Unlike Russell Kirk’s better-known stories, “Off the Sand Road,” along with “Skyberia” and “Lost Lake,” are not tales of the supernatural, though there is a strong sense of the eerie about them. Together they form a trilogy of sorts, depicting the odd mix of wild rural beauty and slumbering menace that characterize the wild marches that creep near Kirk’s ancestral home in Mecosta.
On a hot midsummer day, our car rumbled over a rough patch on one of the narrow, forest-lined roads not far from the village of Mecosta in upstate Michigan. From the backseat, one of my passengers gestured toward an abandoned house set back from the road amid a yard overgrown with weeds, thistles, and Queen Anne’s lace.
“Now, that’s an interesting place over there. Right over there,” said Annette Kirk. “That’s the House of Death.”
Her words hung in the air, and among my normally talkative passengers there was an uneasy silence tinged by something like fear. The words “away in the back of beyond,” so often used to describe the sandy stump-country near Mecosta, never seemed more real, or more ominous—all because of a place called “the House of Death.” The car sped on, and the derelict house soon disappeared in the trees and scrub behind us.
What on earth had happened back there to give that house such a reputation?
During the next few minutes, Annette described the events that had taken place at the House of Death many years ago; and it quickly became plain that this was where the acts of hellish deceit and marital violence had occurred that were later recounted and adapted in her late husband’s short story “Off the Sand Road.”
This story is one of three often-overlooked and seldom-anthologized short works by Russell Kirk (1918-1994) that appeared in his first collection of “stories and sketches,” The Surly Sullen Bell (1962). Unlike the author’s better-known stories, “Off the Sand Road,” along with “Skyberia” and “Lost Lake,” are not tales of the supernatural, though there is a strong sense of the eerie about them. Together they form a trilogy of sorts, depicting the odd mix of wild rural beauty and slumbering menace that characterize the wild marches that creep near Kirk’s ancestral home in Mecosta.
“Just the Sort of Place…”
For off the back roads and away from village and town, at a distance from the homes and shops of harmless men, is a world unto itself that certain of the locals call Skyberia. It is a land of cut-over timberlands, hidden ponds, sandy fields, trackless swamps, abandoned small farms, and isolated houses inhabited by people sometimes called “sand hill savages”—or used to be known by that label in the not-too-distant past. Novelist Sally Wright once described this region as a “land left barren by lumbermen in the nineteenth century,” adding “There’s something haunting about it still, with its glacial hills and empty spaces, its lonely looking horses and abandoned machinery, its Victorian brick farmhouses and rusty trailers.” This is a land where it is easy for the unwary to get lost; and anyone who has ever had the experience of wandering lost across fields, through hedgerows, and around posted property can attest to the slowly rising terror of realizing that the sun is sinking low and there’s no direction out: no roads, no houses, no people, just a trackless expanse of beautiful but unforgiving land. It is, as one ghost-story writer described a similar locale, “just the sort of… place where the horrors of a Hitchcock or a Polanski might have been inspired. There was horror in the very vegetation spreading under the hazy sun—an everyday buzz of nothing that bred the violent and bizarre.”
This is the world that serves as the background to the three above-named stories, which together might be called the Sand Hill Trilogy.
A World Unto Its Own
In “Lost Lake,” Kirk recounts chilling, real-life anecdotes of the settlers of this land who he either knew or heard about during his youth as a summertime visitor to Mecosta. People talk; and in a village, word gets around. Several anecdotes concern the story of the Van Tassel clan, who—with a nod to their literary forerunners in Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow”—inhabit this region, where a “drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere.”
The patriarch of the Van Tassel family, a man rumored to have killed someone and hidden the never-found body, once heard a confess-your-sins-to-Jesus sermon in the local Assembly of God church that stirred him so deeply he shot upright from his pew and shouted, “I’ll tell it; I’ll tell it; I’ll tell it if they send me to state’s prison!” As the congregation stared, Van Tassel realized with a horrified start what he had almost said and sat down without a further word.
It was this man’s wife who was at the center of one of Kirk’s most horrifying anecdotes, as he describes an occasion long ago in Skyberia, when:
the Van Tassel children invited class-mates home to play with their new doll. This was in the dead of winter. When the guests arrived, they did indeed find the Van Tassel children sliding down hill with a new doll. But that new doll was a human baby, the youngest Van Tassel, dead and frozen stiff. They baby had died the previous week, and had been stored in the woodshed for burial when the frost was out of the ground; the other children had asked if they might have Susan for a doll, and Mrs. Van Tassel had not demurred.
