entry into Atlanta forty years ago, age 15, was not something from “Andy of Mayberry” or any other easygoing expression of the ‘good-old-days’-that-never-existed, even for those of us who carry the luck of pale skin and good training, even in many cases for those who add money to the mix of blessings. Gail’s trek, from South Carolina lowland “home” to the Greyhound Station where she sat for twelve hours until fate designated her pick-up to be a kind-hearted man who believed in human possibility, will emerge in time.
Thomas’s life will also appear, another commonplace of our real condition, the basis for any hope of progress or possibility for our children and their progeny beyond our own time here. “Grandchildren are tickets to heaven,” smiles a magnet on the dorm-frig at their “Gail and Pop’s Barber Shop.” Gail and Thomas have just one chance for these eternalizing possibilities, based on the performance of their persnickety daughter, who is considering travel instead of the college course that both her parents insist is the only decent choice.
The story that Thomas conveyed a couple weeks back, however, as he spoke shearing me closer and closer to the skull in an unanticipated Marine Corps cut, was not his own nor theirs together, though it came from his childhood in Alabama. I’ve found out a bit more since then, but the old yarn will never appear completely brazen, like an episode of Geraldo today. It was an interlude of a violent destruction of all potential for the ‘tickets’ that grandkids can represent, to a couple whose only daughter was the most amazing beauty of the history of a place with long memories of such things. Today’s modest beginning is just an orientation, a suggestion that in the cauldrons of the past there bubbles much more of note, much more that we need to digest in order to make our current pass comprehensible, than most of us care to countenance on any given afternoon.
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1938 on Sand Mountain, in the wild canyon country of Northeast Alabama, marked the dying days of one South and the birth throes of another. The entire process was brutal and bloody in a way that “Thunder Road” comes much closer to describing than does any fantasy of recent Republican Presidents about our hypothetically halcyon past. The confrontation of old ways and new is frequently difficult, although the overheated carnage of Martin Henkel’s disaster is worse than most such situations of bringing forth the present moment. The tranformations then underway had multiple sources.
One key was the Tennessee Valley Authority, the good pay and draconian schedule of which, for skilled technicians, is a part of this story. TVA brought a new version of power to the region’s people. At the same time, of course, that power proferred critical elements of United States military might that would soon come to dominate the planet in a way that Hitler only dreamed might be the case for his ‘Thousand Year Reich,’ Dixie’s displaced farmers and swarthy fieldhands providing the teeth to reinforce the technology that blossomed under TVA’s electric blanket..
Another piece of this puzzle was that martial muscle, to which Sand Mountain’s boys made such a substantial contribution. Martin worked for three years for ‘the ‘thority’ before he enlisted in the Army, despite his war-work deferment and his beautiful daughter and wife, who had fallen for her capable courtier but whose parents, in agreeing to the marriage, had counted on his not succumbing to any patriotic fervor. Martin refused to allow his mates and cousins and brothers to venture forth alone.
His assignment to the Army Corps of Engineers in New Jersey kept him stateside and available for infrequent duties at home, building and loving and conceiving a sister for his firstborn, but from February, 1944 until the Autumn of 1945 he was part of the killing, building stream of American planning and authority that unseated Naziism before the denizens of Sir Stalin accomplished the same thing, in what would have been a disaster for the leaders of the free world incomprehensible to us now, sitting atop the heap of American hegemony as if the silver spoon and pride of place were birthrights to all freeborn, White Americans.
A third aspect of the core tragedy was the always fiery need of every daughter of Eve to achieve as much an expression of her potency as passion and talent allow. Evelyn Johnson wed her burly fellow, Martin, when she was only fifteen, with a farm girl’s practical knowledge and a well-off young woman’s hopes. The coming war and Martin’s war-work deferment and gigantic talent as a pipe-fitter and mechanic had nothing to do with her swoon for the swagger and substantial physical assets of the exceedingly well-put-together twenty-six year old man who found her Helenic charms completely irresistible. Her parents, however, had relied on this prerogative of Martin’s job to permit a marriage to a family lacking property or connections or prospects worth speaking of.
Their expectations and disappointment are the final links in this chain of tragedy. Mr. and Mrs Johnson introduced their frisky daughter to an engineer, a family friend’s youngest son, with a much leveller keel than had the battle-worthy frigate that was Martin Henkel. This new ‘tiger’, too, was a handsome lad, fresh from Auburn’s new engineering school and much closer in kith and kin and class to the Johnsons than any Henkel ever was, “or ever would be,” predicted Mr. Johnson, on the day he more or less suggested that a ‘friendship’ with Mark Jones would be a fine chance for Evelyn to wile away some hours while her foolish man was playing patriot.
This big boy, young Mark Jones, was the father of the Henkel’s second daughter, who entered the world just before Thanksgiving, 1942, eight and a half months after her erstwhile Sergeant-Father’s last leave. And Mark Jones was the explanation for the premature labor, from which their third daughter emerged from inside Evelyn, who bore a big healthy girl with strawberry in her fur only seven and a half months after the tempestuous passion of Martin’s ultimate return from Berlin and war and all the ideals that a march across France and Germany had destroyed.
Martin was no idiot, despite his pardonable sin of patriotism over paternity; he soon knew of his wife’s liasons and the questionable origins of two of his daughters. His firstborn, though, was a true Henkel, smart and strong and full of unshakeable principle and loyalty, his own qualities, which would have kept him attached to his winsome and willowy wife who still wound him up like one of the Tennessee River’s big turbines, whenever she would hold him close. She became pregnant with another child, another girl Martin was sure, his girl Martin was sure, the baby---Martin was sure---that would win her back to him because the wrong he had done was, after all, a pardonable sin.
