The Root of All Evil Speaks

A short story about creativity and commerce

Sculpture carved from tree root, Bessie Harvey, Visionary Artist, East Tennessee

(I thought it was about time for another story for all my Substack readers. This piece first appeared in Crescent Review, 1992, thus the cameo appearances from politicians of that era. How times have changed so little it seems. Hope you enjoy.)

We are not a backward people, living even as we do back of the cove and county in the tail end of the state, in a place some might say was cut off from the doings of the wider world. Believe you me, Beaverdam’s had its share of big doers and real world-beaters.

We don’t like to brag, but name me off how many places got someone in the Museum of Modern Art in faraway New York City, which everybody’s heard tell of, and where Merle Phelps has set foot, hooking his fingers in the stiff collar of his Sunday best while folks in tuxedos studied his talking root.

The New York Times wrote up that evening and about Merle’s art in a story that Alma Greene’s great-niece clipped and mailed her. Alma taped the account on the window at her store for all to see:

Merle Phelps of Beaverdam, N.C., brings a down-to-earth yet otherworldly vision to play in his mixed media. These constructions of weathered tree stumps, discarded feathers, animal bones, enamel spray paints and rusted farm implements reflect the relentless thrust of urbanization upon the rustification of Mr. Phelps’ Appalachia. The art resides in a neighborhood somewhere between Al Capp’s Dogpatch and Picasso’s Guernica. Yet Mr. Phelps is a postmodern Primitive, seemingly unaware of the irony he arouses in the sophisticated observer.

“Huh?” said Merle.

Hands tunneling in the deep pockets of his overalls, he bent close to the glass, nodding his head to get the right angle of his bifocals on the small print.

“What it call you, Merle?”

We elbowed each other, at poor Merle’s expense. He rocked on his heels, and pulled the brim of his hat down low like he was burned up.

“Huh!” Merle spoke again, not a question, but a sound he hawked up like he was liable to spit. “Ain’t no primitive.”

Course any man among us could tell you Merle Phelps and his people from way back have been members at Beaverdam Baptist, which is regular Southern Baptist. No Phelps has been known to consort or commune with Primitive Baptists who are said to pass poisonous snakes the way we pass offering plates down the pews.

Merle is no primitive, but in a way, Sundays and snakes are to blame for him starting in on art. One look at Merle Phelps, you can tell here’s a man who’s never had a foolish thought in all his days, until one Sunday he took the notion to carve a straight stick into a curving snake.

Some say he took this notion from the Preacher’s sermon that morning about how Aaron and Moses were trying to get Old Pharaoh to let go them children of Israel. To make his point, Aaron cast down his rod and it turned into a snake. Pharaoh’s sorcerers and spellmakers threw down their sticks and turned them to reptiles too, but Aaron’s snake was meaner and ate em all up.

Merle Phelps sat in the pew that hot Sunday, with the preacher talking about how appearances in this world are deceiving, how walking in the woods what looks like a stick may be a snake, and what may be a snake is really a stick, so a man best pray with his eyes closed and open at the same time.

“Amen,” we all said. Then it was time to go home and eat.

After preaching, Merle went home and sat on his porch, and it being the Sabbath and such, there weren’t much to do, so he whittled away the time on a length of alder. He shaved and he cut and he trimmed and smoothed that stick until one end looked pointed like a head. He turned the stick around and whittled away until there looked like buttons on that end. Up the middle, he crisscrossed the wood for scales and ribbed the belly until it looked mightily like an old timber rattler if it’d been run over by a truck in the road. Then Merle got to thinking about snakes in Scriptures, how the serpent used to be the proudest and most beautiful creature in all creation before he sold Eve on that bad apple.

So Merle colored his snakestick with old paints from his shed, but that was just a start. He hung some of his wife’s old paste jewelry around its neck and tail, placed a cardboard crown on its head, and fashioned angel wings from coat hanger and paper. It took all day, and when it was night, Merle was finished. He’d made himself a snake all right, but like no reptile the world’s seen underfoot since leaving Eden.