But in Kirk’s recollections of the fields and forestlands of his home county, all is not grimness. There is also humor and whimsey. For example, Kirk recollects the time Old Man Van Tassel was upbraided by his pastor for not dressing up a bit when attending church services:
“Mr. Van Tassel, don’t you think you should wear better clothes to church on the Lord’s Day?”
Van Tassel, regarding him dourly, replied: “Jesus Christ didn’t wear no fine clothes.”
Thus baffled, the preacher pondered on the question for some days, and presently, meeting Van Tassel in the street, he resumed their discussion. “Mr. Van Tassel, don’t you agree that George Washington… was a good man?”
“Well, yes.”
Well, George Washington wore fine clothes.”
But Van Tassel was not easily vanquished in such doctrinal contests. “Yes,” said he, “but hell, that was long ‘fore Christ’s time.”
Elsewhere in the sketch, Kirk describes a firsthand visit to Lost Lake with a citified friend named Peter. Having tramped far afield into the wild, the sudden appearance of a harmless woodchuck unnerved Peter, who urged a quicker-than-expected return of the two men to Kirk’s home in Mecosta.
Here at the end of “Long Lake” the author shows forth a latent but definite sense of pride of place which pervades the entire piece: a sense that although this locale is not for everyone, it is the land of the writer’s roots, his history, and where he has chosen to live and die.
A Black Widow Pounces
“Off the Sand Road” pulls together fragments of several real-life stories alluded to in “Lost Lake” to imaginatively retell the story of a Black Widow: a treacherous woman who travels the country seeking a succession of husbands she can exploit and destroy before moving on to a new victim. Her modus operandi is this: She scrapes acquaintance with an unsuspecting single man and, through plaintive, I’m-just-a-Jesus-fearing-woman-seeking-a-good-man rhetoric, tricks the unwary soul into marrying her, all for her own personal gain. Once married, she makes her new husband’s life a living hell: foisting on him her defiantly ill-behaved children by other marriages, verbally and physically abusing him, taking control of the money he earns in order to spend it recklessly on expensive trifles for herself, and driving him to madness and then divorce or suicide. Having sucked the life out of her most recent conquest, she then leaves the region to seek another victim.
In “Off the Sand Road,” the widow Ella Fowler comes to Skyberia, where an earnest, unsuspecting Army veteran named Gerald Clatry lives alone in a house “off the sand road” outside Mecosta. The story is told in third-person narrative featuring one Dr. Cross, who is very much like “Peter” from “Lost Lake”: a man who is something of a stranger to Skyberia and needs to be guided to the now-abandoned House of Death by two young local boys. Entering the house, Cross skims through a trove of love-letters that are laying about and pieces together the entire horrible story, while the boys pick up random souvenirs and periodically chime in with their own versions of the ghastly events that took place at this site, like a Greek chorus only partly aware of the significance of what is unfolding.
After reading a final letter, Dr. Cross learns from the boys that the Black Widow moved out of the house only after being terrified by the sense that someone—possibly the shade of her late and latest husband, whom she had driven to suicide—had been peering in the windows at night and trying the doors. There is a sense that the Black Widow has become aware that her faithful service to the world, the flesh, and the devil, comes at a horrid cost: that although justice may seem to sleep, her day of disaster is coming.
At the conclusion of the story, the doctor is completely unnerved by the now-revealed story of what happened on this site, on this very spot. In such places, the veil between this world and the next seems gossamer thin. Standing beside the sycamore from which Clatry hanged himself, one of the boys takes out the victim’s old wartime garrison cap, picked up from inside the house. In his own foolish way, he tries to be funny:
“Look!” demanded Frank, putting on the garrison cap and sucking in his cheeks. “Look, I’m Mr. Clatry!”
A breeze, rustling the sycamore, picked up a dozen grains of sand from the doctor’s feet and deposited them on his shoes. Grasshoppers leaped in the sun; two crows alighted on a stump fence across the sand road; as the wind touched it, the barn door creaked heavily. Had it not been for the boys beside him, the doctor thought he would have run straight across the barren, despite the sand, until he gained cover in the cedar swamp.
When the real-life Black Widow married a man who lived “off the sand road” (which is now paved, by the way) she repeated her deadly pattern of conduct—and was eventually arrested and tried as an accessory to her husband’s death. Despite a significant array of evidence against her, the Widow was found not guilty. Free to leave, she paused in the door of the courtroom to jeer at the judge and the prosecuting attorney: “Ya thought ya had me, but ya didn’t! Ya couldn’t get me! Ha!” And with that, she flounced out the door and apparently disappeared forever from the earth.
