1Small family graveyards and churchyard cemeteries speckle the slopes of western North Carolina and upstate South Carolina, the backdrop of Ron Rash’s expansive body of work. So too does death permeate the content of Rash’s writing. Thematically, his work relies on the landscape of the Appalachian region and deeply explores the idea of loss—often interweaving death and cultural erasure. In contrasting the traditional with the contemporary, the careful reader of Rash’s fiction is able to witness the transformation of the practices and beliefs surrounding death as the funeralizing process is taken out of the hands of the family and community, and turned over to the funeral industry. The result of this change, what can be summed up as a commodification of funeralizing, is a detachment and discomfort with the idea of death and the dead. The representations of deathways in “Raising the Dead,” “Last Rite,” “The Corpse Bird,” and “Something Rich and Strange” emphasize the significant role of the environment, place, community, and Welsh folkloric tradition, as well as reconciling grief and the detachment with death through an understanding of the natural world and humanity’s place within it.

Preparing the Body and Funeralizing

2The process of preparing the body for funerary service and burial is referred to as “laying out” the body (Crissman 29). Maude Shope explains this practice in Foxfire 2, the second installment in the regionally celebrated series that has aimed to capture and preserve the culture and crafts of the Southern Appalachian community for the last fifty years. In Foxfire 2, Shope recalls that “they didn’t have no funeral homes t’take’em to, y’know. If one was to t’die here last night, we laid’im out. What neighbors was already here ‘cause somebody’uz sick would strip th’bed off and put’im on a plain plank till y’got yer casket” (306). As indicated by Shope, the corpse would be placed on a board of some sort such as a piece of lumber or a spare table. The body was readied on what was most often called a “cooling board.” Instead of professional morticians, neighbors assisted the grieving family as they primed the deceased’s body for burial. Generally, this entailed washing the face and extremities (Crissman 29). In his second collection of poetry, Eureka Mill, Rash describes part of this procedure from the perspective of a participant in his poem, “Preparing the Body”:

. . . I found some men out in a yard
smoking cigarettes, looking at the ground,
the women in the house with the dead man’s wife.

They’d have him laid out on a cooling board,
looking like he’d passed out drunk, but then
you saw the shirt dyed crimson with his blood,
a face as white as August cotton bolls.

We’d strip the body first. The younger girls
who hadn’t known a man were curious.
They might giggle, childish as the men
who’d brought us here with their little boy games. (21)

3Much of the time, as described in Rash’s poem, women were tasked with the responsibility of washing and dressing the corpse. The poem illustrates the communal role in dealing with the dead as well as how early in life Appalachians were introduced to death and the traditions surrounding it—the inclusion of the younger girls exemplifying the passing along of customary processes. The girls are “curious” because they “hadn’t known a man,” not repulsed, scared, surprised, or put-off as one might be when confronted with a dead body for the first time. Rash’s specific description of the scene leaves the reader to infer that this is a common occurrence and that none present are entirely unacquainted with the dead. While Rash does not explicitly return to the traditional laying out process in his short fiction, he does revisit the image in a contemporary setting.

4In “Raising the Dead,” from his first fiction collection The Night The New Jesus Fell to Earth and Other Stories from Cliffside, North Carolina (1994), Tracy, the story’s narrator, and Jessie, the town undertaker, plot to switch the bodies within two coffins in order to give their friend Dooley a better afterlife. Tracy and Jessie switch Dooley’s body with “Pappy” Calhoun, after Mrs. Calhoun demands Pappy’s remains be moved to a different church. Tracy agrees with Jessie’s plan to give Dooley a better burial for two reasons: first, she remembers that “Pappy himself had fired my uncle twenty years ago for taking an extra ten minutes during a lunch break” (Night 72) and secondly, she considers that “Dooley had never had anything when he was alive and how nice it would be if he could at least have something, a nice, silver-handled coffin and fresh flowers on his grave every week, now that he was dead” (72-73). The underbelly of the story is this class conflict and the differences in how the working class and the wealthy handle their dead.