Merle fancied that first snakestick so, he spent the whole week making more, until Saturday when he had to go to market with his ‘maters. He quit tobacco a few years back when he started getting Social Security. Merle always said “Burley ‘bout killed me when I was young, why work it when I’m old?” But he plowed his garden in spring and took produce in summer to the farmer’s market, sometimes down at Asheville, other times over into Winston-Salem, where people will pay top dollar for anything grown good in local dirt.

That Saturday, he took a slew of the snake sticks he’d made all week and set them out on the hood of his truck, no price, no intent to part with them, but as something to see, a gimmick that might get people picking through his bushels of Better Boys.

First fellow came over, oohed and aahed and pulled a twenty from his wallet. He wanted one.

“A bushel?”

“No, that carving there, yes that one.”

Before long, a crowd was gathered at the truck. Forget the ‘maters Merle brought, they were eating up his snakesticks. Folks were about to fight over them, waving fists of money.

Upshot of it is Merle drove back that night with five hundred in cash in his pocket and most of his ‘maters but all the snake sticks sold. The last one went for seventy-five dollars. Merle said he felt bad, like he was taking folks’ hard-earned money for a little foolishness he’d made. Feeling bad, he gave away a half dozen ‘maters free to anyone who took a snakestick.

He needn’t have felt bad. We heard one of them sticks what went for fifty dollars at the farmer’s market wound up in a Soho art gallery with a pricetag of three thousand dollars, more money for something that grew out of mind than Merle had ever made off anything he grew out of dirt.

---

That’s the start of the story with Merle Phelps, and the end’s not yet in sight, but here through the middle, he didn’t change any we could see in the community. Merle kept up his faithful church attendance in the pew on the right side, third from the front, where he and his late wife had sat for fifty years.

The next Sunday, the preacher started talking about the swine that Jesus drove the demons into. Merle went home and pondered a spell on his porch, then walked off into the woods. A while later, he came back with a chunk of chestnut what had died in the blight at century’s turn. Now if you squinted hard, that wood looked like a pig’s snout before Merle set to work. He put a row of sharp teeth in its mouth, and painted it some bright red eyes. Then he nailed on a pair of cow horns and glued a crest of crow feathers on top, until what started as regular wood looked like a real pig’s nightmare. In the Museum, they called it Satan’s Sow.

This went on a while. Every Sunday, the Preacher preached, Merle made art. Didn’t matter what the sermon said, Merle would be nodding in the third pew, adding “amen” at the right places. But Preacher might mention the Lamb of God, then Merle would go home and find a piece of wood that put you in mind of an ethereal ewe. Preacher got to the point he had to be careful about animals, after Merle made a whole menagerie.

Preacher decided this had gone on long enough. He pounded the pulpit and said a certain somebody in the congregation was in need of Christian chastening lest he become a stumbling block to his fellows. What did Merle do but go home and spray-paint his chopping block black and glue a brogan on top? The New York folks really went wild over that one. We heard tell a Japanese man bought the Stumbling Block for ten thousand dollars at a Sotheby’s auction.

Preacher finally felt led by the Lord for some visitation. He walked up the road where Merle’s been living so long the state named it Merle Phelps Road, and knocked on Merle’s door. They sat on the porch and talked about the weather, the general sinfulness of our time and world.

“Now Brother Merle, I don’t mean to pry none into your business, but this art stuff has got some folks talking, and gossip in the community is a certain sign of some serious backsliding. Scripture warns about men’s vain imaginings. Instead, you ought let the work of your hands be a glory unto God.

“That a fact?”

Merle was whittling on a piece of soft ash, and Preacher was getting nervous just watching, wondering what might take shape in Merle’s hands if he said the wrong thing. Preacher had been hoping to spend a whole month of Sundays on the Book of Revelation, but with the seven-headed Beast, the four horsemen, the angels with the seven seals, the whore of Babylon, the armies of Gog and Magog descended upon Armageddon, well, just the thought of what Merle might make of all that made him shudder.

“Brother Merle, Scriptures tell us on Pentecost how the Holy Spirit entered the disciples and they spoke in tongues, Chinese, Hottentot, French and what not. Well, I was wondering if you’ve not been hearing in tongues. Say I’m preaching regular as an instrument of the Lord’s will, but somewhere in midstream it gets translated into some tongue.”

