Something there is that doesn't love a pressure-treated privacy fence: "Time of the Preacher" by Bret Anthony Johnston (Best American Short Stories 2025)

When people who haven't been trained in literary analysis read the criticism of those who have, I imagine they often think the "pros" are just making it up and reading too much into the story. Lay people are probably prone to object, often with good reason, that "it doesn't say that anywhere in the story." 

I say "with good reason" because skepticism about unusual claims is typically a good thing. When Freud and his acolytes claimed to be able to interpret dreams, skepticism was well-founded. A lot of literary criticism probably feels similar to a lay person to the flim-flam interpretation of dreams. Both are claiming that an image can work on two levels: a literal or conscious level as well as a connotative or unconscious one. 

The difference to me is that with literary interpretation, treating an image or a word or a figure of speech like it might have a second layer of meaning is warranted, because words really do have connotations. We all experience this. It's why using words associated with monkeys or apes in close proximity to a black person is likely to draw anger. It's why conservatives get worked up about the treatment of the American flag or the National Anthem, although the former is just a piece of cloth and the latter just a song. Dragons, tigers, rainbows, spark plugs, Donald Trump's hair--all of them evoke both literal and figurative associations for us. The figurative ones might be hard to pin down, and they certainly won't be exactly the same in every person, but they objectively exist, and there will be an approximate nearness of meaning for most people. Or maybe rather than saying these things "objectively" exist, I should say they "phenomenologically" exist, which is to say that objectively, people nearly universally have a subjective experience. It comes to almost the same thing for interpretation. 

Two levels of political meaning in "Time of the Preacher"

In analyzing "Time of the Preacher" by Bret Anthony Johnston, I'm going to claim that there is a lot of political meaning in the story. This is true on two levels. One is that the main character, Holland, has pretty clear political opinions. This claim won't be hard to prove, because the story is full of evidence for Holland's political beliefs. The second claim is that the story itself holds certain political ideas, and this claim, I'll wager, will be met with greater skepticism, more objections of, "Where does it say that in the story?" 

Note that when I'm saying "the story" holds political ideals, I'm not saying Bret Anthony Johnston holds those ideas or that he meant to put them in the story. That may be, but when someone writes fiction, they're handling materials that are instable. All of those images and incidents and words, each of which has an uncertain connotative meaning, can end up creating meaning that the author did not intend. That's why most literary critics don't talk about what the author intended; they talk about what the text suggests. 

Meaning level one: Holland's political beliefs

It's pretty easy to prove that Holland leans conservative. The story is told from a third-person limited point of view, which means all of the thoughts about characters in the story are coming from Holland's mind. In the very first sentence of the story, we get Holland's impression of the people he is building a fence for. He finds them to be a "tiresome academic couple." Academic many not always mean "liberal," but it usually does, and it's clear that Holland, at least, thinks they are. Moreover, while still in the same neighborhood of the "tiresome academics," a man walking two small dogs asks Holland if he can build a skateboard ramp. Holland tells him no and then thinks one word to himself: "Liberals." Now, if Holland had simply thought this one person was a liberal, he would have thought "fucking liberal" or something like that. Instead, he thought in the plural, meaning Holland was lumping this one person in with others he thinks to be similar, and expressing a negative opinion about them as a group. I guess liberals walk little, annoying, pussy dogs and ask for stupid construction projects, in Holland's mind. 

If this wasn't direct enough, then his interactions with his ex-wife Mandy definitely are. Mandy calls him a libertarian, a group of people in some ways more liberal than conservatives (they generally are pro-legal-abortion), but also more conservative in some ways (they want to get rid of nearly all taxation). In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which this story is set during, libertarians were bed fellows with Republicans/conservatives, because both wanted to limit the amount of government-mandated restrictions on personal activity. Holland, like many conservatives, wasn't a big fan of wearing a mask, and did so only perfunctorily to placate his liberal clients. When Holland and his wife had argued most recently, it had been about taxes and the mid-terms. When Mandy left Holland, she apparently left Holland's politics as much as him, because now she's married to a guy with the type of job Holland associates with rich liberals, and she also drives a Tesla, while he drives a who-gives-a-fuck-about-emissions pickup with a smoke stack. (Remember when Teslas were something liberals drove?) 

The pandemic wasn't the beginning of every act and possession becoming encoded for one's political beliefs, but it did become more pronounced at this time. The type of car one drove could tell something about your political beliefs. Whether you wore a mask said something about your beliefs. At work, a liberal co-worker friend of mine once got upset because a co-worker had a sign at his desk for Black Rifle Coffee. Only in a country where nearly any purchase can be coded for political beliefs would a coffee advertisement be an indirect way to put up a "Trump 2024" sign at your desk within a workspace where political signs were not allowed. "Time of the Preacher" makes use of these codes that we all recognize to tell us something about the characters. 

