Angels and Demons in the Ozarks

Paulette Jiles’ story “Angels and Demons in the Ozarks” was first published in Harvard Review 50. She passed away on July 8, 2025.

We were walking from my Aunt Donna’s house to somebody else’s house. This was on Christmas Day north of Poplar Bluff. We had to go through a deep swale that was dry this time of year, a place of yellow grasses taller than I was, and in order not to lose sight of my cousins Jeannie and Caroline I had to run. There was that very tall grass called Bear Grass that grows in tight crowns and brushy bluestem dry and flock-headed, a rich rust color, oat grass very pale. I don’t know who we were going to visit but it was on the other side of this world of winter grass. It was a warm December. This was magic. This was adventure. I was no more than six and extremely happy to be where I was with my two good-looking older girl cousins somewhere ahead of me on the path and the small birds darting. And then somebody called us, girls’ voices, and out of the grass two other girls came running out.

Look what we got for Christmas! they said. They were beautiful. They were both blonde and wore thin dresses of cotton print and in their hands they held sugar candies in all colors: the raspberry drops and the emerald ribbon candy with a white edge to it. And I thought, Is that all?

We don’t grow up in steady increments. We become adult in violent jerks, in one enormous step taken at one time and then we go on being that much more mature and stay on that level for a long time, and then maybe a year or two later or ten years later or maybe never occurs yet another moment when we are taken by the hair and hauled forward toward understanding or we are snatched bald-headed in the process. Suddenly I knew that these gem-like penny candies were all and more than all. My own presents back at Aunt Donna’s were nowhere near as luminous as these handfuls of edible jewels, nor had I taken such unadulterated joy in them. And I did the adult thing and said how wonderful they were and admired them, and in fact I did but it was just the sight of the two girls not much older than myself in the blowing yellow grasses of that low swale in a hollow of the Ozark hills, and behind them somewhere a small house with parents that could afford nothing more than penny candies for Christmas, and they happy and thin and shivering and smiling with their white teeth that has stayed with me for more than sixty years, a kind of vision, a remembrance of learning what it is to take a sudden step toward being an adult, a gift of angels. To say, and mean, How lucky you are.

We never learned anything about our ancestors in the Ozarks, in Carter County, and it has taken many years of research to discover anything about them. Only vague rumors came down to us about our great-grandfather John Giles, who changed the spelling of his name in the 1880 census to Jiles. But who was his father? Nobody knew. We had no stories of heroic pioneers, nor did any of us twenty-five first cousins possess heirlooms handed down. Our family history seemed to stop sometime in our grandfather’s childhood, when he and four other children were orphaned in a diphtheria epidemic and were scattered among other families to survive as best they might. The Civil War was never mentioned. Nobody knew where the Giles/Jiles family had come from. They might have come from the moon.

What happened was that the Civil War was so relentlessly savage in that area that it left something resembling a layer of ash in the communal psyche. It was as if a volcano had erupted and buried all sense of history or community. The hills are beautiful with sweet echoing greens in the summertime and trails through blow-downs where tornados have twisted the trunks into fan-shapes, bright streams, and the sparkling rivers: the Current, the Eleven-Point, the Saint Francois. This is my country, and for a long time it was blank and as innocent of history as a planet only lately lived in by human beings.

John Giles’s father, my great-great grandfather, was named Marquis (pronounced Marcus) Lafayette Giles and he was hanged from a live oak tree along with two other men by a Confederate colonel for loudly proclaiming his loyalty to the Union. This was in Bloomfield, Missouri. I think this was him. His name is unusual and his disappearance from the records was for a long time very puzzling. Research has revealed not only these deaths, in an obscure after-action report, but that Bloomfield changed hands between the Union and Confederate forces sixteen times. I repeat, sixteen times. Marquis Lafayette Giles was a justice of the peace and a schoolteacher; he left a pregnant wife and three small children. He had filed on 1,200 acres of land. This was sold on the courthouse steps in 1867.

What demon made him stand in a public square and shout out his politics? What maniacal devil seized him by the hair and threw him into defiance so that he finished his days at the end of a rope? May these times never come again. But knowing the demons of human nature, I am not sure they will not. No wonder we had no family stories. His son, my great-grandfather John Giles/Jiles somehow made it to adulthood and married and had children himself and then again, another generation orphaned by diphtheria. He worked as a timber hauler when Pennsylvania interests came in to strip the hills of yellow pine, and so he and his wife went to the other world and left his children without a house or a loaf of bread or an acre of land.

I have often said there is a streak of craziness in our family of which I am quite proud and whether this is the gift of angels or demons I do not know. It is a gift of stories and immoderate laughter. My grandfather Marcus Jiles became an engineer on the Burlington and Northern Railroad and leaned on the whistle like a haunting spirit when he passed his home in Neelyville, bearing down on the whistle chain, a phantom of steam calling out, We are passing the Arkansas line! And Aunt Byatt as a young girl in her delusions used to sleepwalk down the tracks in her nightgown, lighting matches, saying she was waiting for her daddy on the nine-fifteen. There are many other stories but I will be killed for telling them.