“I do get a buzzing a lot in my ear, but only when my battery’s going.” Merle pointed to his hearing aid on the ear stem of his spectacles.

“Well, what you might take for inspiration coming from my mouth, as an instrument of Lord, mind you, might be getting twisted as it passes through the air, since Satan is the Prince of the Air, before it goes into your ears.”

Merle shook his head. “No offense, preacher, but I don’t hear nothing new sitting in church Sundays.”

“You don’t?”

“Afraid not. Tell the truth, I hear it out in the woods. It comes clear to me then.”

“It?” Preacher was getting suspicious now. “What does it say?”

“It don’t say so much as argue. Say now I see a stick lying on the ground. Well, there’s a stick, I’ll say. No, it says, look again. Stick, I say. No, look again. And then I don’t see the stick no more, but something new.”

Preacher turned red. “Look here Merle, this has got to stop. Plant corn, beans, ‘maters, burley, whatever, just don’t be growing these thorns.”

“Thorns? What thorns?” Merle looked pricked himself.

“This, THIS!” Preacher swept his arms over the yard where Merle’s woods had grown up: Tree of Good and Evil, the withered fig tree cursed by Christ, the Great Cedars of Lebanon. There was Solomon’s split baby, Goliath’s head with a rock in it, and Samson slinging an ass’s jawbone. Merle had Abomination Writ Large and Tene Mene Upharisan spraypainted over an old Co’Cola sign he pulled from some old barn. Job’s ashheap was there with a burlap bag and a mound of manure. Moses’ Plague of Locusts was just that, old shellacked hulls of seventeen-year locusts all glued and covering a dead pine tree.

“It looked like hell, Merle Phelps’ front yard,” Preacher told folks later, “And I’m not talking rough now, I mean real Hell, Hades itself, spray-painted and glued all together, souls in torment and flames frozen in wood and paint and junk.”

“It’s a sore sight all right,” we agreed. “Won’t win Beaverdam the beautification medal this year for the 4-H’ers.”

“No, what I mean...” Preacher for once looked at a loss for words. “Well, you wouldn’t think you’d want to look so long.”

But at least, Preacher had learned he didn’t have to worry about his words from the pulpit. So Sunday came, and we got back to our regular dose of hellfire and brimstone. Preacher was in fine form and Merle, well, some say he slipped in the collection plate a crisp $100 bill he’d got that week from a Atlanta couple for a waterlogged chunk of oak and bits of moss and rock, wrapped and bound in chickenwire, entitled All Have Come Short of the Glory of God.

After church let out, we smoked on the church steps and talked the way men always have of the week’s news. What had foaled and what had died, who’d who was feeling poorly, what the weather had been and what fool things the politicians were up to now. Merle used to stand and smoke with us, before he turned artistic. Now we watched him get into his truck and drive on home toward Merle Phelps Road.

“Reckon he’s gonna go up in them woods and argue some.”

“Wonder who with?”

“Gawd Almighty.”

“Hard to argue with somebody that old.”

“Who, Merle?”

“No, God.”

“Guess the only way to know is follow old Merle.”

And one of us did just that, followed Merle Phelps into the woods later that day. He picked his way through the trees, carrying a snakestick in one hand, and a can of spray paint in the other. You could hear the metal ball banging inside the can as he walked. For seventy-nine, Merle Phelps’ got a gait that will wind somebody following after — well, sneaking, careful not to snap twigs underfoot even if that body knows Merle’s half deaf.

After a while of walking with that metal ball rattling around in the paint can (and somebody creeping on behind), Merle came to a clearing. The trees around stood dead as bones stuck in the ground, blighted by a disease or blasted by lightning. A patch of sky had been opened up when the tallest had toppled over, no telling how long back. Branch and bole had rotted away into moss and dirt, and all that was left were the roots. Those were weathered and dried and shrunk over the years, wood so old it could have floated off the Ark.

Merle stood, not even winded, before that old stump. He said nothing you could hear. Just rattled the metal ball in his can, studying that root.

“That so?”

There was not a soul in sight Merle was speaking to. You could hear the wind blowing up the Buckeye and through the tops of the dead trees, with a sound like the opening and closing of a door.

“Well, there’s an idea.”

