The Fortners: A Southern Gothic Triptych
I. An Introduction to Violence
“HELP! Mother, help me!”
The screams tore through the house—primal, feral, wrenching me instantly out of sleep into pure fight-or-flight panic.
My bedroom, once shared by four boys, sat in the back corner of the L-shaped ranch. As my bare feet hit the cold floorboards, the distant, mournful whistle of the late-night coal train echoed down the hollow, hauling raw stone from the mines up the road to the preparation plants in the next county. Between the whistle and the dark, I knew it was that dead hour before dawn.
Then came the thudding: a sickening, rhythmic percussion of human bone hitting drywall.
I crept to the bedroom door, gripping the brass knob and turning it with agonizing slowness to keep the latch from clicking. I cracked it open. The hallway was pitch black, save for a pool of amber light spilling out from the back of the house.
As I rounded the corner, the shrieking grew louder. Blood-curdling is what my grandmother always called it.
I stepped into the dining room, which had been converted into a temporary bedroom for my Aunt Joy.
Joy was standing on top of her mattress, her fingernails clawing frantically at the wallpaper, trying to scramble up the wall like a trapped animal trying to climb into the ceiling. My grandfather stood behind her. Reaching out with massive, calloused hands, he seized her by the ankles and yanked her backward.
Joy slammed down hard against the mattress, her skull cracking against the drywall with that hollow thud I’d heard from my room. Then he went to work. With bare fists, he beat her entire body with relentless, measured fury. No part of her was spared his reign of punishment.
Years later, I stumbled across a video online of a street race gone catastrophically wrong. A bystander had been clipped, his legs severed beneath the chassis. In the gruesome seconds that followed, the man used his elbows and forearms to drag his torso across the asphalt, desperately trying to crawl away while streetlights reflected off the pooling blood. It was an instinctual, primitive scramble toward survival.
Watching it brought me instantly back to Joy clawing at that floral wallpaper—climbing toward nothing, desperate to escape an inescapable violence.
My grandmother appeared in the doorway, whispering harshly to Aunt Sissy: “Get that boy out of here.”
But the damage was already done. The man I had looked up to as a father was revealed to me as a monster I would spend my youth terrified to cross.
The next morning, Joy was nowhere to be seen.
In the kitchen, my grandmother stood over the cast-iron skillets as if the night had never happened, frying up thick cuts of bacon, country sausage, eggs, and golden biscuits smothered in syrup—a warm concoction of boiled sugar, butter, and water that we ladled out like gravy. She cooked that feast every single morning of her life, and today was no exception.
There he sat at the head of the table: my pawpaw. The Reverend. A man of God with his own church and his own flock.
He looked up at me with a broad, easy smile. “Come on and get you some breakfast, Jimmy.”
I slid quietly into a chair. My grandmother piled food onto my plate. “Eat up, boy. You need to get out there and help your pawpaw this morning.”
I didn’t dare utter a word about the blood or the screams. That was the family code: Suck it up. Swallow it down. Shut the fuck up and move on.
We were an upwardly mobile family. My cousins would grow up to become respectable professionals who would never understand the sheer brutality it took to drag our bloodline out of the hollow poverty Eleanor Roosevelt documented during her Depression-era tours of Appalachia.
A few summers later, my grandfather got bored and decided we were going to build an extra house on the property. We spent months framing it, laying brick, and driving nails. The very next summer, he decided he didn't like where it sat—so we tore it down piece by piece, brick by brick, and rebuilt it on another corner of the yard.
“Why can't we just buy more nails?!” I’d wail in adolescent misery as he made me sit on an upturned bucket with a ball-peen hammer, straightening hundreds of rusted, bent nails.
The construction skills I absorbed during those brutal summers became the foundation for every home I would ever renovate as an adult. But those weren't the only lasting marks he left on me.
During one of those building projects, I talked back to him. As I turned on my heel to walk away, he picked up a six-foot length of two-by-four and swung it with the raw, terrifying strength of a grizzly bear. The lumber cracked across my spine. I was fifteen years old. Decades later, the nerve damage from that single blow still manifests in chronic, debilitating spasms.