What the story says about conservatives and liberals

So it's pretty non-controversial that Holland is politically conservative. That doesn't mean that the story is, though. In fact, writing a story about a conservative can be a pretty effective way to critique conservative political beliefs. Is that what's happening here? I'm almost instinctively conditioned to expect as much, since this is an anthology of literary fiction, and the politics of literary fiction are pretty solidly liberal. 

However, I think the story's more complicated than that. During all three of Trump's campaigns, there was a tendency to equate blue collar workers with Trump supporters, and to claim that liberals were often well-off beneficiaries of a liberal status quo. The actual math behind this is not that clear-cut. A Pew Research poll in early 2024, before the election, suggested that 58% of low-income families supported Democrats. However, in the 2024 election, Trump split voters making less than $50K a year and won voters between $50,000 and $100,000. It's also a little bit tricky to equate "low income" with "blue collar," since many blue collar workers now make over $100,000 a year. But at any rate, Trump has certainly tried to associate himself with blue collar work, and there has been a shift in the direction of Trump among these voters, even if total blue collar support for Trump in particular and conservatives in general hasn't quite become totally overwhelming. At the very least, while I'm driving around Ohio, I'm not at all surprised to find a pickup truck with decals on it for an electrician or a plumber, and the truck has Trump stickers. 

In Holland's world, many of the stereotypes that Trump supporters have made hay with are existent, and pretty clearly so. Holland is a conservative blue collar worker doing work in liberal communities for wealthy liberal clients. Liberals look down on him for being blue collar. (Mandy makes fun of his smell and says he should bottle it, perhaps because she thinks liberal women secretly want to be with manly men like Holland. In any event, she's treating him in this respect like he's an "other" for working hard outdoors.) In spite of how liberals perceive him, Holland is brave and manly and resourceful and liberals are effete and cowardly, hiding behind masks and walls. Mandy has to call Holland to look for a snake because her software-designing husband "appreciates snakes even less than (Mandy does)."  

The story also challenges the notion that liberals are kinder than conservatives. When Mandy (is it too much of a reach to read "Mandatory" into her name, in the context of the pandemic?) needs help finding a snake, she calls ex-husband Holland, although she hasn't bothered to check in on him at any time during the pandemic. Mandy apparently comes from some amount of money, since she's taken over properties from her parents, but rather than call an exterminator and pay to have the snake removed, she calls on Holland. Maybe to seduce him one last time, maybe to cheap out, maybe because she trusts Holland more than someone she doesn't know. She certainly puts out a couple of signals that she might be open to seducing him, including mentioning it as a possible motivation. But whatever her real motivation, the point is that Holland comes. He is tolerant of Mandy's mental health issues (another conservative stereotype of liberals, particularly liberal women, is that they're all in therapy, all gobbling down psychotropic drugs, and all unhappy). He really tries to find the snake, at personal risk. Hell, Holland is even kind to animals, building a house for abandoned chickens. 

This doesn't mean, though, that the story is giving a full-throated endorsement to conservative talking points. For one thing, Holland, for all his bravery, calls himself a coward at one point, because he's too afraid to have an honest and emotional conversation with Mandy. Secondly, there is apparently a critical watershed moment going on in the world, and although Mandy recognizes it, Holland doesn't. 

Holland listens to Willie Nelson. Is this a signifier of a conservative, a liberal, or someone who rejects labels altogether? Stick around to find out. 

Two allusions

Figuring out what the story is actually saying about Holland as a person and about his politics can be helped by looking at two very subtle allusions the story makes. One is the name of Holland's fence company: "Good Fences." This is a reference to Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall." The poem is about two rural neighbors who repair the stone fence between their property every year. The narrator is a little confused about why they even bother doing it, when the fence just keeps toppling down, and it's not really keeping anything out. But the neighbor twice repeats the phrase, "Good fences make good neighbors." 

This phrase has come to be known for the way people cite it in earnest, when the original poem is questioning its validity. That is, people now say, "Good fences make good neighbors" as a pretext for building a privacy fence so they don't have to see their neighbors (in other words, to become bad neighbors). But "Mending Wall" is poking fun at the neighbor's fideism in the efficacy of fences. Good fences don't actually make good neighbors, it is saying. In fact, nature itself seems to be trying to rip down walls between people. 

Holland is, in some ways, the inverse of the saying, because he is a good neighbor who makes good fences. Nonetheless, those fences are making people into worse neighbors. And the worsening quality of neighbors is part of the whole threat that Mandy feels but can't quite express. 

The second allusion is in the story's final paragraph: 

..In the truck bed, the old recliner jostled, swayed. There, deep under the seat's cushion, the snake--a copperhead, hungry, still gray at five months old--lay coiled and alert. The world was reverberating from every dark direction, a chaos that frightened and confused her, so she curled tighter, made herself smaller. She stared with unblinking eyes into nothingness. She flicked her tongue, trying to decipher the numberless threats in the cold air.

