The Trapper’s Last Shot: A Novel (book review)

The Trapper’s Last Shot

John Yount

Random House, NY,1973

The Trapper’s Last Shot opens in 1960 when Beau Jim Early is returning home to Cocke County, Georgia, after 6 years in the U.S. Army. His return is rambunctiously lived and just as rambunctiously told but the novel soon motors down to a more or less droll narration of daily events in an extremely racist South in the process of evolution from its agrarian past to the present’s industry and soul-grinding jobs like trucking and masonry, jobs that are now making slaves of men of all colors. Beau Jim moves in with Dan, his brother, who is 15 years older and now a farmer, both of them survivors of a fire that killed both parents and drove them from North Carolina. Living with Dan in very straitened circumstances are his mean-spirited and child-abusing wife, Charlene, and Sheila, their thumb-sucking 7 year old who is about to repeat first grade, perhaps in part due to the pillow-smothering attacks at the hands of Charlene was still an infant, and assuredly in part due to the intellectually barren home life described.

Beau Jim realizes his immediate post-service dream of enrolling in college, nearby Senneca College, while learning to hustle pool with Claire, his high school classmate now mentor. Claire is a worldly wise alcoholic homosexual who has learned how to survive in the deep South as such while remaining just below the radar of his homophobic, racist white contemporaries. Somewhere amidst all this hubbub Beau Jim meets up with an old high school classmate, Yancey, and, a trifle improbably, becomes her beau as well as her Beau.

Shortly after Beau Jim begins to doubt his intellectual and characterological fit as a college man, given his background and temperament, he and Claire suffer a beating at the hands of the stereotypically vicious local Deputy Sheriff Earl Wagner, a beating initiated by Claire’s homosexuality (and Claire’s divesting Sheriff Wagner’s brother of $85 in a pool game), which Jim had not suspected. This beating is the penultimate climactic event in the book: Jim quits college despite enjoying it and doing well, Claire effectually disappears from view, and the focus now beams in on Dan and his struggling farm and family life. Charlene, in a fit of pique over Dan’s decision to have her milk the cow to save money, sets the barn on fire (a fact never discovered by Dan), kills the cow and, in so doing, detonates the apocalyptic sequence of events that close this dark novel in an even more noir fashion. Dan snaps mentally, shooting to death an entire family of innocent blacks whom he knew and respected, as well as a stranger, a college student at Senneca. The final pages, like the opening ones, provide a bookend (literally) of bleakness: we find Beau Jim working as a mason in yet a new town with despicably mean white masons in a dead end job as he tries to establish a family life with Yancey and Sheila, whom Charlene is more than happy to be offloading on them. Unlike the initial pages, the ending offers a glimmer of the hope for an intact family life for Beau and Yancey and Sheila.

This novel is an understated indictment of the attritional consequences of overwhelming poverty, racism and ignorance in rural Georgia of 1960.  Although the tone is muted throughout, the reader – at least this reader – finds himself emotionally winded by the last page and can only reach for a cocktail, watch a mindless football game, or go for a walk. Or all the above, in sequence.

Yount narrates the story of Dan, Beau Jim and Claire with uncommon skill. He is able to weave a picaresque beginning of the novel into the subdued romance of Beau Jim and Yancey while painting a highly credible portrait of a white homosexual stuck in his society, fending for himself as best he can while never deluding himself about his role, his limitations or the social skills necessary for his survival.

But the keystone of the book is Dan, who struggles with his acknowledged intellectual limitations (“I ain’t got but two thinking gears, he’d say, one’s low and the tuther’s double low, and they both growl when i use em.”  [page 39]) and his desperate attempt to understand the ways of God, much less men of all colors. Most of all he fails, while trying mightily not to, to understand why he is failing at life despite his unbelievably hard and constant labor. Never have I read a book that reminded me as much of Halldór Laxness’s monolithic, Nobel-winning novel of pre-WW I Iceland, Independent People.  Bjartur of Summerhouses and Dan Early are literary twins separated at birth with regard to their fierce independence, identification with the soil and their stolid belief in their will to succeed by dint of the sweat of their brows, despite repeated missteps and adversity, especially adversity imposed on them from without. The last proves too much for Dan, a simpler man than Bjartur, and chaos ensues.

The whirlwind is almost Biblical in proportions. However, unlike the Bible, elements do not retain their purifying attributes. Water does not baptise and Fire does not cleanse. This reader has difficulty in finding, in literature, a more antithetical anti-baptism than the opening scene in the book wherein a young boy is gruesomely immersed (“baptism” derives from the Ancient Greek βαπτίζω fοr “to immerse, dip; baptize” [New Testament usage]) in spiritually fatal waters that serve as a watery initiation into death not life: in this first chapter we watch with increasing horror as an 14 year old boy dives into a country pond literally crawling with thousands of water moccasins who bite him hundreds of times as his stunned fellow swimmers watch in dismay. There is not one but two cataclysmic fires, both involving Dan Early, both set by irresponsible, selfish and self-hating family members, both fires hurting Dan more than anyone else. The poor cow becomes a sacrificial victim depicted in New Testament symbolism: Dan and Beau Jim metaphorically crucify its poor incinerated corpse with barbed wire in order to drag it off the property. This is the Old and New Testaments at their harshest.

At times I felt I was reading, if not a Biblical tale of pestilence, then a Greek tragedy, with its inexorable march of tragic events that must happen as a result of the environmental, social, economic and political strands of a inimical web in which the Early family finds themselves enmeshed in 1960. Not since Montana 1948 have I felt so trapped by authorial control of dramatic tragedy in a novel. In retrospect, the apparently disconnected opening chapter – death-by-water moccasin – has everything to do with the snake-infested South into which our characters are unwittingly diving while subsequently trying to stay afloat and alive in a pond of death not of their construction.

