Excerpt from Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She was the only one to use my real name after everybody else let it go, Mom included. I didn't realize until pretty late in life, like my twenties, that in other places people stick with the names they start out with. Who knew? I mean, Snoop Dogg, Nas, Scarface, these are not Mom-assigned names. I just assumed every place was like us, up home in Lee County, where most guys get something else on them that sticks. Shorty or Grub or Checkout. It's a good guess Humvee was not Humvee to begin with. Mr. Peggot was Peg after he got his foot crushed by one of those bolting machines they use in the coal mines. Some name finds you, and you come running to it like a dog until the day you die and it goes in the paper along with your official name that everybody's forgotten. I have looked at the obits page and thought about how most of these names are harsh. Who wants to die an old Stubby? But in life it's no big deal, you can buy a beer for your best friend Maggot without either one of you giving it a thought.

So it was not usual for Mrs. Peggot to keep my born name in the mix after others had moved on from it. It's Damon. Last name of Fields, same as Mom's. At the time of filling in the hospital forms after my action-packed birth, she evidently had her reasons for not tagging me to my dad. From what I know now, there's no question, but looking like him was something I had to grow into, along with getting hair. And in those days, with her looks still being the main item in Mom's plus column and the words "bad choice" yet to join her vocab, maybe there were other candidates. None on hand to gentleman up and sign over his name. Or drive her home from the hospital. That job, like most gentleman-up stuff in Mom's life, fell to Mr. Peg. Was he happy about it or not, another story.

As far as the Damon part, leave it to her to pop out a candy-ass boy-band singer name like that. Did she think she'd even get me off her tits before people turned that into Demon? Long before school age, I'd heard it all. Screamin' Demon, Demon Semen. But once I got my copper-wire hair and some version of attitude, I started hearing "Little Copperhead." Hearing it a lot. And look, no red-blooded boy wants to be Little Anything. Advice to anybody with the plan of naming your kid Junior: going through life as mini-you will be as thrilling as finding dried-up jizz on the carpet.

But having a famous Ghost Dad puts a different light on it, and I can't say I hated being noticed in that way. Around the same time Maggot started his shoplifting experiments, I was starting to get known as Demon Copperhead. You can't deny, it's got a power to it.

3

From the day Murrell Stone walked up our steps with his Davidson boot chains jingling, Mom was like, He's a good man. He likes you, and you like him. I had my instructions.

Stoner is the name he went by, and if he said nice things to Mom, she was all ears. By now she's been sober long enough to keep her Walmart job through all restocks of the seasonal aisles: Halloween costumes, Santa crap, Valentines, Easter candy, folding lawn chairs. She's up on the rent and has her drawer full of sobriety chips that she takes out late at night and looks over like a dragon sitting on its treasure. That much I remember. Mom getting home from work and into her cutoffs, cracking open a Mello Yello, sitting on our deck smoking with her feet up on the rail and her legs stretched out trying for the free version of a tan, yelling at Maggot and me down in the creek not to get our eyes put out from running with sticks. Life is great, in other words.

What I don't remember is what I didn't know: How does it feel to turn legal drinking age, and already be three years into AA? How much does it suck to have a school-age kid and a long-termed relationship with the Walmart party-supplies aisle while the friends you used to have are still running around looking to get high or drunk or married, ideally some perfect combo of all three? All Mom had to work with were middle-aged type people in their thirties at least: sobriety buddies and Walmart buddies that would tell her "You have a blessed day, hon," and go home to their husbands and buckets of chicken and Jeopardy. She'd tried and failed at more boyfriends by this time, post me getting born, which all dumped her because (a) they got her off the wagon and into hot legal water with motherhood, or (b) she was no fun.

Excerpted from Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. Copyright © 2022 by Barbara Kingsolver. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.