and yield up our secrets.
I read most of Shelby Foote’s Civil War trilogy in the early nineties, but I stopped for some reason on the verge of the fall of Atlanta and Sherman’s March to the Sea. Surely life intervened in some way. But perhaps I was afraid to journey through all that destruction—especially since childhood viewings of Gone with the Wind were imprinted in full Technicolor on my memory. So, let’s just say there’s a Sherman-shaped gap in my Civil War knowledge—or, rather, in my mythology.
Not anymore.
Glenn Arbery’s Gates of Heaven is many things: a story of Covid and demon possession; a portrait of America through the lens of small towns and road trips; an eruption of the past into the present akin to Beloved; a young man’s discovery of a prophetic writer’s vocation; and a study of a brutal, passionate man, Braxton Tecumseh Forrest, who tries to govern his family and friends like a wealthy old patriarch. Oh, and did I mention trauma, domestic disputes, exorcism, arson, the lure of a charismatic preacher, and shameful secrets—some of which stem from the story’s earlier installments? Gates of Heaven is a serious novel about serious subjects; but it’s full of the joys of a sprawling telenovela, where various storylines advance like kudzu while you wait to find out if your favorite character will ever wake up from that coma.
Karl Guizac is really the poet Walter Peach—both names are given to him ironically, and neither one reflects his actual parentage. Six years ago, Peach fled Gallatin, Georgia with his family after nearly ruining his life. Now safely ensconced at the foot of the Wind Mountains in De Smet, Wyoming, Peach is the genius behind Sage Grouse, a satiric semi-political online journal featuring the musings of one Socrates Johnson, a fictional Wyoming local who has his finger on the pulse of a nation in flux. But on the very day of the 2020 election, Peach succumbs to a severe case of Covid. He spends much of the novel in a medically induced coma, where he dreams that the accuser torments him before he faces the tribunal that will decide his eternal fate.
Ordinarily, our own sins and failings are more than enough to condemn us absent the mercy of God. But the seismic political shifts of 2020 have opened a portal attaching our rages to William Tecumseh Sherman’s rages, our infidelities to his. Like the puppeteer who occupies John Malkovich’s mind in the 1999 Spike Jonze film, Sherman slips figuratively into the twenty-first century via the dissociative mind of Jacob Guizac, born Buford Peach—a high school senior whose imaginative capacities are exceeded only by his bravery and goodness. As Walter Peach hovers between life and death, he becomes entangled somehow with his son Jacob’s Sherman obsession. Briefly awakened from his coma, Peach tells Jacob,
My soul. Is stitched. Onto his. Pray for me.
Peach’s dream trial, in which he must defend not only his own soul but that of the South’s most hated historical figure, enacts beautifully our present-day preoccupation with the social sins of our ancestors. Can we twenty-first-century people simply move on and try to live the best lives we can, or must we somehow atone for the sins of a past we never inhabited? What does it mean to live as members of the Body of Christ—a Body that stretches forward and backward in time?
Sensational though it might be, Gates of Heaven is deeply informed by the teachings of the Catholic church—which, when you think about it, can be quite sensational in themselves. Midway through the book, after a funeral gone horribly wrong, two people who consider themselves mighty unworthy are chosen to authorize baptism for a motherless child. In hearing their confessions beforehand, a priest tells one of them,
Believe that you have been forgiven. Your past is the story that the accuser can use to shake your faith. You’re no different than any of us. We have repented, and Christ has forgiven our sins. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.
How’s that for a sensational promise? When the two of them later advance to the baptismal font, they enact the forgiveness of a past sin of their own. We might call this a scandal of mercy, but only because it rings true.
In Arbery’s novels (I’ve read two of the three), everyone struggles with sin. Even the best male characters are tempted by their adoring (and much younger) female students, and their long-suffering wives must decide whether to offer forgiveness. Male barbarism wreaks havoc on young female bodies—Nora O’Hearn’s sufferings in the brutal but gorgeous Boundaries of Eden still trouble my mind—but in Gates of Heaven, a chorus of pregnant young women sings joyfully as they scrub down the smoke-infused walls of Stonewall Hill, the antebellum mansion where a pregnant slave was once chained in the basement. Would that we could wash history clean in this way.
In the end, Arbery’s rich novel points backward and forward, on multiple fronts, while still leaving us with a haunting suggestion or two. Oh, how I love an outlandish story like this—especially one with such a historical bent. Kudos to Arbery, too, for writing about the 2020 election and Covid without letting either huge elephant squash his story.
For this perishable must put on the imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality. But when this perishable will have put on the imperishable, and this mortal will have put on immortality, then will come about the saying that is written, O Death, where is your victory? O Death, where is your sting? (1 Corinthians 15:53-55)
Joan Elizabeth Bauer 