5The scene in “Raising the Dead” where Dooley’s body is processed is vastly different from the traditional laying out that Rash describes in the poem but there are parallels in the overall process of preparing the bodies for burial. Inside the funeral home where Tracy visits Jessie is “a brightly-lit room with a tile floor and a stainless-steel table” that Tracy notes she is “glad to see was unoccupied” (70). The sterile space is clean and quiet except for the conversation that takes place between Jessie and Tracy. The description implies a certain coldness that starkly contrasts the warm comfort of the traditional laying out which takes place in the home, surrounded by people and even the laughter of children, as depicted in Rash’s poem, “Preparing the Body.” While Jessie is a friend to Dooley, he is doing his job as a mortician by embalming Dooley’s body and preparing it for the coffin and later burial—in Tracy’s words a “needed service” (68). There is no group of family and friends gathered and willing to do the work necessary to prepare his corpse. Tracy even requests that before she helps switch the bodies in the coffins, Jessie cover Dooley’s face (73). The scene also serves to highlight the way in which Tracy, the story’s narrator, is uncomfortable around the dead bodies—both the decomposed body of Pappy and the freshly drowned body of Dooley. In the historically set poem, even children were included in and seemingly comfortable with the process of laying out the body, but in the contemporary story Tracy expresses discomfort at the idea of even seeing a corpse. She explains, “I wasn’t used to passing my time with dead people” (70). She later leaves the room while Jessie handles Pappy’s remains. When she returns, Dooley’s body is laid out on a stainless-steel table, processed and dressed in the suit another community member purchased for Dooley to be buried in (73). There are no cooling boards in funeral homes and no expectation for anyone else in the community to take part in the process of embalming Dooley’s corpse. Preparing the body is thus no longer a personal, intimate responsibility bestowed upon the family, but an impersonal and objective task assigned to professionals in the community.

6While the story shows a marked difference in the attitude toward the physical act of laying out the body and preparing it for burial as compared to the poem, the way in which members of the community come together to deal with Dooley’s death, in particular, harkens back to more traditional practices that emphasize community involvement. Tracy explains:

Dooley had no money, and though the county had a potter’s field on the other side of Broad River, Jessie felt that Dooley deserved better than that, and I agreed. Jessie had already called around town and raised five-hundred dollars to buy Dooley a cemetery plot. Besides taking care of Dooley’s body, Jessie was going to donate a headstone, and Phil Moore was going to buy him a suit. What Jessie wanted me to do was build Dooley a coffin. Jessie’s cousin Bennie, who runs Hamrick’s Lumberyard, had already agreed to supply the wood. (69)

7The vital role of community aid in the funeralizing process is emphasized in the section of Foxfire 2 dedicated to “Old-Time Burials.” These oral histories inform contemporary readers that “[s]howing their genuine sympathy, respect, and love for the family of the deceased, people traveled great distances in wagons and on horseback to attend wakes, help dig and fill the grave, make the coffin, wash and dress the body. . . . And they did it, usually, free of charge” (305). In reference to grave headstones, Ada Kelly told Foxfire that “[t]hey usually carved out a rock—nearly always somebody in th’community that did those kind a’things. They’d smooth up a rock and make tombstones out of a rock—just out of the rock here in the country. They didn’t charge anything. Ever’body did things for the other fellow then” (318).

8Furthermore, just as Rash describes the donation of the suit in which Dooley will be buried, Crissman notes that if the deceased “didn’t have anything fit to wear after death, kin and neighbors would get together and make something” (33). And just as Tracy is asked in the story to make a coffin using donated wood, William E. Phipps’ account of “Traditional Appalachian Funerals,” published in Appalachian Heritage, details that men were tasked with building the coffin while women readied the body (49). This was an integral step in preparing for the funeral and interment of the body. The roughly made coffins were fashioned from whatever lumber was immediately available and usually they were unpolished. Though crudely crafted, Phipps asserts that this quality “conveyed individuality” (49). Rash demonstrates this uniqueness when Tracy notes the coffin she has crafted for Dooley looks like “the blue-light special at K-Mart” when compared to an expensive, professionally built casket (Night 70). It is interesting to note that in Rash’s story, the gendered tasks of preparing for burial are switched. Tracy, a woman, builds the coffin and Jessie, a man, has prepared Dooley’s body. This notion attests to Rash’s ability to preserve Appalachian traditions while also subverting norms that no longer reflect contemporary practice.