Yet the memory that severed my soul from him happened on a bright Sunday morning.
We were driving home from his church, where he had just delivered a roaring, sweat-drenched sermon on the impossibility of entering the Kingdom of God—something about a rich man, a camel, and the eye of a needle.
As the car rolled to a stop near the back patio, we discovered that my grandmother’s dog had given birth to a fresh litter of puppies on the porch.
My grandfather instantly detonated. He slammed the car door with such force that the chassis shuddered like a cinderblock had been dropped on the roof. He screamed at my grandmother, cursing her carelessness while she dissolved into tears. Storming into the kitchen, he emerged with a heavy black contractor trash bag.
Ignoring my grandmother’s desperate begging, he scooped up all twelve newborn pups, dropped them into the dark plastic, and tied a tight knot at the top.
He marched across the lawn to the edge of the high bluff overlooking the Guyandotte River, reared back, and hurled the bag into the brown water below.
I stood there in the sun, hollowed out. That day, I learned that men in pulpits can harbor a darkness far more terrifying than any demon in their Bibles.
Years later, my cousin Rina proudly remarked that his funeral procession was “three miles long.” I kept my mouth shut and let her keep her sweet memories. But I thought to myself: Would that line be three miles long if they knew the man who lived behind the front door?
It wasn't until I reached my fifties that I began to understand the generational trauma that shaped him, allowing me to finally grant him a measure of grace. He was human—a catastrophic contradiction of holy aspirations and monstrous impulses. I had judged him through the impossible perfection of the Gospel he preached.
And only after confronting the violent impulses in my own life—rages born of a desperate need to protect my home, even when that fury turned on the man I loved—did I finally see the family ghost staring back at me in the mirror.
II. Fort Bragg, Bad Checks, and the House in the Pines
After a carousel of bad relationships, Aunt Joy finally married well.
Carl was everything the family revered: an American hero who had risen to the rank of Major in the 82nd Airborne, carrying a heart bigger than Texas. I respected him immensely.
Which made the sheer terror of being summoned to my Company Commander’s office at Fort Bragg all the more suffocating—because sitting in the chairs across from the Captain’s desk were Uncle Carl and Aunt Joy, her eyes drilling into me with pure, unadulterated venom.
After a rudderless freshman year at West Virginia University, I had enlisted in the Army. Like thousands of working-class Southern boys—Black, brown, and white—our unifying trait wasn't ideology; it was the empty bank accounts of our parents.
I was entirely unsuited for the military. I was too independent, too loud, and entirely unwilling to be told when to breathe. At WVU, I had developed a healthy thirst for liquor; in the Army, I fell in with a crew that ran on liquid acid, psilocybin mushrooms, cocaine, and PCP.
His name was Jeff, and he drove a candy-apple-red Jeep Wrangler. For me, it was an all-consuming romance; for him, we were just “bros partying.”
Just outside the gates of Fort Bragg, the scrub-pine landscape was dotted with nondescript, cinderblock buildings with flaking paint and weeds cracking through oil-stained asphalt. One of those unmarked bunkers was the worst-kept secret in Fayetteville: Tracxs.
It was an underground gay speakeasy. Because this was Cumberland County in the 1980s—the political fiefdom of Senator Jesse Helms and the backyard of Reverend Billy Graham—the club featured a reinforced double-door vestibule designed to stall the local police just long enough for patrons to scatter out the back. Behind the main bar was a false wall where soldiers could dive to hide whenever the Military Police cruisers swarmed the gravel lot.
One night, while I was in the back stall of the head receiving oral sex from an Army Captain with a polite Midwestern surname, the MPs kicked the door open.
The Captain was quietly reassigned to an icy outpost in Minot, North Dakota. I was dragged into an interrogation room and coerced into becoming a confidential informant for the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division.
