The Yearling

“I hate you.  I hope you die.  I hope I never see you agin.”

And just like that, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’  The Yearling takes me right back to my childhood.  But, already, I digress.

If There Eyes Were Watching God is the Florida-based book that everyone says you should read, The Yearling is the one that everyone has actually read.  Except me.  This is another hole in my education.  It’s a hole that I almost filled myself over the years, but I was afraid this was going to be another Old Yeller or Where the Red Fern Grows, and I’m generally not a guy that enjoys blubbering like a baby when reading for fun.

You're going to shoot me, aren't you?

I’ll be honest: I hated the first 33 percent of this book.  (The beauty of reading on a Kindle is that it gives percentages rather than pages, so you can always be the ultraspecific pompous ass at Starbucks saying things like “The Best 14% of Huckleberry Finn is when he’s off the raft” or “That last 4% of Macbeth has more blood imagery than the first 9%, don’t you think?”)

But around the 33% mark, Penny got himself bit by a rattlesnake and said, “Ol’ Death going to git me yit,” and I knew I was one-third of the way into a real winner.  I can’t blame Rawlings for the slow start (there is, after all, a lot of characterization to develop and flutter-mills to build), but I sure was thinking about abandoning things for awhile there.  Then things got a little nuts, with Penny, rattlesnake venom racing through his veins, unexpectedly shooting a deer.

“Now Jody knew his father was insane. Penny did not cut the throat, but slashed into the belly.  He laid the carcass wide open.  The pulse still throbbed in the throat.  Penny slashed out the liver.  Kneeling, he changed his knife to his left hand.  He turned his right arm and stared again at the twin punctures.  They were now closed.  The forearm was thick-swollen and blackening.  The sweat stood out on his forehead.  He cut quickly across the wound.  A dark blood gushed and he pressed the warm liver against the incision.  He said in a hushed voice, ‘I kin feel it draw–‘.  He pressed harder.  He took the meat away and looked at it.  It was a venomous green.”

Of course, Penny lived, and the dead and liverless deer was the mother of the yearling himself, Flag.  This has to be ne of my favorite animal-based scenes ever, perhaps second only to the horse stud chapter in Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full.  I’m not sure where Rawlings got the idea that you can extract venom using a warm liver, but it sure sounds logical to me.  At boy scout camp, we learned that we could suck on each other’s snakebite wounds to remove venom, and we spent hours upon hours sucking on each other’s elbows and knees and heels.  (That’s normal, right?)  Alas, I learned later that this isn’t really an optimal solution as the venom will then move from the body of the suckee to the body of the sucker. 

The final 66% of the novel is a good read, and I can see why this is a classic and half the world has read it.  It has a gang fight that rivals anything that happens in West Side Story (although it’s not quite up to the level of the street fight in Anchorman), and the scenes of early Florida create quite a memorable impression.  It seems that the action takes place around Cross Creek, in the Ocala area, with jaunts to St. Augustine and Jacksonville and Salt Springs, which makes me wonder if that’s the same Salt Springs I visited as a kid.

My biggest issue — perhaps my only issue — with the novel is that Penny’s wife Ma Baxter is described as obese far more times than I’m comfortable with.  (Her “bulk” was referred to at least six times.)  Do you think Rawlings had fat issues?  I was waiting for her to use the phrase “crippling fat,” but to her credit, she never did.  Okay, she’s fat.  We get it.  

Now don’t get me wrong.  There are some nice zingers that I really enjoyed, like when Ma Baxter requested four yards of material to make herself some new clothes:

“But seems to me four yards won’t no more’n make you a pair o’ drawers.”

The Yearling is also a funny book, making me think that Rawlings knows you’re expecting the baby deer to die so she might as well throw a few chuckles your way.  I loved the note the doctor left on his door when he evacuated for the hurricane:

“I have gone toward the ocean where this much water ain’t so peculiar.  I mean to stay drunk until the storm is over.  I will be somewhere between here and the ocean.  Please don’t come after me unless it’s a broke neck or a baby.  Doc.  P.S. If it’s a broke neck no use anyway.” 

I guess this is what life was like before FEMA. And is also made me realize that it seems a hurricane is a requirement of any book set in Florida.

At any rate, I don’t want to print any spoilers here in case there’s another human who hasn’t read the book, but yes, the yearling dies at the end.  Surprisingly, though, it’s more Of Mice and Men than Where the Red Fern Grows.  There.  I’ve said enough.

As far as the Tour is concerned, I’ll have to do a little more research about places to visit.  It seems that there’s a Yearling Trail in the Ocala National Forest, and the five-and-a-half-mile route circles Pat’s Island, the inspiration for Baxter’s Island in the book.  (I also read that the book was made into a movie starring Gregory Peck.  He did something else besides To Kill a Mockingbird?  Blasphemy!  “Stand up, Scout.  Your father’s passin’.”)

And I’ll end this commentary with the infinite wisdom of little Jody Baxter:

“Women were all right when they cooked good things to eat.  The rest of the time they did nothing but make trouble.”