9In “Raising the Dead,” Rash demonstrates that the key to understanding the Southern Appalachian funerary process—from death to burial—is to understand the role of the community. The development of tight-knit bonds that influenced the customs and practices was a direct result of the isolation that the landscape created. Until isolation broke and the professional funeral industry arrived in the mountains, the family and neighbors followed age-old traditions in dealing with the dead. By nature of necessity, due to their economic standing as well as the fact that Dooley had no family to handle his affairs, the community comes together to give him a proper burial.

10Unlike in “Raising the Dead,” when Sarah Hampton’s son Elijah dies in “Last Rite,” a story included in Casualties, Chemistry and Other Stories, and Something Rich and Strange, there is no body for the family to prepare. Murdered by robbers, Elijah is buried in a makeshift grave and Sarah sets out with her daughter-in-law, Laura, and a surveyor to discover the exact location of Elijah’s passing so that she can fill in the place of his death in her family bible. It is made clear in the story that it would be impossible to discover who killed her son and Sarah does not dwell on the identity of the murderer. She does not seek justice or revenge, merely closure.

11When Sarah and the others find the site where Elijah is buried, it is marked only with a rusted skillet nailed to a tree and a rock marking swollen ground. Sarah and Laura kneel beside the grave and begin fashioning an improvised memorial by planting wildflower seeds on Elijah’s grave to leave a lasting mark on the place of his burial (Something 332). This form of memorialization—placing flowers on the grave—pervaded popular practice in the late 1800s (Crissman 131), likely around the time or just before the story takes place. In Summoning the Dead: Essays on Ron Rash, Jimmy Dean Smith writes that “to Sarah, and to her son’s widow, the woods are a grave before which they kneel, and, as in other Rash fiction, they commune with their lost kin and their region by planting indigenous seeds into the earth” (55). The act of planting seeds as opposed to placing cut flowers, as is customary in contemporary practice, is noteworthy when one considers the apposition of sowing life in the place of the dead. This scene serves to further illustrate Sarah’s connection to the land and to nature.

12The party is forced to camp for the night before making their return journey and Sarah spreads a blanket in the place where Elijah has been buried. In this spot “[s]he lay down and closed her eyes, the bible laid beside her” (Something 333). The image that Rash creates in this scene is reminiscent of a traditional Appalachian wake as it is described in Foxfire 2. The wake was an important part of the funerary process in Appalachia as it was in many cultures. Fidel Crisp described the primary purpose of the wake as a means to “show your respect to th’dead man” (314). Another woman recounted that no matter what, “somebody stayed all night with [the deceased]” (314). As the story’s “wake” follows the makeshift memorialization and grave decorating, the story illustrates a provisional funeralizing process reflective of traditional Appalachian customs. Sarah’s participation in these rituals emphasizes the emotional and moral elements critical to those who must negotiate the experience of grief.

13The final moment that provides closure comes when the surveyor tells Sarah that Elijah died in North Carolina, Watauga County (Something 333), and she is able to fill in the missing line in the family bible declaring Elijah’s place of death. This practice was, as Crissman asserts, “the most common record of the deceased’s life and death” (143). That the entire plot of the story is propelled by Sarah’s desire to determine the place of Elijah’s death serves to exhibit the importance of place and the environment in Appalachian culture. Sarah could have made the decision to disinter Elijah’s body and take him home but chooses to leave him in the place where he died. Her grief is soothed in finding the body, but also in recognizing that Elijah has returned to the earth and will spur new life in the environment, like the flowers she has planted over him.

Signs and Myths

14The traditions the early Appalachian settlers brought with them from their European homelands influenced the folk customs and beliefs that were established in the mountains. Folk beliefs or “superstitions” penetrated the lives of mountain people. In “The Corpse Bird,” from Rash’s Burning Bright, the protagonist, Boyd Candler, remembers his grandfather: “He’d watched the old man live his life ‘by the signs.’ Whether a moon waxed or waned decided when the crops were planted and harvested, the hogs slaughtered and the timber cut. . . . Other signs that were harbingers of a new life, or a life about to end” (Something 260). Many of the beliefs were merely a means to understand the world in which these people lived, and most were centered on the environment and natural world.

