A metaphor of motherhood: "Hellion" by Julia Elliott

Mothers don't come off very well in Julia Elliott's "Hellion." It's easy to miss, though, because in "Hellion," there's a story going on in which the mothers seem to play only a bit part in the larger drama. Like many moms in real life, they aren't even granted the decency of getting credit for their important role. But motherhood is at the heart of all the tension in the story.

There's plenty entertaining going on in the surface story to distract the reader from thinking about mothers. Butter, a country-dwelling tomboy in early 1980's South Carolina on the verge of puberty, tries to shepherd her city-boy distant cousin Alex during his temporary stay in the country. He's not exactly from the big city, coming from Aiken, but he's exotic enough for Butter. His dad works at the "nuke reactor" there, and they have a mall.

She can see, though, that he's too soft for the hellion boys she runs with, so she coaches him through surviving his interactions with them. In fact, she coaches him through pretty much everything there is to know about living in the country, from the calls of frogs to the best place to score Kit Kat bars and Dr. Pepper. She takes to her role as country life mentor with enthusiasm, promising Alex she will show him "a whole 'nother universe."

There are four threatening symbols lurking at the back of the story that eventually drive the conflict. Three are monsters: an alligator, a vampire, and the Swamp Ape. The fourth symbol is the nuclear reactor, which we'll come back to.

Why wouldn't every town want a nuclear reactor in it?

There is an alligator named Dragon that Butter has raised since it was a baby. It's now three feet long and becoming a menace. The alligator bites Butter's hand when she's feeding it; it savors "the taste of fish splashed with his adoptive mother's blood." Butter gets no gratitude from Dragon for having raised it and protected it against those who would harm it. (Interestingly, the first in the story who attempt to harm it are the neighborhood hellion boys, who feed it atomic fireballs, a sly nod to the threat of the nuclear reactor in Aiken, which to this day is one of the most contaminated places on Earth.)

The second monster is the vampire, which is the name Butter's father gives her mother. Mom works at the local hospital on the night shift, drawing blood, and she sleeps all day, forcing her dad with his bad back and drinking habit to tiptoe around the house to keep from waking her up. She pays the bills in the house, but she's also a monster, and father and daughter are both in on the joke.

Then there's the Swamp Ape. In an otherwise reality-based world, the presence of the swamp ape is the last magic of childhood that remains for Butter. The creature lives "just beyond the border between wet and dry ground," just as Butter lives right on the border of childhood and adulthood. The creature seems to be as real within the narrative as the flying squirrels and frogs and chuck-wills. She feeds it Slim Jims, and the creature comes and eats them. She sees and hears the creature.

What is the Swamp Ape? People do not agree. Some say it's a primitive man, some that he's a regular man gone feral. Others, in another echo of the dangers of science, think it's an escaped experiment from Clemson University. But it seems, in the narrative, to be the embodiment of sorrow, specifically Butter's sorrow: "And through this delicate symphony came the bellow of the Swamp Ape, mournful and longing, as though epochs of human misery had been mixed together into this one voice, ringing out from the deepest dark." As Butter notes to Alex while explaining the Swamp Ape, people can also be monsters--another possible jab at her mother, although in the context of some of her other fears, she might be referring to the general propensity of humanity to destroy itself.

Butter so fully identifies with the sadness of the Swamp Ape, she seems almost to have summoned it. "Out came a bellow so long and low, so misery-packed and wistful, that I longed to join in, to howl my own torments in the muggy dark." It's easy to see the Swamp Ape as her childhood coping mechanism, one that embodies her sadness for her, so that the sadness becomes external to her.

Like she does with the alligator, she also feeds the Swamp Ape. Butter, the child of a monster vampire mother, is now the mother to two monsters herself, a dragon and a Swamp Ape.

Alex and Butter form a friendship with hints of young and awkward romance, partly because Butter is, without knowing it, smart, and there is no outlet for her intelligence among the hellion boys in her town. They go on small adventures, but then Butter gives into a temptation she cannot resist, and it begins the end of their idyll. She smells hot tar, which to her signifies everything she's been dreaming of that has made her start saving up her money to escape her hometown. To Butter, tar represents "the smell of flat-roof exploration, new roads winding off into the green distance, amusement-park blacktop gone soft in July sun." She loves tar so much, she initiates a tar fight with Alex, and they experience a consummation of sorts as they smear each other with it.

Giving into temptation leads to them being stripped in front of each other by Alex's grandmother and scrubbed with an "angry" brush. They are made to feel ashamed of their (near) nakedness, and are thrown out of their Eden. This is followed by a fight between Butter's parents, during which the mother sees the bite on Butter's thumb from Dragon, and she forces the father to shoot the alligator while the neighborhood "hellions," now turned into a nearly literal chorus of demons, hoot their approval. (And now we get the triple entendre of the atomic fireball--both parts of the candy's name refer to something else in the story.)

