The Ford Boy

On October 9, 1959, the University of Tennessee newspaper, Orange and White, announced that the first issue of The Phoenix, a literary supplement to the newspaper, would be included in its October 16 issue. Due to printing difficulties, the publication was delayed a week. The issue featured the creative writing and art work by UT students and included “Wake for Susan” (McCarthy, 1959), the first published fiction by C. J. McCarthy Jr., later known as Cormac McCarthy.1 After a half-century the short story was reprinted in the fiftieth anniversary issue of the same student literary magazine in which it was first published (McCarthy, 2010), and most recently “Wake for Susan” was again reprinted as a stand-alone unauthorized chapbook by Withnail Books in Penrith, England (McCarthy, 2024).“Wake for Susan” is the story of a teenaged boy, Wes, who after an unsuccessful squirrel hunt on an October morning, is taking the longer way home past a quarry and onto a railroad track with rotting ties and sagging rails before turning into the woods again.2 After finding an old rifle-ball he is prompted to look for a burial plot that he had visited once before with “the Ford boy.” There he finds an old headstone of a seventeen-year-old girl named Susan Ledbetter who had died in 1834, a year that McCarthy mentions repeatedly in the story. He then fanaticizes what her life and a relationship with her might have been like been like before finishing his walk home. Despite the fictional and imaginal aspects of the story, I believe “the Ford boy” is based upon a likely childhood acquaintance of McCarthy’s. This note presents my reasoning, but first, a little background.In 2000, Rev. Jerry Allen Anderson, a childhood friend and neighbor of McCarthy’s, wrote a book in which he described a group of four childhood friends who lived nearby his home on Neubert Springs Road in south Knoxville, Tennessee. “We called ourselves the ‘Brown’s Mountain Boys’.3 We saw ourselves as the ‘Tom Sawyers’ and ‘Huck Finns’ of the little community that stood in the shadow of Brown’s mountain” (Anderson 45). Anderson went on to recall the members of that group: Jerry Reed, who had a career in the Air Force; Hugh L. Winkler who died young of cancer; himself, who became a United Methodist minister; and Charles J. McCarthy Jr., the youngest of the group, who later became known as Cormac.The following year Anderson was interviewed by the journalist Mike Gibson for a feature article on McCarthy. In the interview Anderson described the influences that each of the Brown’s Mountain Boys had on characters in McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper (McCarthy, 1965).4 “All three of McCarthy’s cohorts are present in the book: Winkler as John Wesley, Reed as a man named Warn, and Anderson himself in the person of several secondary characters” (Gibson 12).Jerry Anderson passed away in 2006, but in 2008 I was fortunate to correspond with and meet Mark Anderson, Jerry’s youngest son. Mark told me about an old cemetery that his father had told him about, and we both wondered if this might have been the cemetery that the character Wes visits in McCarthy’s first short story.On an April afternoon in 2008, Mark and I drove around the Brown’s Mountain area and briefly looked, unsuccessfully, for the old cemetery that his father had told him about. We later read about the Doyle-Brown Cemetery, aka Brown’s Mountain Cemetery, in Robert McGinnis’s monumental book on local cemeteries (McGinnis 37–38) and thought that was probably the cemetery that we had been seeking because of its location.Previously in an article in this journal I reported that, in 1948, Barbara McCarthy, Cormac’s sister and then an editor of their high school newspaper, had written a short unsigned article introducing her brother Charlie to the student body (Morgan). In my piece I neglected to mention some of Charlie’s hobbies that Barbara had reported: “taxidermy, cartooning, painting, stamp collecting, and making parts for a collection of old guns” (Charlie 2).More recently I was researching Hugh Winkler, Cormac’s friend and one of the Brown’s Mountain Boys, who lived next door to the McCarthy family, concerning his role in The Orchard Keeper and mention in Suttree (McCarthy 1979, 456). I found a group photo of some Mooreland Heights schoolboys in a 1946 newspaper, which included both Winkler and another of the Brown’s Mountain Boys, Jerry Reed. Interestingly, the caption of the photo explained that the boys were all taking a correspondence course in taxidermy.I do not believe that the shared interests in taxidermy among Charlie McCarthy, Jerry Reed, and Hugh Winkler were completely independent although it is unknown who might have had the interest in taxidermy first. And much to my surprise I noticed that another of the Mooreland Heights taxidermy boys was named Howard Ford. Could Howard Ford have been “the Ford boy” credited as showing Wes the location of the cemetery?I consulted McGinnis’s book again to see in detail what he had reported about the Doyle-Brown Cemetery beyond its location. He did not report anyone with the name Susan Ledbetter being buried there. And in fact, there is no record of anyone by that name being buried in Knox County in the “Knox County, Tennessee, Cemeteries Index” compiled by Robert McGinnis.McCarthy repeatedly (four times) calls the reader’s attention to the year of the fictional Susan Ledbetter’s death—1834. Of the eleven markers recorded by McGinnis during his visit to the cemetery in 1983, he found that Polly Ford Doyle’s tombstone was the only one in that cemetery with a year of death in 1834. Unfortunately, this particular gravestone was not found by McGinnis on a subsequent visit in January 2001.Polly Ford Doyle had five brothers and four sisters and was the daughter of Joseph and Mary (Maxey) Ford who settled in south Knox County in 1810 (“Ford and Maxey”). It is likely that Howard Ford was a descendant of this large family. And it seems unlikely that the year of Polly’s and Susan’s death, 1834, and Polly’s maiden name and Howard’s family name are coincidences.Howard Edward Ford was born to J. Keller and Lucy Ford on June 5, 1931. He attended Young High School along with Anderson, Reed, and Winkler and lived on Ford Valley Road, according to the 1950 US Census and the 1950 Knoxville City Directory. He later joined the family construction company as a brick mason, married a local girl, raised a family and died on December 11, 2004.There may have been other Ford boys of varying ages living in the general area, but only Howard, by virtue of a shared interest in taxidermy, was associated with members of the Brown’s Mountain Boys. His likely familial relationship to Polly Ford Doyle and his home on Ford Valley Road in proximity to the burial plot might well explain an interest the cemetery. I think it likely that this “Ford boy” shared his knowledge with the Brown’s Mountain Boys. It might be speculated that the protagonist of the story, Wes, might well have been based partly on one or more of the Brown’s Mountain Boys as well.