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This article was originally published on NEW YORK TIMES "TEN BEST BOOKS OF 2022" Reprinted courtesy of Harper Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers You want to think it’s not over till the last page.įrom the book: “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver. Did that line of work even exist, in our trailer-home universe? Had they all quit Smallville and gone looking for bigger action? Save or be saved, these are questions. Me though, I was a born sucker for the superhero rescue. Anybody will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.

This kid, if he wanted a shot at the finer things, should have got himself delivered to some rich or smart or Christian, nonusing type of mother.

He’ll grow up to be every- thing you don’t want to know, the rotten teeth and dead-zone eyes, the nuisance of locking up your tools in the garage so they don’t walk off, the rent-by-the-week motel squatting well back from the scenic high- way. If a mother is lying in her own piss and pill bottles while they’re slapping the kid she’s shunted out, telling him to look alive: likely the bastard is doomed. And if that’s how I came across to the first people that laid eyes on me, I’ll take it. Those are the words she’d use later on, being not at all shy to discuss the worst day of my mom’s life. She came back out yelling for him to call 911 because a poor child is in the bathroom trying to punch himself out of a bag. Peggot being a lady that doesn’t beat around the bushes and if need be, will tell Christ Jesus to sit tight and keep his pretty hair on. His wife would have told him the Jesusing could hold on a minute, first she needed to go see if the little pregnant gal had got her- self liquored up again.

Peggot was outside idling his truck, headed for evening service, probably thinking about how much of his life he’d spent waiting on women.

A slick fish-colored hostage picking up grit from the vinyl tile, worming and shoving around because I’m still inside the sack that babies float in, pre-real-life. The day she failed to show, it fell to Nance Peggot to go bang on the door, barge inside, and find her passed out on the bathroom floor with her junk all over the place and me already coming out. This is an eighteen-year-old girl we’re discussing, all on her own and as pregnant as it gets. All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the mountain and there she’d be, little bleach-blonde smoking her Pall Malls, hanging on that railing like she’s captain of her ship up there and now might be the hour it’s going down. On any other day they’d have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home, good neighbors taking notice, pestering the tit of trou- ble as they will. The cover of “Demon Copperhead.” (Courtesy)