CID knew Jeff and his drug network. They wanted me to broker a deal between his crew and an undercover agent. By then, it was painfully clear to everyone in my chain of command that my military career was terminal. It wasn't just that I was gay—I wasn't ogling guys in the communal showers—it was the profound, isolating gulf between my inner life and the hyper-masculine culture around me.
Whenever the base grew too stifling, I’d wait for evening chow to clear, jump in my car, and point the hood north toward Morgantown. I’d barrel straight up Highway 19, past the Mountainlair, cruising down High Street past the Delt and SigEp houses until I pulled into the gravel drive of Phi Delta Theta, my old fraternity.
I’d spend Saturday screaming at the football game, hit the gay bars in town Saturday night, and drive like a maniac down Interstate 77 through the early Sunday fog to make morning roll call at Fort Bragg.
One Sunday morning, coming down off a sexually charged weekend at the fraternity house, I crossed the state line through the mountain tunnel that my grandmother swore John Henry had carved with his own hammer. Dropping down into Virginia, the morning mist rose out of the Blue Ridge valleys in soft, ethereal waves of blue.
By the time I hit Charlotte, I was running on pure adrenaline. I swung off I-77 onto Nations Ford Road, cutting over toward Arrowood. The strip was a sensory overload of diesel fumes, twenty-four-hour truck stops, neon diner signs, and the steady, rhythmic thump-thump of eighteen-wheelers thundering across the overpass.
I pulled into the gravel lot of the Economy Inn beneath a flickering VACANCY sign, where a tall, glamorous street queen in high heels was working the morning shift for long-haul truckers and businessmen heading to early services.
She leaned into my passenger window, looking me up and down. “Oooh child… I got myself a Marine.”
“I’m Army,” I muttered. “Get in.”
She smiled, resting a manicured hand against my jaw. “Honey, if I can service my seventy-five-year-old sugar daddy, I can handle you. Twenty bucks.”
By the time I pulled back through the gates of Fort Bragg, morning formation was long over. AWOL. On top of that, a string of bad checks I’d floated around Fayetteville had caught up with me. Between the check charges, the AWOL flag, and the CID sting, my military days were down to the final countdown.
Around that time, I had started seeing Rick, a thirty-year-old married man with two teenage kids whom I’d met at Tracxs. I was nineteen, completely delusional, and convinced that once my discharge went through, his wife would magically vanish into thin air and we would play house together in the suburbs.
One weekend, while my extended family was away in West Virginia for a huge family wedding I couldn't attend, Rick and I broke into Aunt Joy and Uncle Carl’s house in the pines outside Fayetteville.
We lived like kings for forty-eight hours: skinny-dipping under the moonlight in their private pond, grilling ribeyes on the back deck, drinking their liquor, and making love in their guest bed. Sunday afternoon, we scrubbed the kitchen counters, erased our tracks, kissed goodbye, and locked the door behind us.
Three days later, I was standing at rigid attention in the Captain's office.
“Private,” the Captain barked. “Your uncle is sitting here telling me a deeply troubling story. Care to enlighten me?”
Before I could draw breath, Joy lunged forward in her chair.
Carl placed a calm, heavy hand on her knee to hold her back, but Joy’s voice shredded the air:
“You broke into my home!” she hissed. “You stole Carl's guns! You took his rare coin collection! And you had disgusting sex all over my bed, you filthy faggot! I ought to kill you myself!”
The room went dead silent.
“Wait outside, Private,” the Captain commanded.
An hour dragged by in the hallway before the door opened.
“Son, I don’t know what the hell your aunt is talking about, and frankly, I don’t want to know,” the Captain said, rubbing his temples. “You’re damn lucky your uncle is a decorated Major and isn't pressing civilian felony charges. Furthermore, your boyfriend’s wife followed him out there. She saw everything. She came back to the house with a pistol intending to blow your head off, and ran straight into your aunt instead.”
He paused, staring hard into my eyes.
“Your uncle just wants his guns back.”
“Sir, I swear on my life I didn't touch any weapons,” I said, my voice shaking. “And Rick wouldn't have taken them either.”