Mr. and Mrs. Johnson agreed with Martin’s prognosis. And Mrs. Johnson, in particular, found “the continued connection of two such unfit and unsuited families to be simply and utterly unacceptable.” She predicted that “he will make our beauty a vessel for his pride that he fills up and removes from us forever by his charms.” And Mr. Johnson listened, in spite of rueing the loss of “one helluva mechanic” and a “fine and honorable old boy,” whatever the deficits of his origins and his jingoistic snap judgements.
On a blustery night in March of 1950, just a few months before his unit returned to the killing fields that were to include a River named Yalu, Joseph Johnson delivered the verdict of the family counsel to his 38 year old son-in-law. “We think divorce the best choice,” was the upshot of the conversation, and although Martin hardly knew what the word meant, he knew enough to answer “that will not do sir.” When his father-in-law noted the family’s connections at the Union County Courthouse---a cousin of Joseph’s was sheriff, and two judges were close kin---and that “Evelyn will tell how you’ve been cruel to her,” the still limber and powerfully built mechanic turned on his well-practiced heel without a word and disappeared into the night.
No one saw him for over a week. Such a dire confluence of arrogance and deceit, of power unjustly wielded and love overturned for pride, almost had to end awfully. What actually unfolded, when Martin returned from drinking moonshine and screwing up his ferocious courage among comrades in Little River Canyon’s outlaw dens, hurts my heart and loins and guts and being to convey. But it did happen, and its coming, far from being happenstantial, was the result of just how we are and just how we deal with each other so as to make mayhem always potentially proximate, and putrefaction always a heartbeat hence.
“I never meant to kill the girls.” So spoke Martin Henkel to the jury that decided whether his end would be prison or ‘old sparky.’ He hankered powerfully to kill his wife, Evelyn, “to teach that whore, Janice Johnson not to make light of a man’s heart.” He didn’t know if he could bring himself to the deed, but “I intended it, I fully did intend it.”
He came upon his household at the noon hour on another day that might have meant a tornado or other vicious storm brewing. His wife, asleep and just beginning to show the girl who lay low in her belly and sprung from the loins of the man who walked through their door with the service-issue Colt .45 pistol at the end of his long powerful arm, never woke from her slumbers. His daughter, however, had stayed home from school that day.
Wise beyond her years, Marian(“Matty)Henkel had packed a bag and believed she could offer herself in exchange for her mother, in recompense for her father’s broken heart and her family’s broken home. Martin foresaw the shattering impact of his daughter’s implacable will and lioness’s spirit, which, after all, were his own. He swore at her, but when he swatted at her as if to strike her with the pistol, she caught hold of his arm and fought like a lithe little demon to save her mama.
The big gun discharged in her face, a grotesque and fully foreseeable ‘accident’ that unhinged Mr. Henkel completely. He shot his wife four times while she slept and then dispatched his screeching toddler daughter with a single bullet, also to her face. The middle child entered her mother’s room---after finding the desecrated remains of her older sister---to find “daddy” with the large bore pistol in his mouth, looking at the meat which remained of his wife.
He chased her into the woods adjacent to the house, and while she screamed, again and again, “PLEASE, DADDY!!!” simply, “PLEASE!!!” he held her by the golden hair she treasured, that contrasted so sharply with his own dark locks, and shot her twice in the head. These were the rounds that neighbors heard, and when two matrons came ambling over to investigate, they found Martin Henkel kneeling over the corpse of the girl he had reared as his daughter, sobbing, the pistol in his mouth, repeatedly pulling the trigger to no effect.
Johnny Giles, the District Attorney, had only sought the death penalty because of the importuning of the Johnson clan. A key fact in the jury finding for five life terms, to be served concurrently(the unborn daughter counted, in their reckoning of the matter)was Martin’s failure to supply himself with ordnance outside of his service sidearm’s single clip. The members of the Henkel clan dispersed from Sand Mountain, even before their raucous ravaged roustabout kin went in chains to Atmore Prison.
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Where is there redemption in this hideous tale? The first source is precautionary. The immersion of Americans today in gore rarely if ever---outside of “Bowling for Columbine,” for instance---faces the sources of the bloodbaths we pretend stem from monsters and aliens and psychopaths, instead of from our own family and friends and futile, fervid search for more of everything except happiness and wisdom. This gory honest recollection allows us, if we will, to see how our demands on and treatment of each other explodes lethally in our faces.
The second source I just intuit. Pops cut off most of the hair on my head, in a very thorough trim I paid not a penny extra to receive, so that he could unload this story that he had never shared and that has never come to light outside of Northeast Alabama, where a few old timers recount the old tales in hopes of someone who can listen and use the sense that is there. He presented me this horrid holocaust of nearly hopeless immensity, because he had faith, both that something in the tale and the telling, and something in the listener, merited the risk.
The final basis for a redemptive spirit is in the aftermath of this pathological bloodletting. The rest of Martin’s life is a story from a different testament, of family and faith and tickets to the afterlife, in spite of murder, in spite of vicious pride, in spite of every tragic flaw of the human prospect, in spite of everything.
And you will read it some day here, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. As I say, THAT’S MY STORY, AND I’M STICKING TO IT!!
