Blog-o-ween 2024: Day 22

Lots of ‘Salem’s Lot

Part Two

Chapter 13: Father Callahan

Sunrise: 7:04 AM

Sunset: 6:09 PM

Father Callahan pays a visit to Matt Burke in the hospital. Matt’s room is filled with library books on a singular subject: vampires. Intrigued, Father Callahan sits down, and Matt lays out the story of Mike Ryerson for him. After, Matt asks Callahan to join their little band of vampire killers — as a representative of the Catholic Church. The priest agrees.

That night, Father Callahan is filled with excitement at the coming battle. It is an opportunity to test his faith and his beliefs in the traditional power of the Church. However, standing on his back porch and looking out into the night, a cold terror grips his heart…

Short and sweet entry today, Blog-o-weeners. Not a whole lot to talk about. It is just more of the same — one character who believes in vampires trying to convince another character who is a bit more skeptical. Father Callahan, however, is not your average skeptic. The man, as we well know, is looking for a challenge, something that he can bring the full weight of his faith against. His faith, not the faith of the post-Vatican II Church. The abbé of ‘salem’s Lot seems game.

Like I said, not much to talk about.

Let us, instead, check out Matt’s to-be-read pile. I love perusing a good to-be-read pile. When Callahan calls on him, Matt is surrounded by books, many of which are actual titles that, if a swotty Blog-o-weener was looking for extra credit, they could pick up at their local library and read for themselves. There is one or two books in Matt’s stack that I could not find — Monsters of the Darkness and Monsters in Real Life. Perhaps the titles are too generic? Nevertheless, what we are left with is a pretty good “For Further Reading” list…

Whew! Whatta reading list! A little something for everyone.

I did want to touch upon another poem that King uses. It is by a poet that he is quite fond of and has quoted in other books — James Dickey.

James Dickey was born in February, 1923, in Atlanta, Georgia. During the Second World War, he served with the U.S. Army Air Forces, flew thirty-eight missions in the Pacific theater, and was awarded five Bronze Stars for meritorious service during combat. He later served in the Korean War.

While teaching at the University of Florida in 1956, Dickey quite rather than apologize after the American Pen’s Women’s Society protested his reading of his poem “The Father’s Body.” Afterwards, he became a copywriter for Coca-Cola and Lay’s while writing poetry in his spare time. Eventually, he was fired for shirking his work responsibilities.

Even though he was appointed the eighteenth United States Poet Laureate in 1966, Dickey is probably best known for the novel he published in 1970 — Deliverance. It was made into a film in 1972 starring Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, and Ned Beatty. It is the story of four businessmen from Atlanta who travel to rural Georgia and are terrorized by the inhabitants. It lives in the memory thanks to the song “Dueling Banjos” and for the phrase “squeal like a pig.”

I will let you figure that one out on your own.

The poem that Father Callahan thinks of as he looks out into the night is Dickey’s “Kudzu,” which was published in New Yorker magazine in May, 1963. This line in particular comes to Father Callahan:

“The night the kudzu has

Your pasture, you sleep like the dead”

Kudzu, the plant was introduced in the United States at the Japanese Pavilion at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. It was marketed in the 1930s and 1940s as a way for farmers to fight soil erosion. Unfortunately, kudzu’s strength is that it spreads quickly and outcompetes native plants for sunlight and food. It grows over other plants, forcing them to live in the shade and, therefore, die.

No wonder that Father Callahan thinks of Dickey’s poem at this time. The vampires, like kudzu, force the natives of the Lot to live in the shade of night. The opening of the poem, though not shared in this section, also speaks to the fear that is gripping Callahan’s heart:

“…Far Eastern vines

Run from the clay banks they are 

Supposed to keep from eroding

Up telephone poles

Which rear, half out of leafage

As though they would shriek

Like things smothered by their own

Green, mindless, unkillable ghosts

In Georgia, the legend says

That you must close your windows 

At night to keep it out of the house…”

Close your windows, indeed!

That’s it for today, kiddies, and that’s it for Part 2 of ‘Salem’s Lot. Tomorrow, we will start Part 3 with Chapter 14: The Lot (IV), Sections 1-6. The battle for ‘salem’s Lot is looming over the horizon. Time will tell if it brings with it the bright light of the sun to banish the vampires for good…or forever night. We will see!

Oh, and remember…if you sleep with the windows open, you’ll just have to…