Southern Bastards #2

"Here Was a Man," Part Two
written by Jason Aaron
art by Jason Latour

Earl Tubb:  First thing tomorrow, I'm headed back to Birmingham.  Just come to see a game before I go.  I used to play on this field myself.  Ain't seen the Rebs in years though.

Tad:  Bull crap.  You didn't come to see the Rebs.  You come to see him.  (Southern Bastards #2: 7)

And so we meet Coach Boss, she shadowy crime-and-football kingpin of Craw County, Alabama, a broad, menacing figure prowling the sidelines of a highschool football field.

Southern Bastards #2 rings of destiny for Earl Tubb.  No doubt, Earl is a stubbornly good man, whose frustrated righteousness at Craw County's decay into the worst of redneck apathy in the shadow of its thuggish bullies provokes his own intractable sense of justice.  When Dusty, beaten and well on his way to dying, stumbles into the football game begging to see Coach Boss, who callously dismisses the bloody and disfigured interruption, it quietly outrages Earl.  When Earl brings his grievance to the police department, the officer being yet another of Coach Boss's former players, regarding Dusty's death from his wounds, it is again brushed off as the riddance of another low-life.  It's not untrue but it is unjust, and it leads Earl Tubb back to his father's tree.

"I ain't you, Daddy.  And this place... ain't never been my home.  These people here... whatever problems thy got... whatever the hell they let happen here... it ain't none a' my damn business."  (19)

He protests, but he's still there, yelling at a tree.  Then fate's own hand intervenes as a bolt of lightning incinerating Bertrand Tubb's tree gravemarker, accomplishing in moments what Earl could not all night with an ax.  No longer standing in his father's metaphorical shadow, Earl is then handed his own destiny.  Like Excalibur in the stone, his own club is burned and splintered from the smoldering stump of his father's tree.  The tool for the worthy man.