To this very day, wrote Kirk, in “Lost Lake”:
A single house still stands, at the junction of the Lost Lake trail and the Sand Road, its steep shingled roof and its concrete walls visible for some distance. By this house is a sycamore, and upon this tree the last tenant of the house was found hanging by the neck, a decade ago. I have told the affair in my short story “Off the Sand Road”…. To the dreadful joy of small boys and girls I refer to the ruin as The House of Death when I am in their company and we pass near.
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
That accursed house stands on the outer edge of the near-wilderness called Skyberia, the setting of Kirk’s story by that name. “Skyberia” tells of a pair of deer hunters, Clements and Robertson, who commit an amateurish mistake. After leaving little Bear City (a disguised version of Mecosta, a Potawatomi word which means “Little Bear Cub”) one cold autumn day, they park their car at the side of a country road and proceed to wander off across the fields in pursuit of game without taking note of where they parked or any distinguishable landmarks. Their compass does them little good, as they have no idea which direction to take to return to their car. They lose their way, and with nighttime approaching and snow beginning to fall, they stand on the brink of panic.
Eventually they happen upon a tar-paper shack in the middle of a cleared lot, and a dog begins barking at them. The dog and the shack belong to one Samuel Williams, a self-styled “sand hill savage” who lives there with his wife Alice and son Tom, working as a carpenter, handyman, and farmer as the need arises. After calming the dog, Williams invites the two hunters indoors to warm up and shares a simple meal with them, learning of their plight, and offering to give them a ride to their car in his horse-drawn wagon after supper. The men gratefully accept this offer.
During the course of their meal, Clements and Robertson learn that Williams and his small family live according to the doctrine of “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without,” a world-made-by-hand existence such as was practiced during the Great Depression. They also learn that the Williamses, though simple, are not simpletons, but instead a family that anticipates the coming breakdown and chaos of the modern world.
While driving his guests to their car, Williams is asked how long he intends to live in this primitive manner, to which he replies that he has no intention of moving to city or town. Waxing philosophical about the future of humanity, he adds:
God is terrible, and He loves men, and He’s going to make them keep their human nature. He’s not intending to let us copy ants. He’s not going to turn us over to the social workers and the planners and the generals and the organizers. He’s going to burn us, and He’s going to starve us, but He’ll keep us men. No, Tom and I will be here when nearly everything else has flamed to blue blazes.
Williams goes on to say that city people will become “soft machines that need to be fed and watched and replaced; they won’t be men; they’ll be things that take and take, but never give.” In the face of all this, he insists, “Skyberia will be here when the rest of the world has eaten itself up; and we’ll be people here in Skyberia, not ants or rabbits.”
“What about guys like Robertson here, and me, when blue blazes come?” Clements inquired, trying to smile.
Removing his cap, Williams tucked it in his belt, drew off his right glove, and shook hands with Clements and Robertson. “Goodbye, gentlemen.” He said this and nothing more; and as the Buick rolled toward Bear City, he stood silent in the cold, watching them vanish into the world of progress that lies beyond Skyberia.
In the hands of many lesser, modern writers, Clements and Williams would have been lured into Williams’s simple home only to discover themselves trapped in the lair of a murderer or a cannibal or at the very least a ghost. (It is perhaps because of its lack of a supernatural element that “Skyberia” is perhaps the least known of Kirk’s stories.) But horror was not Kirk’s intent in this sketch, which focuses upon a life similar (in its own way) to Kirk’s own.
For like Williams, the author of “Skyberia” had in his own way lived a simple, independent life: Williams as a jack-of-all-trades, Kirk as a man of letters unattached to any periodical or institution of higher learning. And there is about “Skyberia” a definite sense of Kirk’s pride in being a part of a region peopled by strong, self-reliant settlers who must live by their wits and native wisdom in order to survive the harsh Midwestern winters and blistering summers within a land bypassed by Progress. Amid his books and studies, Kirk lived both apart from, and a part of, people who knew and respected him, though they had little use for overly much “book-larnin’.”
Kirk’s better-known ghostly tales are recognized for their craftsmanship and effect upon the reader. The three short works seen in the above overview, the Sand Hill Trilogy, have considerable strengths of their own and are not to be overlooked by anyone who appreciates intelligent regional writing—especially works written by a past master of imaginative writing, Russell Kirk.
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The featured image is “Landscape” (1895) by Constantin Kryjitski, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.