Burning Man
Southern Gothic horror on a Sunday morning
At first we all thought somebody in the trailer park was grilling hamburgers.
We were at church, or what passed for our church at the time. My folks had decided to leave First Methodist in Laurel, Mississippi, and help start a Wesleyan outpost in our rural community, Pendorff, which was about 80 percent Southern Baptist and most of the rest Holy Roller.
While our little sanctuary was under construction, we were holding services in the living room of an old house that the owner of a trailer park nearby had graciously made available to us for a small fee.
There were perhaps 25 of us present that Sunday morning, sitting in folding chairs and listening to Thurston Cassleberry III, a 20-something minister the Mississippi Methodist conference had assigned to us straight out of divinity school.
To a congregation more accustomed to hellfire sermons and altar calls, Brother Casssleberry was delivering a seminarian disquisition about the Eastern philosophical concepts of yin and yang, the dark and the light, the good and the evil, the two different energies that can be used to describe any and everything in the universe.
“We all have some of both in our souls,” he said.
The grownups fidgeted and fanned themselves. Tim and I were struggling to keep from giggling out loud because “ying yang” was what sideshow siren Little Egypt sang while doing her “famous dance of the pyramids” on a Coasters 45 we had played ’til we knew it by heart.
The smell wafted through the open windows. There was definitely an element of charcoal. People sniffed. Burgers? Barbecue? Now the restless congregants were getting hungry, too.
As Brother Cassleberry wound up his lecture and we stood for the closing hymn — “Love Lifted Me,” a cappella, as we had no piano — the smell turned more acrid, like burning rubber. Was someone burning old tires? On a Sunday? Disgraceful.
When we exited the house, we could see a crowd had gathered in the trailer park across the way. The air was even smokier outside. It stunk.
The Methodist men strolled over to see what was going on. We kids — me and Tim, Pam Sweet, Bobo Lowe — trailed after them.
A crowd of people, some in their pajamas and robes, was milling around a silver trailer, like an Airstream but larger. Some gray smoke still drifted out open door. What we could see of the inside was charred black.
A highway patrol officer stood guard. I heard someone tell Daddy a man inside, name of Jenkins, was dead, burned to a crisp, likely a victim of smoking in bed.
“Let that be a lesson to you all,” the patrolman said.
Residents of the trailer park had noticed the smoke and put out the fire with garden hoses. Pendorff was unincorporated. Firehouses in Laurel never sent trucks out our way, not even for wildfires that scorched fields and woods.
The patrolman was waiting for an ambulance to arrive. He said to no one in particular, “If y’all want to step in an see this, just line up.”
He held out his flashlight.
“No kids,” he added, but I didn’t want to see Mr. Jenkins. I didn’t like looking at dead anything, not dogs or possums or even birds.
A dozen trailer park residents lined up to take a turn with the flashlight. They could only poke their heads in the trailer door. My daddy joined them. So did my scoutmaster, Mr. Stiles. So did the young Rev. Thurston Cassleberry III.
Yin and yang. Let that be a lesson to you.
Excerpted from:
As I Die Laughing: Snapshots of a Southern Childhood
Laurel, Mississippi, native Noel Holston’s new memoir is a collection of stories and sketches that illuminates his…www.amazon.com
Love this. Got to get your book!