15Patrick Gainer’s Witches, Ghosts and Signs: Folklore of the Southern Appalachians lists several signs and superstitions related to death and dying that he recorded from people within southern Appalachia. Some of the beliefs Gainer recorded include:

If four stocks of a lily come up to bloom, someone in the family will die that year.

If anyone eats fruit that has grown in a graveyard, he will die before the year is out.

If a woman cuts out a dress for herself on Friday and does not finish it on the same day, she will die before the year is out.

A storm follows the death of old people. Nature is mourning.

If the walls creak, it means a death soon.

If the thread knots while one is sewing, it means the one who is sewing will die. (124-25)

16One of the more pervasive trends in the documented signs and folk beliefs is the idea of birds as harbingers of death. Gainer writes about this belief: “[t]he fluttering of a bird at the window of a home could arouse fear in the mind of one who believes it to be an omen of death” (122), and Larry Thacker maintains that if a bird flies into a house, death can be warded off by forcing the bird to exit the same place from which it entered (92). Birds are often used in Southern and Appalachian literature to signal a looming death. Poe’s raven is the most obvious, but the eagle in Rash’s novel Serena can be interpreted as a deathly omen as well.

17The omens related to birds manifest in different ways. The corpse bird myth, specifically, comes from Welsh folklore, in which it is called “Deryn Corph.” It is not hard to trace the lineage of the myth as it would have been brought to Appalachia by immigrants and preserved and transformed in the oral tradition, as is true of much Appalachian folk culture. Writing in 1911, Welsh folklorist Jonathan Ceredig Davies asserted that the corpse bird “[flaps] its wings against the window of the room in which there is a sick person” and, relaying information from an interviewee, Davies describes it as a small gray bird. Rash’s corpse bird is not small and gray, but an owl. It does not flutter at the window the way Davies describes, but waits, perched in an oak tree (Something 261).

18Boyd Candler, the protagonist of “The Corpse Bird,” is from western North Carolina and has left Appalachia to live a suburban life in Raleigh, North Carolina. When his neighbor’s daughter falls ill, Boyd employs his mountain folk education: he hears an owl’s call, two nights in a row, from an oak tree in an empty lot behind his neighbor’s house and from this, “knew with utter certainty that if the bird stayed in the tree another night someone would die” (259). His belief is rooted in an adolescent experience which is central to the story’s plot and the overall thematic implication:

Boyd was fourteen when he heard the corpse bird in the woods behind the barn. His grandfather had been sick for months but recently rallied, gaining enough strength to leave his bed and take short walks around the farm. The old man had heard the owl as well, and it was a sound of reckoning to him as final as the thump of dirt clods on his coffin.

It’s come to fetch me, the old man had said, and Boyd hadn’t the slightest doubt it was true. Three nights the bird called from the woods behind the barn. Boyd had been in his grandfather’s room those nights, had been there when his grandfather let go of his life and followed the corpse bird into the darkness. (260)

19Boyd’s grandfather “follows” the corpse bird into the woods. This act demonstrates the grandfather’s willingness to accept the inevitability of death and his need to assert control over his own fate. As implied by the use of the word “reckoning” in this instance, the grandfather’s acceptance and embrace of death also underscores the sense of fatalism at work in Appalachian culture. Later in the story, Boyd’s reaction to encountering a corpse bird shows him rejecting the idea that fate is predetermined and demonstrates a dichotomy between the older generations of Appalachians and their adherence to these fatalistic tendencies and the younger generations that choose to take fate into their own hands. It is also possible that Boyd’s resistance to succumbing to fatalism when the corpse bird appears is a result of having left the mountains.

21When Boyd is roused from sleep on the third night by the call of the owl, he is compelled to act to save Jennifer’s life in the face of her parents’ rejection of his warnings. When Boyd confronts the bird, it is “[r]igid as a gravestone” (268). Boyd cuts the tree down with a chain saw, and when it falls “something beaked and winged passed near [his] face” (269). The corpse bird flies away and “crossed over the vacant lot and disappeared into the darkness it had been summoned from” (270). The story ends as Boyd turns himself over to police, “both palms upturned, like a man who’s just set something free” (270). The reader is left to assume that he is successful in saving the girl by forcing the corpse bird off its perch.

