I have been a fan of James Lee Burke’s for several years. Shout out to Scott Woods for turning me on to him.

 

I am unashamed to say that I believe Burke to be among the best, if not THE best novelist in America today. I think I can make that point by comparing a short passage of his 1989 Novel, To the Bright and Shining Sun, to a renowned short passage from the 1939 novel by another great American novelist, John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. It is commonly accepted that this is the book that won him the attention that culminated in the Nobel Prize in literature in 1962.

 

Perhaps not too surprisingly, both books focus on the lives of the working poor. In Steinbeck’s case, dirt farmers from the Oklahoma dustbowl. The real-life humans who lived that chapter of American history must have felt that God Himself hated them and the banks existed to prove it. At the end of that novel there is nothing left in the world but the literal “milk of human kindness.”

 

Winfield said, “Ma!” and the rain roaring on the roof drowned his voice. “Ma!”
“What is it? What you want?”
“Look! In the corner.”
Ma looked. There were two figures in the gloom; a man who lay on his back, and a boy sitting beside him, his eyes wide, staring at the newcomers. As she looked, the boy got slowly up to his feet and came toward her. His voice croaked. “You own this here?”
“No,” Ma said. “Jus’ come in outa the wet. We got a sick girl. You got a dry blanket we could use an’ get her wet clothes off?”
The boy went back to the corner and brought a dirty comfort and held it out to Ma.
“Thank ya,” she said. “What’s the matter’th that fella?”
The boy spoke in a croaking monotone. “Fust he was sick—but now he’s starvin’.”
“What?”
“Starvin’. Got sick in the cotton. He ain’t et for six days.”
Ma walked to the corner and looked down at the man. He was about fifty, his whiskery face gaunt, and his open eyes were vague and staring. The boy stood beside her. “Your pa?” Ma asked.
“Yeah! Says he wasn’ hungry, or he jus’ et. Give me the food. Now he’s too weak. Can’t hardly move.”
The pounding of the rain decreased to a soothing swish on the roof. The gaunt man moved his lips. Ma knelt beside him and put her ear close. His lips moved again.
“Sure,” Ma said. “You jus’ be easy. He’ll be awright. You jus’ wait’ll I get them wet clo’es off’n my girl.”
Ma went back to the girl. “Now slip ’em off,” she said. She held the comfort up to screen her from view. And when she was naked, Ma folded the comfort about her.
The boy was at her side again explaining, “I didn’ know. He said he et, or he wasn’ hungry. Las’ night I went an’ bust a winda an’ stoled some bread. Made ‘im chew ‘er down. But he puked it all up, an’ then he was weaker. Got to have soup or milk. You folks got money to git milk?”
Ma said, “Hush. Don’ worry. We’ll figger somepin out.”
Suddenly the boy cried, “He’s dyin’, I tell you! He’s starvin’ to death, I tell you.”
“Hush,” said Ma. She looked at Pa and Uncle John standing helplessly gazing at the sick man. She looked at Rose of Sharon huddled in the comfort. Ma’s eyes passed Rose of Sharon’s eyes, and then came back to them. And the two women looked deep into each other. The girl’s breath came short and gasping.
She said “Yes.”
Ma smiled. “I knowed you would. I knowed!” She looked down at her hands, tight-locked in her lap.
Rose of Sharon whispered, “Will—will you all—go out?” The rain whisked lightly on the roof.
Ma leaned forward and with her palm she brushed the tousled hair back from her daughter’s forehead, and she kissed her on the forehead. Ma got up quickly. “Come on, you fellas,” she called. “You come out in the tool shed.”
Ruthie opened her mouth to speak. “Hush,” Ma said. “Hush and git.” She herded them through the door, drew the boy with her; and she closed the squeaking door.
For a minute Rose of Sharon sat still in the whispering barn. Then she hoisted her tired body up and drew the comfort about her. She moved slowly to the corner and stood looking down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes. Then slowly she lay down beside him. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. “You got to,” she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. “There!” she said. “There.” Her hand moved behind his head and supported it. Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.

 

Wow! What a scene and what a hopeful, sad ending to a novel that generally wasn’t all that hopeful. You remember it, right?

 

Fifty years later, Burke takes up a very similar subject, but instead of dirt farmers, Burke uses the geography and culture of Appalachian coal miners in the times of the union struggle and at the advent of mechanized mining. It’s amazingly the same story. There may be love between poor people, but there is damned little of it between the impoverished miners and the fat-cat owners and banks. And the results are the same. In Burke’s case, the death in this scene comes as a direct result of labor strife and violence, but it is the same phenomenon at work. Here for comparison is another old man, beaten down by an unjust system to his deathbed.

 

Mrs. James called the doctor, who filled a syringe to give Woodson another shot of morphine. As the doctor rubbed an alcohol-soaked pad on the skin, Woodson held up his hand weakly to push away the needle. Then the light began to grow fixed in his one uncovered eye, the muscles relaxed in his face and his breathing became more shallow and even. He rested his head back on the pillow and looked up at the ceiling a gray strand of hair stuck out from the bandage on his forehead. He felt a longing inside him for sleep and an end of the fury that had burned in him for a lifetime. A warm feeling, like a mild fever, began to glow inside his body, and a pink mist, the color of blood diluted in water, seem to circulate in the room. “You ain’t going to need it this time, Doc,” he said.

 

The doctor drew the blinds, and everyone left the room. The stillness made the distant drumming grow louder in Woodson’s head. The mist was so thick that he could feel it in his hand: it changed color to crimson and then to purple, and he knew that he was back in the mine shaft for the last time. He didn’t have to worry about the clot of blood in his windpipe any longer. He could breathe the cool air through the pores in his skin. The burned wounds in his scalp had healed, his mutilated hand could grasp an ax handle with the strength of a man in his twenties, and he felt his darkened eye burn through the gauze until it could see the frozen timbers hanging from the limestone in the top of the shaft. I’m going underground to stay this time, ain’t I, God, he thought. I ain’t got to fight with you or make no bargains anymore. We are a-going home.

 

For the first time in his life he rested quietly, without heat or anger or struggling against that fierce, unknown enemy that had always tried to strike him down. A square ripple of fire broke through the rock wall, burning a great doorway in the shaft. The flame showered out in sparks like a welder’s torch, and the room was again flooded with yellow light, but it was brighter this time. Then he felt himself being absorbed into the light and carried to its source. He seemed to rise from the floor without willing his body to move. As he went up through the earth towards the sky, he could smell the wind blowing in the white oaks and poplars, the new pine sap in freshly cut logs, and the sweat glistening on the horses. He rose faster to the surface now, closer to the light, and he saw that the sun had descended from the sky and spangled everything with a radiance that made him shield his eyes. He floated higher, feeling himself dissolve and become a part of all things, and he could see to the far reaches of the earth on both horizons. The oceans were blue and green, and the mountains rose up jagged against the sky behind them. He had never known the world was so immense. He felt the light enter his mind and consume him, and the radiance became so bright that he was conscious of nothing else.

 

I don’t need to belabor the point. Burke is a fine, fine writer. Who said anything about a Nobel Prize?