This is something of a nod to W.B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," which foresees either a sphinx reborn or the coming of the beast from the Revelation of St. John:

 ...a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Mandy senses that something epochal is happening, some fundamental change in the tides of history, but she can't quite put her finger on it. Three times she tries, and every time, she links it to the uncanny sense she has that it's a bad omen that her tenant, a preacher, has skipped out on her. "The world's on fire, and preachers are skipping out under cover of darkness" is one of them. Another is this: "I just keep thinking this is the end of the world. A snake in a house previously occupied by one of God's servants doesn't help." And finally: "If you can't count on a preacher to stick it out, who's left?"

Yeats' poem seems to think that something terrible is about to happen to world civilization as a result of the breakup of Christian consensus. Mandy apparently thinks something similar. Snakes, of course, play a fundamental role in Judeo-Christian mythology, with the serpent being what talked Eve into eating the fruit that ended paradise. At the end of "Time of the Preacher," the snake is a symbol of some profound evil waiting to unleash its venom on the world. That evil isn't the pandemic itself. The snake is afraid of all the noise coming from the truck. The noise is like all the bedlam of the pandemic. It's after the bedlam has died down that the snake is going to grow bold and come out to strike. 

Perhaps the real terror, the real snake waiting to strike at the heart of civilization and cause chaos, isn't the disease. It's the increasing alienation of people from one another. The liberal/conservative divide is an obvious example. We know just from seeing the car someone is driving whether they're in our camp. We can't imagine marrying or even being in close communion with someone who has different political opinions from us. Just before they leave one another from the preacher's home, Holland thinks of trying to run to Mandy to console her when she's crying, overwhelmed by the feeling the world is falling apart. He refrains, though, because he knows she'll just "fumble for her mask and retreat across the yard." 

We have a conservative who is still willing to brave the dangers of the pandemic and keep down one kind of wall, his mask. But he's not brave enough to risk approaching a liberal who hides behind her mask. The story seems to accept some criticisms of liberals, like that their insistence on safety ("safe spaces," after all, is a liberal creation) is helping to increase alienation rather than reduce it. But conservatives in the story are happy to help them build those walls, and they're also too chickenshit to go over the wall to connect. They'd prefer to write off the people behind masks and walls as "liberals" without even trying to connect. They're cowards, too.

Holland and Mandy both have a perspective to contribute to one another, but ultimately, they fail because each has their own particular kind of walls they put up. What results is a failed union, similar to our failing political one. 

A third allusion I'm not really touching

Holland listens to Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. Willie once put out an album called "Red Headed Stranger," which featured a song called "Time of the Preacher." Actually, the album has three different songs by this name. It's apparently a "concept" album, which I think usually means that the stories are linked and tell one running story. I listened to the album and can't really tell what running story is there. Nor can I tell what the "time of the preacher" is. The song basically is about a guy at the end of the pioneer age of America (1901) whose woman leaves him and he goes crazy. In two places, the song states either that the "lesson has begun" or that the "lesson has ended." So maybe the singer is the preacher. Or the "time of the preacher" is a time of historical change, when the voice of a preacher holds a warning for society. (To complicate all this, there is a movie based on the album that came out eleven years later, and it identifies an actual preacher named Julian Shay as the man who was jilted by his wife. I'm going to ignore the movie.) 

Willie Nelson is himself an interesting signifier politically. (Forgive me for my mistakes here. My mother loves Willie, but I'm far from an expert. I'm relying on Google to help me with this.) His "outlaw country" image made a lot of anti-establishment people embrace him. He was always into what might be called "progressive" causes, like his pro-environment stance, but many of his fans didn't really notice until recently, when he endorsed Democratic candidates. He's now beloved by the left, although the right hasn't completely abandoned him. Holland is still listening to him. Maybe Willie is a libertarian in the best sense, in that what he really wants is to be his own authentic self. Maybe Willie, and libertarians generally, are a potential bridge between left and right. 

Willie may or may not be the preacher of his song, but he is sort of acting as a preacher in the story, a voice still capable of connecting left to right. In a country where even your consumer choices are constrained by your politics, these voices are becoming rare. By identifying strengths and absurdities of both left and right, the story is also acting prophetically. The time of the preacher is partly about Mandy's understanding that the preacher's disappearance is a sign of the end, but it's also about how the story itself has arrived to offer a way out. The final lines of the story are the only ones that break from third-person limited (Holland has no way of knowing what's in the chair). So this seems to be the intervention of the voice of the preacher, telling us, prophetically, what is about to happen and why. 

See also: Karen Carlson's take on this story, which focuses more on the relationship between Mandy and Holland.