Every Cloak Rolled in Blood by James Lee Burke

Published by ‎ Simon & Schuster on May 24, 2022

Aaron Holland Broussard is part of the Holland family that James Lee Burke has chronicled in a dozen novels. Broussard is also Burke’s alter ego. At 85, it isn’t surprising that Burke uses Broussard as a way to reflect on his life, on the mystery of existence, and on loss.

Broussard is an 85-year-old novelist who, like Burke, lives with the pain of a daughter’s death. Burke explains in a letter to the reader that his daughter died of natural causes in 2020. Broussard feels he is being “boiled alive” by “psychoneurotic anxiety and agitated depression.” Broussard’s daughter died but is still at his side, appearing to warn him of dangers arising in both the corporeal and spirit world.

Broussard lives alone, although prolific writers who are surrounded by family spend much of their life alone in the act of creation. How much of Broussard is really Burke is unknowable to anyone who doesn’t know Burke. Nor does it matter. The novel is not a biography; it succeeds or fails as a matter of literary merit.

Broussard has evolved during his long life. He feels shame for supporting Strom Thurmond’s election and for cheering American pilots who gunned down civilians fleeing their village during the Korean War. Yet he was never part of a mob — not a Klansman, not a waver of Confederate flags, not a bigot. He believes heroism should walk with humility, that bravery follows kindness. He is a decent man who regrets his mistakes.

The story begins with a young man painting a swastika on Broussard’s barn. At various times, Broussard confronts or tries to reason with or help the boy and the father who poisoned him. The story involves drug dealing and buried gold on a reservation, a couple of gruesome murders, ineffective cops, and an unfortunate woman who wants to make a movie with Broussard. While some of the story is reality-based, a good bit of the novel asks the reader to believe (or at least accept that Broussard believes) that spirits of the dead are trying to influence us with evil or save us from ourselves. Broussard, on the other hand, wonders if he might be delusional, forced by grief to see things that aren’t there. A reader might wonder if that’s true, but that does not appear to be the conclusion that Burke invites.

Every Cloak Rolled in Blood succeeds despite its reliance on the supernatural themes crime writers often use to address the existence of evil. Broussard explains that the “great mystery for me has always been the presence of evil in the human breast.” On several occasions, Broussard encounters Major Eugene Baker, the officer who ordered his cavalry troops to massacre peaceful members of the Blackfoot tribe as they slept. A state trooper named Ruby Spotted Horse has a cellar that is a “conduit into a cavernous world that has never been plumbed,” a place where Baker’s spirit resides, among others who have the power to “come back upon the living.”

I’m not a fan of supernatural themes — the supernatural seems too easy as an explanation of evil, a copout that allows humanity to avoid responsibility for inhumane behavior — although I forgive Burke and other accomplished writers for evoking evil spirits. Burke’s prose makes forgiveness easy, particularly when he offers other insights into the human condition. Examples:

“I do not enjoy my role as an old man in a nation that has little use for antiquity and even less for those who value it.”

“I hate the violent history of the Holland family, and I hate the martial mentality of those who love wars but never go to them.”

“When you lose your kid, the best you can hope for is a scar rather than an open wound.”

 “I would like to claim power and personal direction over my life. But not a day goes by that I do not experience a reminder of an event that left me at the mercy of strangers.”

“The United States prides itself on the freedom of the individual, but we are still a Puritan nation and obsessed with sex.”

Burke’s letter to the reader describes Every Cloak Rolled in Blood as an “attempt to capture part of mankind’s trek across a barren waste into modern times.” Modern times include “the recalcitrant and the unteachable” who refuse to wear masks during a pandemic because the selfishness of cultural grievance is more important to them than public health. Those grievances include being the butt of jokes told by the “Hollywood friends” of liberals on Saturday Night Live, a grievance that fails to consider what they have done to earn mockery. The trek includes a long history of violence and bigotry and oppression. Burke writes movingly about Native Americans who were slaughtered and brutalized by white soldiers who, instead of being tried for war crimes, were lauded as heroes.

Burke describes Montana landscapes with religious awe and views his characters through the focused lens of compassion. The novel is, in some sense, a howl of pain, notable more for the emotions it evokes than the plot. But it is also a reminder that we must always struggle to understand our place in the universe, to be a barrier against the historic march of evil, to be strong but polite, open but on guard, emotional but not helpless or hopeless.

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