I’ve always felt a certain affinity toward the South. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, geographically speaking. I didn’t grow up in the Deep South—no Spanish moss, no wisteria, no boiled peanuts on the side of the road. But if you zoom in just right on a map, technically, technically, I’m from below the Mason-Dixon. Doesn’t matter. No one outside of there would consider it the South. And yet, say that out loud to someone from where I grew up and watch them lose their goddamn minds. The defensiveness is almost tender. Almost.
I’m from the southern end of Maryland with its brackish water, shotgun houses, and trucks with mud caked on like war paint. Everyone I knew thought they were country. Parents worked in crabbing, farming, bait shops, boat repair. Kids wore camo to school year-round and blasted country music in the parking lot. It had all the aesthetics of the South, just without the mythology.
And one of the clearest, weirdest memories I have from growing up is of the church. This little, weather-beaten place where two very different congregations shared the same space. In the mornings: the older white and Black Baptist folks—many of them Vietnam vets, bodies worn down, oxygen tanks hissing softly beside them. Then in the afternoons: the Korean church I went to with my family, filing in quietly with our own ghosts in tow.
But on the first Sunday of every month, we’d combine. A joint service. Mashed-up sermons, broken translations, off-key hymns sung too loudly in two different languages. And then food. Fried chicken, kimchi, seaweed soup, sweet potato pie, macaroni salad. All of it laid out on plastic tablecloths in the fellowship hall like it belonged together. And somehow, it did. People tried their best to mingle. Stiff handshakes, too-loud greetings, smiling through the language barrier. It was awkward and holy in its own strange way.
Both churches are gone now. There was no scandal, no final sermon. Just a slow drift. The old folks passed. The younger ones moved away. The building’s still there, technically… but abandoned.
So… Dirty Work.
It’s about two veterans, Walter and Braiden, sharing a hospital room and circling each other’s pain. One Black, one white. Both chewed up by war, poverty, race, history. Both stuck in bodies that don’t work anymore, minds full of ghosts, rage, regret. There’s not much plot. They talk. They remember. They confess things they maybe shouldn’t. Or maybe need to. It’s brutal and haunting.
I kept thinking of the old vets at church. The way they’d sit with their heads bowed, eyes clenched tight, hands trembling just slightly as they gripped the backs of the pews. They rarely spoke. Never led prayer. But they were always there. Rain, snow, broken hip or not. Like showing up was the only kind of redemption left to them.
I didn’t share their history. I was Korean, not from the South in any recognizable way, and never stepped foot in any war field. But in that room I felt that we shared something. Not language. Not culture. Maybe just the ache of being human, trying to believe in something. Or needing to. I still miss many of them and the stories they never told.
Larry Brown’s writing is deceptively simple, and he has a real mastery of stream-of-consciousness that brings his characters fully to life. He captures the rhythms, cadences, and emotional weight of working-class voices, people always one missed paycheck away from the brink of poverty. And that felt deeply familiar to me. I saw pieces of people I grew up around in Walter and Braiden.
You can find a Walter or a Braiden anywhere in this country. You just have to listen long enough to hear what they won’t say.