And there’s Sister Paul, a 102-year-old whom almost no one at Five Ends remembers but who faithfully mails her tithe of $4.13 from a nursing home in faraway Bensonhurst. the Elephant, a fortyish Italian bachelor who lives with his mom and runs a stolen goods ring out of a boxcar on the nearby pier. There’s “Jesus’s cheese,” delicious fresh “white people cheese” which has for years been delivered every month to the church by unknown means to be given away and savored. Sportcoat’s motive is far from the only mystery in the neighborhood.

After her splendid funeral at Five Ends Baptist, Hettie starts appearing to Sportcoat in dreams and in daylight, and all she wants to do is fight. If you have a secret hope that a spouse’s demise might be the end of marital bickering, McBride has a surprise for you. Sportcoat is also grieving the recent death of his wife, Hettie. Yet he’s a cheerful friend, a handyman who can make anything work and a gardener who can make anything grow, a beloved man in his community. Add to that the fact that, at 71, he’s been pickling his brain in alcohol for decades - the nickname that gives the book its title comes from his fondness for a particularly potent home brew called King Kong - it’s no surprise he has trouble remembering things. Raised in poverty in the South and marked by bad-luck omens since birth, he has survived a dizzying list of diseases and injuries. The question that drives the book is why Sportcoat shot Deems, whom he’s known since Deems was a child and whom he lovingly coached into a star baseball player before the kid’s career change to selling heroin.Įven Sportcoat doesn’t know the answer to that question. Clemens survives, minus one ear Sportcoat, despite 16 witnesses to the shooting, isn’t arrested. All of that’s true, but almost none of it is quite as it seems.

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