| Ryan Adams – Carolina Rain Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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I do not agree that one needs to be an American Southerner to understand this story, but the Faulkner comparison is in my opinion apt, particularly with regard to how this narration seems to skip around a bit in terms of timeline at the beginning, and how the author chooses to indicate the passage of time through imagery. Rose is down on her luck, and about to be evicted. Her landlord "shows up with two hundred dollar bills", so she knows he has cash, and she enlists the help of a "drifter who's looking for work" (the narrator), to travel by train to Mecklenburg and help her kill the landlord and dump his body in the quarry, splitting the cash down the middle. The narrator would have left town by train afterward, but the station "got flooded when they opened up the dam". So he is stuck, and anxiously awaits its reopening, because "for every load of granite, we got a ton of worry", fearing that the body of the landlord would be discovered. During this waiting period, the narrator falls in love with a woman in town named Caroline who works in a diner. He knows that she is taken by another man, because "that gold plated cross on her neck, it was real, and you don't get that kind of money from pushing meal". Whether or not he discloses his feelings to her is ambiguous. The lyrics quoted here are "I should've told him that you were the one for me", but i have also heard Ryan sing it as "I should've told her that she was the one for me". Either way, he makes the decision to stay in Mecklenburg because he is in love with Caroline. Caroline marries the man who gave her the gold cross, Alderman Haint. The narrator marries Caroline's sister, Percy, in order to stay close to her. The narrator then settles down in Mecklenburg for a number of years, during which time he suffers a great deal, because not only is he forced to conceal his feelings for his wife's sister, but also fathers two children who both die before the age of 7. So the narrator has concealed 2 secrets during the 7 years he has known Alderman Haint, one being the murder of Rose's landlord, the other being his affection for Haint's wife Caroline. At some point after the deaths of the children, "Suspicion got the best of old Alderman Haint". Which of the 2 secrets Haint uncovered remains ambiguous, but the narrator decides to murder Haint and dump his body in the quarry. "He was silent but his rosary well, it drifted into the custody of a sheriff that was just deputized". Haint's body remains undiscovered, but his rosary becomes dislodged from his body and floats to the surface of the quarry, coming into the possession of an inexperienced sheriff. It is clear that Haint has been murdered, but the sheriff is thus far unable to pin the murder on the narrator, since the narrator is never taken into custody but is still "down at the banquet hall". Nevertheless, evidence is now in play, and the narrator is now quite nervous. Rose, who has apparently remained in Mecklenburg as well, "spilled the beans on the day that he died", which means she knows about the murder of Haint almost immediately, presumably because the narrator confides his offense to her. Rose decides to turn on the narrator, her former partner in crime. She sees his desperation and feels threatened, because if the novice sheriff is able to figure out that the narrator is the murderer and arrest him, the narrator might confess to the original landlord murder as well, implicating her in the process. Preferring that the narrator die before he has a chance to blow her cover, she discloses to the townsfolk that the narrator is the culprit, and vigilante justice is carried out in the banquet hall by some angry drunken locals, "where the gun went off". |
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