22Death is abundant in Rash’s writing, and drownings are a frequent means through which his characters meet their fate. Perhaps the most memorable drowning in Rash’s body of work is in “Something Rich and Strange,” from his 2013 collection Nothing Gold Can Stay. Depictions of death via water express the theme of transience, and facilitate one of the more pervasive motifs in Rash’s writing—water as an allusion to Christianity and “biblical connotations of redemption and rebirth,” but also to Welsh folkloric tradition portraying water “as a conduit between the two worlds of the living and the dead” (Wilhelm 13). Rash gives flowing bodies of water immense power in his work, but in “Something Rich and Strange” he pushes this power a step further. Much as he gives agency to death through the owl in “The Corpse Bird,” in “Something Rich and Strange” the river is given a similar, if not more direct, sense of agency.

23The unnamed girl in “Something Rich and Strange” attempts to reach the middle of the river that marks the state lines of Georgia and South Carolina so that she can tell her friends that she had been in two states at once (Something 221). This reference points immediately to the binary of life and death as the girl underestimates the power of the current and is swept away. The syntax in this scene underscores the agency the river has over the girl: “the current turns her” and “the water holds her there” (222). At the conclusion of this haunting passage that lasts nearly an entire page of the book, the girl is finally overcome by the river: “and at that moment her arms and legs she did not even know were flailing cease and she becomes part of the river” (223). In this scene, she is neither part of life nor of death, but in a transient liminal space. Death is a transformation, not an ending; the girl does not die: she “becomes.”

24The unnamed narrator who is a biology teacher and volunteer diver is tasked with finding and retrieving her. The diver’s first expedition into the depths brings him back to the surface coughing, reporting to the rescue team that he has discovered her body “in the undercut behind the hydraulic” (223). There is a sense of stillness while he is underwater as the girl’s body is “pressed against a rock slab” and only her hair moves, an image reminiscent of Medusa. The allusion to Medusa does not end here, and as the diver gets close enough he notes that her eyes remain open and that there is still life in them. The calm in the hydraulic turns to chaos when he attempts to retrieve her body. His mask and mouthpiece are “ripped free” and his light is “grabbed” by the force of the hydraulic (223). The language used in this moment is another demonstration of the river’s ability to act with agency upon those that enter. The diver is so haunted by the experience, especially by the girl’s paralyzing gaze, that he vows never to enter the river again.

25The diver returns to his daily routine and continues to ponder what he observed in the hydraulic. These considerations pervade his dreams and as he falls into a deep sleep, “the girl came with him” (224). Instead of the chaotic current that took over when he searched for the girl initially, in his dream the river is “tepid.” Even when he attempts to retrieve her body, the current does not overwhelm him as it did in reality; instead, “[the girl] whispered that this world was better than the one above and she should never have been afraid” (224). This dream sequence is haunting in the way the girl beckons the diver to join her, assumedly in death. The dream also reflects the Welsh tradition of water serving as a place of communion between the living and the dead.

26A few days later when sitting alone in his classroom, the diver hears “the gurgle of the aquarium” (225), echoing the girl’s last remembrance of her “sixth-grade science class, the gurgle of the aquarium at the back of the room…” (222). This parallel between the girl’s final thoughts and the diver’s occupation as a biology teacher, as well as the direct link between the “gurgle of the aquarium” they both perceive, is no mere coincidence. Just as readers suspend their disbelief for the almost-too-perfect alignments in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” readers must do the same to experience the unsettling mystery in “Something Rich and Strange.” This is the narrative moment where it becomes clear that the story is not about the drowned girl but about the haunting effect her death has on the diver. Rash intentionally leaves room for the reader’s imagination as to what the diver hears in his classroom, having the narrator observe: “He would never speak to anyone, not even his wife, about what happened in the classroom’s stillness” (225). What the diver experiences in this scene remains unclear, adding to the mystery and sense of unease that the moment is meant to inflict. Whatever the experience may have been, it motivates the diver to enter the river again.

