The mule would not make itand the farmer, his overalls and straw hat stained with sweat, fell to his knees as thunder roared and lightning cast shadows on the crosses marking the graves of other mules long since departed, asking his Maker one simple question. “Why?”
This is not a rough draft of a novel, although it could be, it is simply the way I felt Tuesday night as the Reverend Welton Worsham delivered the Lord's wrath upon Roanoke Rapids City Council.
The setting was Southern Gothic literature at its finest and I have a feeling Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner sat up in their graves and took note at the hellfire and brimstone being delivered to the city's leaders with language straight from the King James Version of the Holy Bible.
“Why do the heathen rage?” I wanted to shout as Worsham declared with both sound and fury God let loose the flood waters last August, tearing a street open, making homes unlivable and soaking the Lloyd Andrews City Meeting Hall and Chaloner Recreation Center to the point they had to have substantial repairs done.
All the while, I thought of the mule, the most venerated and worshipped animal in all of Southern Gothic literature, plowing the land around the Tara-like remains of the Roanoke Rapids Theatre, the topic of the right reverend's bile, a theater in shambles because the city council didn't take heed of his warnings he should be the owner of the venue.
Tennessee Williams and Faulkner may have painted him a troubled soul, O'Connor may have used him for comic relief as would Eudora Welty.
Other Southern writers may have used him as a prophet speaking the word of God or portrayed him as a street corner preacher, spreading the word as he believes it at the corner of Tenth Street and the avenue on a blazing hot summer day.
And there I sat thinking about another Southern Gothic image, grandma telling the young'uns on the porch about how it was, toiling in the fields, picking cotton by hand, and waxing nostalgic about the many mules they wished they had if the bank ain't come and foreclosed on the farm.
If you weren't sitting there Tuesday night, you'd have to believe this came from the pages of an O'Connor short story, a complex Faulkner novel or John Kennedy Toole's classic A Confederacy of Dunces — a minister getting in his mother's Mustang and driving to Roanoke Rapids where he happens to run out of gas at the theater and takes it as a sign it is the Lord's will for him to buy this venue.
Casting all objectivity aside as you do in these editorial pieces, I believe his story and believe he has faith enough to be convinced God will provide a way for him to buy the venue. If he didn't believe I don't think he would have stepped out of the pages of the Oxford American to drown council with such an apocalyptic speech.
What he wants to do with it after that hasn't been made exactly clear because it seems right now council is satisfied with the operation of the theater under HSV Entertainment and hasn't pressed the reverend with questions.
As in any Southern Gothic story worth its weight in corn pawn and molasses, however, the possibilities are limitless with a good imagination and roots planted firmly below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Still, I thought, there must be a mule — Lance Martin