A complex but sweet denouement 

Butter runs off into the woods. She thinks about how narrow the limits of her life are--ironic for a girl who has so much freedom that only hours ago she was driving a truck that did not belong to her without a license while smoking a cigarette. She imagines Alex has much wider opportunities. She will have to become a vampire taking blood (or worse) at the hospital like her mother. He, meanwhile, has big prospects he's talking about, and Butter thinks the worst:

"I saw myself, pale and moving in a dream through a hive of the sick and dying, a one-week vacation the only thing to look forward to. Alex had said he wanted to build rockets, and I pictured him zipping off into the twinkling black of space, leaving the likes of me to rot on our ruined planet. I imagined humans crammed cheek to jowl, mutated by nukes, resorting to cannibalism after they'd devoured every last animal alive. I saw plant life stamped out by solid blacktop, the globe turned to a ball of tar."

When Butter started the tar fight because she couldn't resist it, tar was both a domestic dream (a rooftop) and also freedom (new roads winding off into the green). But giving into that temptation as a species--starting families and exploring the world--has led to the rot of the beautiful planet Butter has grown up on. Domesticity leads to women becoming monster mothers, and adventure leads to nuclear reactors.

And here we come back to the nuclear plant. Alex came to Butter's town full of Cold War fears. He is afraid his father is contaminating the house. He is afraid the nuclear radiation is the reason his brother was born prematurely (which is why he had to come to live with his grandma for a while in the first place, while his parents stayed in the ICU with the newborn). The reactor in Aiken, it so happens, was created after the Soviet Union became a nuclear power, in the hopes we could build a stronger bomb to stay ahead. Butter's idyllic home is not far from the monster creating the end of the world.

We are come to a familiar paradox as old as one of the oldest stories in Western civilization. Butter is growing up, and with that come adult longings. But those longings come with conditions, and chief among those conditions is that the moment one seizes those wishes, freedom is circumscribed. Truly loving someone means leaving Eden. It means pain and danger. It leads not just to the pangs of childbirth, but to being utterly ignored for having gone through those pains. It leads to shrill nagging like that Butter's mother shouts at her father.

But perhaps, it can also lead to wisdom. It did for Alex, at least. He is no longer a timid boy by the end. He comes to find Butter in the woods, and he, at least, refuses to blame Butter for getting whipped by his grandmother. "Not your fault. Got a will of my own and so do you." This is the opposite of Adam and Eve's "not my fault" attitude during their fall. It's awfully big man talk for someone who was playing Qbert days ago. His burgeoning adult feelings for Butter have matured him rapidly.

Their relationship looks like it will soon end; his brother is coming home from the hospital. Alex suggests they might be pen pals, but she rejects the idea. Their friendship/more than friendship has gone as far as it will go, at least for now. So the two sit together and listen to the Swamp Ape, who is now joined by "fairies," which is how the flying squirrels jumping for pawpaw fruits seem to her. She knows what they really are, but chooses to think of them, perhaps for one of the last times, as fairies. The magic of childhood is nearly at an end.

She has choices in front of her, although she may not, as she put it, have as much "room to move" as others. She can choose to turn her tar into a road to freedom, or she can turn it into a house to start a family, but any choice means not choosing other things. It seems that she is likely to choose a route that leads to motherhood, thankless as that may be. It's in her nature to mother things, much as she rejects that idea.

The final moment is just sweet. She is falling into whatever future lies ahead of her, but she is at a point where the attractiveness of that future is brighter than the possible downsides. Meanwhile, the magic of her past has not faded, meaning she has both future and past shining on her at once. Alex's brain seems to her "a different universe," one that might open up to her the opportunity to have some of the freedoms she might otherwise not have gotten.

Notes on the writing

Every year, BASS gives me a story or two that I'm amazed got published. Not because it's badly written--in this case, far from it--but because there's something in it that seems to break a rule or two. In this case, it has to do with dialect. There's no hard rule about its use nowadays, but if there is one, it seems to be this: "Go easy on it." And most of the story does. But the most heavily southern dialect-accented parts are right up front. The neighborhood hellion boys, who appear in the first scene, are especially full of a strong dialect. The first word of the story is "y'all." It settles down into a more modest use of dialect a few pages in, but I would have been afraid as a writer to put that much up front, where a busy editor might have thrown the whole thing out before discovering the rest of it. I give a lot of credit to the Georgia Review here for having the sense (and possibly the ability to know a true regional portrait from a false one) to see the gold that was here.

Further reading: Karen Carlson goes deep following the link between the tar, tar pits, and the pits of hell here.