Fair? In The Trapper’s Last Shot, there is no “fair”; there just “is”  and how one responds to it in as noble a way as possible that preserves one’s sense of self while not hurting others. Only Beau Jim and Yancey, and, to a much lesser extent, Claire, succeed, but at great cost. In the process, there are major losers: the land, education, civility, and many “innocent” lives. Perhaps the greatest loss, the greatest tragedy, is how a simple, very decent, loving man – Dan Early – can be broken, at least psychically, by these overwhelming forces that can only be called evil and then become himself a force of evil. (One is tempted to posit, in Yount’s worldview, the notion of das böse or ultimate, pure, elemental Evil as an independent force. Yes, it is the racist South of 1960 but a dark wind – as much an entity as Night in Neil Gaiman’s wondrous Neverwhere  – blows throughout these pages.) In a very simplistic way, if Dan is the Christ who is sacrificed to this whirlwind, Charlene and Cass Willard (the latter an arch-racist of the most hateful variety) are the anti-Christs. And, in a no-holds-barred author like Yount, the bad guys win. Which leads us to the title of the book.

The Trapper’s Last Shot derives from a well known painting by William Ranney, who was already gaining a reputation for oils of the rapidly expanding U.S. West when his painting, The Trapper’s Last Shot (figure below), vaulted the artist to fame, a fame that Ranney could only enjoy, unfortunately, for seven more years before his death of tuberculosis at the age of 44. Ranney’s experience with the West was that of an Easterner who had gone to volunteer with the Texan Army in 1836; but that sojourn was life-changing in shaping his life and his art. The image of the Trapper’s Last Shot has a tortured ontogeny had several iterations as a painting and as an engraving based on the different oils. [footnote 1])

The significance of this painting for the book is simple. (Or, perhaps not so simple, if one could interview the author.) On page 32 of the novel, the protagonist (one hesitates to call Beau Jim the protagonist, since the clear keystone character of the novel is his brother, Dan), relates the significance of this painting to himself and his family. Beau Jim has one of those true memories of childhood one can only accept as real despite his age of 6 when he formed it. Beau Jim remembers in great detail the image of this painting in his family’s house. (It had to be one of the many engravings that followed the painting.)  Dan, who was 21 at the time, can only shake his head at the mystery of such a vivid early childhood memory. Beau Jim develops, during the subsequent course of the novel, a working relationship with the Trapper in the engraving, referring to himself as “The Trapper”.

Now, what is supremely interesting is the relationship of Ranney’s Trapper to his enemies (both seen and unseen) and the relationship of Yount’s Beau Jim (aka “Trapper” when talking to himself) to his opponents (both seen and unseen). Depending on which image of Ranney’s TTLS one is viewing, there are apparently – I have trouble seeing them – Indians. (N.B.: For the purposes of this review, and to be consonant with Beau Jim’s interpretation of his remembered image, the American Indians in this book are “bad guys”.) According to Grubar, this difficulty in seeing the Trapper’s unexpected company is not just my interpretative inadequacy but a function of which version of Ranney’s several productions one is seeing or remembering, since he did several versions of the painting leading to two different engravings. To make matters worse, the engraving based on the earlier, smaller painting is an amalgam of the two paintings, which differ from each other in several stylistic ways, one of which is the more visible presence of the Indians in the larger, later painting (which also generated the other of the two engravings). In other words, Indians seem more visible in one of the two paintings and both engravings, i.e., three of the four extant iterations of The Trapper’s Last Shot””. When there are Indians clearly visible – I hesitate to write “clearly” – they are for the most part assuming semi-concealed postures not lending themselves to an exegesis of friendliness. In fact, one can easily understand Ranney’s Trapper’s concern in these images, less so in those without a threat evident to the trapper or the viewer. Of course, the title suggests that matters did not go well for this trapper.

Of importance to this discussion is the fact that Beau Jim grew up with the image depicting visible Indians. He refers to this threat in his memory of the picture, a referral I had the hardest time understanding when I began reading the book since when I had looked up Ranney’s Trapper I had not yet seen, as of page 33, the Indians Beau Jim had. If the Indians crouching in the low to medium height grass are Ranney’s Trapper’s foes, then Beau Jim’s enemies are his family (at first his sister-in-law, then, surprisingly, his loving and quite noble brother); his town; a background that makes him feel that his nascent college learning and education are wasted on him and his personality – in short his cultural heritage and the life he must live if he wishes to stay near home. This is not a nostos he can overcome, like Odysseus, with a few well placed arrows.

Perhaps one of the most depressing interpretations of this fine novel is the determinism that pervades it: the apparent truism that one is helpless before the inescapable moira the gods have meted out to you eons before. From the moment the hapless boy jumps into a pond of snakes and tries to escape from his fate with water moccasins hanging off him like poor Laocoon, to Dan’s psychotically murdering seven innocent blacks whose fates just as poorly served them, to the final pages when yet another young helper is mistreated by the vicious bricklayers in a scene out of Dante’s Inferno – the overwhelming sense is of futility, of almost Sisyphean hopelessness.

But the last image one has in this book is the last sentence, i.e., that of Beau Jim, like Ranney’s Trapper, looking around in an attempt to catch his surroundings and realizing the impossibility – like a novelistic equivalent of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle – of observing oneself in an unobserved state. One has, like Beau Jim, no chance of success in self-analysis. One has to soldier on the best one can in this life, letting others take your measurements, while avoiding the internal and external Indians who will harm you and yours.

1. Ranney’s “The Trapper’s Last Shot” Author(s): Francis S. Grubar Source: American Art Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring, 1970), pp. 92-99 Published by: Kennedy Galleries, Inc.

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