27While the search for the girl’s body is tabled due to weather conditions, the scene in the hydraulic remains “quiet and still” and “the girl’s transformation unrushed, gentle. Crayfish and minnows unknitted flesh from bone, attentive to loosed threads” (225). The degeneration of the girl’s body is not grotesque in the way that one would expect; instead, Rash enmeshes decay with beauty by infusing elements of the natural world. When the diver is finally able to enter the river again, he finds a similar scene. Though she is “less of what she had been” (226), the description immediately following is quite beautiful: “the blue rubbed from her eyes, flesh freed from the chandelier of bone” (226). The image created through the chandelier image is that of an ornate underwater banquet hall with the girl’s body literally feeding back into the ecosystem.

28This time when the diver reaches out to the body, chaos does not overcome the underwater scene. Instead, “[h]e touched what once had been a hand. The river whispered to him that it would not be long now” (226). The diver witnesses the stages of her transformation—in this scene the hydraulic is still. This stillness suggests that the girl should be left there, unbothered. As a result, he returns to land and tells the sheriff and other members of the search team that her body has disappeared, “not even a scrap of clothing or bone” (226). While the others argue that the diver should look in other spots where her body could have been swept, the sheriff’s final word is to “let her be” (226). Allowing her body to remain in the river is similar to Sarah’s decision to leave Elijah’s body where it was originally buried in “Last Rite.” The impulse behind this is an Appalachian understanding of the importance of place and the role of death in the life cycle of an ecosystem. Sarah and the diver find peace in allowing the bodies to rest.

29The haunting elements of the narrative give it the semblance of a ghost story, but it also reads as universal, timeless and mythic. There are several elements at work in “Something Rich and Strange” that give it this quality: the autonomy given to the river; the two unnamed characters; the supernatural elements; the parallels regarding science class and aquariums; and the questions intentionally left unanswered. It is through these tropes that Rash moves beyond incorporating myth into his work and into mythmaking.

30It is of note that both stories, “The Corpse Bird” and “Something Rich and Strange,” end on similar sentiments, concluding with the same final word, “free.” In “The Corpse Bird,” “Boyd stood up and held his arms out before him, both palms upturned, like a man who’s just set something free” (270) and in “Something Rich and Strange,” “[Dogwood blossoms] would furl amid the last bones and like the last bones they would finally slip free” (226). Boyd frees his sick neighbor and saves the girl from what he is sure is certain death if the corpse bird is allowed to remain, and the diver frees the girl by allowing her body to remain in its place, where it has become part of the environment. Freedom manifests differently in each narrative, but in both stories, it can only be accomplished through an understanding of the natural world—Boyd’s knowledge of signs and the diver’s realization that the girl’s body has transformed into “a part of the river.”

Implications and Conclusions

31Over the last several decades, the southern Appalachian customs that withstood modernization for hundreds of years have been increasingly eroded as isolation in the mountains wanes, and as the generations of people holding on to cultural customs pass away. With the rapidity at which cultural traditions have been forgotten and replaced, Appalachian ways of old have found preservation within literature crafted by writers from the region. In Step Into the Circle, written to highlight the work of several influential Appalachian writers, Wiley Cash calls Rash “an ethnographer of the region’s heart” (33). On the topic of cultural erasure, Rash has stated, “[t]here is a sense that you don’t want this to be forgotten, that it has some importance” (qtd. in Lang 4). Rash’s work not only captures traditions that are disappearing, but also the transformations that are taking place. Cash writes, “[t]he land and its people are shifting and adapting to changes in climate, culture, and civic life, and Rash has spent decades chronicling the region’s evolution” (39). This is not to say that Rash’s writing is only about the regional ethos. It is through the lens of the region, and the characters that inhabit it, that Rash illuminates the universal. Whether one chooses to “[follow] the corpse bird into the darkness” (Something 260) or cut down its perch with a chain saw, Rash shows his readers that death is an inescapable part of a natural cycle, while also validating the ways in which the living handle the dead and give genuine voice to grief.