“He knows you took the coins. You’re on camera cashing them at the shop in town. That’s a grand larceny felony. If you were under my direct command, you’d be sitting in the stockade at Leavenworth right now. But JAG and CID have worked out an administrative exit.”
He pointed a finger at the door.
“You are one lucky son of a bitch. Now get the fuck off my post.”
I walked out to the parking lot, climbed into my car, and sat there shaking as waves of humiliation washed over me.
I drove straight to the first low-slung dive bar I could find. I threw back four consecutive shots of rail whiskey, letting the rotgut burn strip the lining from my throat. It tasted worse than the moonshine my uncles ran out of the hills, but it did the job: the sharp edges of the world began to blur.
I wandered over to the glowing jukebox, dropped in a quarter, and punched in Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.”
Stumbling back to the stool, I ordered another shot, turned to the gray-haired man beside me, and slurred, “Did you hear West Virginia changed its state motto?”
The man turned his head. Through the hazy smoke, I caught the silver eagles pinned to the collar of his leather bomber jacket and the blue-and-gold division patch on his shoulder.
My spine snapped straight. “Sorry, Sir! Just telling an off-color joke, Sir!”
The man chuckled softly. “At ease, son. I retired from the Army before you were born. Colonel Clayton Richards. What’s got your cat by the tail?”
Over the next two hours, the whiskey flowed and the masks slipped. The old Colonel listened without a shred of judgment as I laid out the whole catastrophic mess—the speakeasies, the AWOL runs, the drugs, the break-in, and the family hatred.
I was handed an Honorable Discharge. But my path towards an honorable life was a long one coming.
III. Tent Revivals, Speaking in Tongues, and the Rapture
The first time I saw a parishioner at my grandfather’s church catch the Spirit, I thought she was possessed by the devil.
She vaulted out of the pew, hurled both arms toward the rafters, and began jerking in place, her tongue unspooling a torrent of rapid-fire, rhythmic gibberish. As I grew older, I learned the church called this shouting—the physical manifestation of the Holy Ghost taking possession of a mortal frame.
The first time I saw it happen within our own bloodline, Aunt Maddy jumped into the aisle.
Her spine bowed, her arms flailed, and her mouth spilled out a frantic, unknown dialect like a marionette being yanked by a manic puppeteer. Across the sanctuary, another woman leaped up, screaming praises.
“The Spirit of the Lord is moving in this house tonight!” my pawpaw roared from the pulpit, puffing his chest out like an alpha silverback defending his territory.
“Thank you, Jesus!” he chanted, pacing the stage in a rhythmic, sing-song cadence.
Suddenly half the women in the congregation were on their feet, shaking, crying, their bodies convulsing under the holy voltage while their shoes remained somehow glued to the carpet, careful not to scuff their neighbors' Sunday best. Up at the pulpit, my grandfather moved his arms like an orchestral conductor, directing his mountain symphony through a Pentecostal staging of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.
Spring was his favorite season. It culminated in Holy Week, an exhausting marathon of non-stop preaching from Palm Sunday through Good Friday, stretching into Saturday night foot-washings behind drawn altar curtains, midnight communion, sunrise services, and shouting matches that lasted well into Sunday afternoon.
His true glory, however, was the Southern Baptist Tent Revival.
They would hoist a canvas tent the size of a three-ring circus in an open cow pasture, packing a dozen regional congregations into the sweltering heat for six hours at a stretch. The humidity under the canvas quickly turned rancid with the smell of cheap hairspray, baking dirt, and hundreds of sweating bodies. Older women furiously waved cardboard funeral-home fans printed with pictures of the Last Supper, completely unaware that their frantic fanning was only making them sweat harder.
“I saw those Jezebels up front batting their eyes at you,” my grandmother would mutter dryly on the ride home.
“Aw, Ethel, you’re my only girl,” my grandfather would chuckle, while my fifty-year-old grandmother looked out the window, secretly blushing.