My cousin Susan and I have ridden the trails back in the hills for twenty years and have found things and places and graves and fallen cabins and extremely strange people camped out on riverbanks. Once we came upon some carnival people with dwarves fishing, and another time a trailer full of people from El Salvador collecting grapevines that are twisted into wreath bases and sold at Hobby Lobby. Once we were guided into a false crossing on the Saint Francois by people who had, at their camp, giant plastic chairs and a plastic kitchen outfit and blow-up vinyl toilet seats you took with you to the john. They said the crossing was good but it wasn’t. I nearly drowned. Susan and I said f— you and your toilet seats and had nothing further to do with them. Once we came upon a burned-out automobile on a trail north of Fairdealing sitting out in the forest. The whole area around it had caught fire too. A Forestry agent we came upon said that sometimes meth-cookers used old cars for their labs and this one had blown up. The agent’s name was Yarborough. We asked what happened to the guy, but Yarborough said he didn’t know. Maybe he didn’t. The guy must have gone up like a bottle rocket.

Once we came upon the lonely grave of a man who had died of old age in prison in Jeff City. He had served a life sentence because he killed a man who shot his dog. He asked to be buried on his ancestral land. It turned out that the man he shot wasn’t the one who killed his dog. He shot the wrong man. It was the county assessor who showed us the grave and told us the story. We are not related to this person. This was down in Oregon County, a grave piled high with flat stones as is the custom there, deep in the oak woods. We are crazy, but we are not that crazy.

Demons are possessive and territorial, but it seems angels wander without a fixed home; they are dreams about wells and springs, water moving underground, appearing with handfuls of penny candies, perhaps a sword. Are they with us or against us? Neither one. The man who shot the wrong man is now neutral, a pile of stones, and his story known only to a few.

McCormack Lake is just north of the Eleven-Point and a very good place to camp, but it was, some years ago, frequented by a pervert that everyone called the Canoe Man. My cousin and I wanted to haul horses down there and ride the Devil’s Backbone and Hurricane Creek (there are probably hundreds of Hurricane Creeks in the Ozarks) but we couldn’t get anybody to go with us. Susan’s husband was deep into that season’s football and mine was up north shooting pheasants and nobody else wanted to go. So we went by ourselves. It was close to Halloween. Sure enough the Canoe Man came cruising by, stared at us, drove slowly around camp with a canoe on top of his little car, as if he were going to shoot the big rapids on the Eleven-Point or had just come back from doing so. We were the only people there. The Canoe Man is a guy who exposes himself, one of those people who think they have a billion-dollar willie, but people who are seized by compulsions and cannot resist them go on to contemplate worse things, which they cannot resist either.

So since we did not have a man with us we made our own. We made a dummy. We called him Cowboy Bob. We stuffed a pair of jeans and shirt, gave him a Halloween mask one of the kids had left in the car and my cowboy hat and gloves stuffed with grass for hands. Several glasses of wine help with things like this. We laughed ourselves into seizures. The Canoe Man glowered from across the lake, among the trees. I could see his car with the canoe on top. The horses stared out over the water with their eyes on fire and turned and turned on the picket line, while Cowboy Bob’s demonic gray plastic face shone in the light of all the wood we piled on and a large spider crawled across his jaw. We talked to him and told him our opinions, I did John Wayne imitations which I am sure were not convincing as I am five-foot-two and weigh a hundred and twenty pounds but I remember addressing Cowboy Bob as “Pilgrim” and Susan trying to wrap his hand-like appendages around a bottle of beer.

And at last we sat contentedly on either side of Cowboy Bob, our invented demon, completely laughed out, and so became our own cowgirl angels, with McCormack Lake ashine in front of us and the low noise of the Boom Hole in the distance rocking the world to sleep. And eventually he drove away. We saw his lights go up the hill and away to Highway 19. As a child, my family never lived in any one place for very long and so this is home, all these hills. This is my place in the world. I have a handful of glassy candies for you that have been rescued at great cost from burning automobiles and hangings and gunfire and twisted men with canoes. I have carried them through dangerous river crossings and past the sinister carnival people who pretend to fish as they watch you riding toward them and have given them away to the memory of the girl walking down the railroad tracks in her nightgown, lighting matches, looking for her father. Angels have that strange studied neutrality and personal joy like the glow in a horse’s eyes at night when they stand nodding and looking at the fire. Brief moments in between disasters and wars, a chuck-will’s-widow lying close and calling out, the big river of stars moving toward the west, drifting and powdering the heavens. A dying fire. Cowboy Bob snarling soundlessly with his plastic face at all dangers, angels asleep in their sleeping bags, the ghost of the old man regretting and regretting that he shot the wrong man drifting up over McCormack Lake like nighttime mist, his spectral dog alongside, who loves him no matter what and will stay at his side everlastingly, amen.