Merle cocked his ear, bending close to the stump, then he stood up straight and shook his head.

“If you say so.”

He shook his can and sprayed the root with a hissing mist of gold. He sprayed in long motions until the can was empty, tossed it on the ground and left the clearing, alone.

One of us stepped out from behind the tree to see Merle’s handiwork. There was little use hiding then and none now, this is where I came out into the open. We don’t like to brag in Beaverdam but it was me who found the root of Merle Phelps’ art.

Like I said, it was just a stump, a mess of dried mud and wood and rock, but if you looked hard, in it was a face. Quartz rock stuck in the wood like teeth and eyes, patches of brown moss sprouted like three-day-old beard on an old man. Merle had wrote on it, gold letters sprayed across its forehead that was all knotted as when a thought sets you to pondering and you can feel the skin pull between your eyes like I could feel then and there. AM SO, it said, the gold letters I mean, which Merle had written. I never heard it speak my own self, but then I was busy listening to my own self think.

I looked over my shoulder, east and west, and all around, and there wasn’t a soul in sight. Merle’s root wasn’t exactly on his property, and it wasn’t exactly on mine either. All I knew it lay close to my place.

I cut down the slope a ways until I crossed the old logging trail that meandered down to the main road. Later, I drove my Jeep back. It took till near midnight, under the light of a half moon and the help of the Jeep’s head lights, but I finally pried that root out of the mountainside like a mouth doctor popping out a bad tooth. Only sound it made was a groaning when the roots ripped free. It was dead wood same as any I’ve chained and skidded down the mountainside. Parts of its face got scraped, and the quartz rock that was supposed to be its left eye got gouged out somewhere on the way down. But you got the idea of a face, looking at the root right, and the AM SO you could read all right.

When the museum men came scouting Beaverdam for more of Merle’s art, I took them to my woodshed where I’d hid the root under the last of my cord from winter. They were horrified. “You weren’t going to use this as firewood, were you?”

I played dumb. “Looked seasoned enough to burn.”

They flashed out their checkbook quick enough and wrote me a note that gave me money to burn.

There’s been too much talk of money in Beaverdam as of late, so I won’t say exactly what I got out of this deal, but any one with eyes can see the new trailer I had hauled over Georges Gap and set behind the old homeplace along with a satellite dish that catches pictures of naked ladies from outer space.

Lucky, the naked lady channel wasn’t on when Preacher dropped by the other evening for a visit. He put his face to the screen and called into the house where I sat in my new easy chair.

“Nary a soul home?”

“Come on in the house, Preacher.”

“No, now a hard working man don’t need to be getting up on my account. Give them feet a rest. You earned it. ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,’ scripture says.”

“Has been hot, ain’t it? Almost too hot to eat.”

Preacher fanned himself. “Amen, brother, but I see the Lord’s been good to you in His bounty.”

“Him and Philip Morris for buying my burley.”

“Don’t forget Merle.”

“Say what, preacher?”

“Brother Merle. Aren’t you farming his tobacco allotment this year?”

“Yeah. I just lease a few acres of his. It’s not like I owe him any of the crop money. Merle’s been making more than any man since he got out of burley and into art.”

“Brother Merle’s been blessed, but he’s been a real blessing to this community too.”

Preacher had a right to be pleased. Merle had tithed enough to up his salary, and pay for new siding on the sanctuary.

“I don’t know no finer man than Merle Phelps,” I said. “Ice tea?”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Preacher said.

Preacher sat inside my trailer, drinking my ice tea and watched my television with the satellite beaming in pictures from all over the world.

“Picked up a Billy Graham crusade the other night,” I said. “It was Billy speaking, except it was in some different language.”

“With men of other tongues and other lips will I speak unto this people; and yet for all that will they not hear me, saith the Lord,” said the Preacher. “The Apostle Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. Sunday I aim to preach it.”

“I wouldn’t want to miss that.”

Poor Preacher. It was hard to talk to the man without him slipping into next Sunday’s sermon on a Monday night. We usually nodded and said amen, amen before going on down the road or row or whatever business we had to get done.

The clock ticked on the mantel, and the Preacher stared at the television. I tried not to think about the unclothed women on the channel that he couldn’t see.