Every Mother’s Day, my aunts would descend on her farmhouse like a hyperactive glam squad, teasing her silver hair into a monumental Appalachian bouffant and squeezing her into stiff department-store dresses.
“This damn thing is scratching the tar feathers out of my neck,” she grumbled into the mirror one year, smoothing down a gray polyester skirt. “Looks like what you’d lay a corpse out in.”
“Mother, you look gorgeous!” Aunt Mila insisted.
“Closest to God you’ve ever looked!” Aunt Sissy agreed.
My grandmother rarely set foot in my grandfather’s church. “I don’t need to drive up the holler to talk to God,” she’d tell him flatly.
“Don’t you want to fellowship with your sisters in Christ?” he’d ask.
“I have no desire to sit in a hot tent with a bunch of heifers listening to them squawk like wet hens.”
God and the river were woven into the marrow of those mountains. It didn't matter the hour or the season: the fear of the Lord was present in every breath we took—and every breath we were afraid to take.
When I was ten, my mother took custody of me and moved us to the city of Huntington. I had hoped for a reprieve from the oppressive judgment of the hollow, but she immediately enrolled me at St. Joseph’s Catholic School.
My mountain accent was thick, my grandfather’s King James theology was thicker, and I spent my days loudly correcting the nuns whenever their Catholic catechism contradicted my pawpaw’s fire-and-brimstone dogma. It was my first masterclass in getting bullied.
As puberty arrived, I began to realize the nature of the difference inside me. My grandfather’s Bible provided the only vocabulary the hills had for it: Abomination. Blasphemer.
“Pawpaw, what does it mean in Leviticus where it says a man shouldn't lie with another man?”
“Never you mind that, boy. Just know it’s filthy blasphemy.”
“Pawpaw, why did you say the Jews will be trapped inside the mountain when the Rapture comes?”
“Blasphemy.”
“What about the people in Africa who never had a preacher come through? Do they burn in hell, too?”
“Blasphemy.”
A quarter-century later, in 2013, I was sitting in the sanctuary of Metropolitan Community Church in Tampa Bay—a radically inclusive, progressive LGBTQ+ congregation. During the service, a worshipper in the row ahead of me suddenly threw their hands into the air, bowed their spine, and began dancing in place while speaking in tongues.
I froze.
It wasn't worship to my ears; it was an explosive neurological trigger. Thirty years of buried religious trauma roared to the surface. My pulse redlined, my chest seized, and I fled that sanctuary like a scalded dog, running all the way to my car in the parking lot.
I wasn't proud of that terror. It was the wounded boy inside me, still terrified of the altar.
What finally reconciled that fear was the grace I discovered during my own spiritual awakening. After spending nine grueling months in Shangri-La, a dedicated recovery home for gay men, I began to dismantle the architecture of the vengeful God I had inherited.
I stopped trying to outrun the preacher’s God and stopped exhausting myself trying to invent an alternative. I simply surrendered to the mystery of being alive.
I traded the furious, bearded judge on the mountain for a God of infinite coexistence—a divine presence woven into the bark of the giant redwoods, the salt of the Pacific, and the quiet earth beneath my feet. I didn't need to define it, litigate it, or defend it in a tent.
The practical miracle was immediate. The rage that used to simmer behind my eyes evaporated. The screaming child on the city bus no longer set off my temper; the casual cruelty of the world lost its power to wound me.
After leaving the recovery home, I moved into an apartment of my own and began splashing acrylics onto oversized canvases, purging decades of repressed terror, toxic shame, and the haunting memories of the benders that had nearly killed me.
One evening, I laid down a deep, matte-black background and began working streaks of bright primary yellow across the void. As the brush moved, the silhouette of a radiant face emerged from the darkness.
I stepped back from the easel, dropping the brush.
Without a hand touching my skin, a wave of pure, electrifying spiritual ecstasy ripped through my chest—transcending the body, transcending the drugs, transcending the fear.
And in that blinding flash of light, I finally understood what those weeping women under my grandfather’s revival tent had been chasing all along.