“Well, I’ve tarried long enough.” Preacher finally stood and stretched. “Thank you for the tea and the fine fellowship, but the Lord’s work is never done.”

I got up from my chair to see the Preacher out.

“You see Merle, say hey for me,” I said.

Preacher squinted back at me through the screen of the door. He of course didn’t know about my business, but he still gave me a strange look. “Well, you probably see more of Merle than me.”

“Not these days. I’m busy with the burley. He’s got his art.”

I turned out the porch light quick and shut the door. Then I turned off that durn TV and sat hard in my easy chair in the dark of my new trailer.

---

If Merle missed his talking root, he never said a word. But we soon noticed he quit making art. He tried to carve a duck, and well, it didn’t look that special. It got so he was whittling sticks all the way down to toothpicks, then spitting them out of his mouth. Merle may not have been making art, but he was making money. He sold off the collection in his front yard to whoever would come and pay hard cash.

“ Take it, go on, get it off my hands.” Merle would throw up his hands, helpless, and stomp back in the house.

Merle was a real inspiration in Beaverdam. Some folks set up stands in their front yards, hoping to attract the cars with out-of-state license plates, that were always going up and down the road, looking for art deals. They put out hand-painted signs, “Real Primitive Art Here,” but most sold the same painted whirl-i-gigs of ducks flying or fish swimming that they’d always made. Alma Greene got money for pieces of quilts glued with old family photos and pictures cut from magazines. Anything ugly and modern brought top dollar. One old woman even sold a 1962 feed store calendar crossed-out day by day with different crayons. She called it Time out of Mind.

So Merle Phelps had put Beaverdam on the map in the Modern Art World, and no one minded. We teased him so he didn’t get too big for his britches, being famous and all. He was forever talking with museum people and newspaper and tv reporters. He got to go to Washington and get a special grant from Senator Jesse Helms. His photograph got taped up on the store window for the community to see: Merle shoulder to shoulder with our Senator, looking sheepish like he’d slip right out of the picture if Jesse didn’t have a firm hold of his hand.

“Now this is God-fearing American Art,” Jesse said. “None of this homoerotic, liberal pornography like Ted Kennedy’s got hanging in his West Palm Beach house.”

Merle never got invited to West Palm Beach, but he did make it to New York City and the Museum of Modern Art, where his talking root and collected works are on show. It was hard to imagine Merle Phelps in the Big Apple, a place so far away and unthinkable. Preacher sorted it out for us: “You could put all of Manhattan into the cove that is Beaverdam, but you could put all the people in Beaverdam into just one building up there.”

“So how big is that Apple, anyhow?” We asked Merle as we stood before the glass at Alma Greene’s store and read about Beaverdam’s own world-famous artist.

Merle shrugged, squinted at the small print.

The New York Times went on about my particular contribution to Merle’s fame and fortune:

Like a fearsome icon, AM SO plays upon faith’s stubborn insistence for the burning bush experience while caricaturing the authority of revelation: a juvenile Jehovah speaks with twisted mouth and cartoon features. Mr. Phelps dares look into the face of Creator in the ongoing dialectic between human and the divine. As subject, “AM SO” seemingly wins the last word, but formally speaking, the medium gets the final say.

“Say what?” we said.

Merle shook his head slowly.

“What did it say, Merle?” We hooted and elbowed one another.

Understand there wasn’t a man there who didn’t count Merle Phelps a friend and neighbor. We just made certain no one got too big-headed in Beaverdam. Like I said, we don’t believe in bragging.

Merle took the hat from his head, then peered inside at the small space warmed by his skull. Not a word out of him. When he lifted his eyes again, they cut me out of the crowd and fixed me to the ground where I stood. I shifted my weight on my boots, all of a sudden uneasy.

“What say, Merle?” I made the joke again and looked for everybody to join in the fun.

But Merle’s eyes kept me pinned. That look of his held a hurt I can’t recollect seeing since we buried his wife with a knot in her breast.

“Merle?” I asked. Truly, I didn’t know.

The old man clapped the hat back on his head.

“It didn’t say. It don’t speak no more.”

That was all Merle Phelps said, the last decent word he’s spoke to me to this day.