The Barrowfields - Hardcover

Lewis, Phillip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0451495640 ISBN 13: 9780451495648

Verlag: HOGARTH PR, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

A richly textured coming-of-age story about fathers and sons, home and family, recalling classics by Thomas Wolfe and William Styron, by a powerful new voice in fiction

Just before Henry Aster’s birth, his father—outsized literary ambition and pregnant wife in tow—reluctantly returns to the small Appalachian town in which he was raised and installs his young family in an immense house of iron and glass perched high on the side of a mountain. There, Henry grows up under the writing desk of this fiercely brilliant man. But when tragedy tips his father toward a fearsome unraveling, what was once a young son’s reverence is poisoned and Henry flees, not to return until years later when he, too, must go home again. 
 
Mythic in its sweep and mesmeric in its prose, THE BARROWFIELDS is a breathtaking debut about the darker side of devotion, the limits of forgiveness, and the reparative power of shared pasts.

– SIBA Okra Pick

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

PHILLIP LEWIS is a lawyer in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2017 Phillip Lewis

PROLOGUE

The desk is the same as he left it. The raven or whatever it is on the wall. Wolfe. Poe. Chopin. A first-edition copy of The Stranger, price-clipped, chipped, and cocked. A signed first edition of Look Homeward, Angel that he prized more than any other book. A first edition of Tales of Mystery and Imagination signed by Harry Clarke in blood-red ink. A Bible, King James, black leather cover. Three candles; copious spent wax. A bottle of Hill’s Absinth, empty. Two bottles of vodka, empty. A bottle of Spanish wine, also empty. A book of matches. A lamp, no bulb. Fifty-one journals, handwritten. The title page of an unpublished novel with an annotation in Latin. Nine years of collected dust and a handful of pictures that must have meant something to him. I open The Stranger to read the inscription in my own hand. I turn the page and see the first line of the book: “Mother died today.” I am beginning to understand.

PART 1

Chapter 1

My father was one of only two children born in Old Buckram’s cinderblock hospital in the cold and bitter autumn of 1939. The other child, a young boy who didn’t live long enough to get a name or a soul to be saved, was buried by his mother on a hillside near town when the ground warmed enough to dig him a proper grave. There was no service and no one sang any hymns. The boy’s head- stone, if you could call it that, was a large smooth rock from the creek. He was laid to rest with only his mother’s voiceless prayer to an absent God. She asked that he be forgiven the original sin and kindly allowed into heaven to await the others when, in the Lord’s wisdom, their day should come.

Old Buckram, where this story begins, is an achromatic town high in the belly of the Appalachian Mountains. It’s situated un- easily about as far north and west as you can go and still be inside the surveyed boundaries of North Carolina. In 1799 the population there was 125, and by 1939 this number had swelled to 400. It’s a town where the streets and sidewalks are lonely and seldom traveled. Where the few paltry shops—an aging hardware store, a feed store, a cobbler, a discount clothier, a café, and a headstone maker—scarcely see enough business for a living and close early in the dark days of winter before the snow falls. It's an old railroad town, but the train hasn't gone there in years. It's a town with one-room red-brick churches on the hillsides and in the hollows, a town that believes in a God living but remote, and a town with one funeral home that bur­ies almost all the dead. It's a town of ghosts and superstitions. It has the Devil's Stairs and Serpent's Tongue Rock and Abbadon Creek, which carried a n entire family into oblivion in the flood of 1916. Up behind the creek at the edge of town lay the Barrowfields, where by some mystery nothing of natural origin will grow except a creeping gray moss which climbs over mounds of rock and petrified stumps that the more credulous locals believe are grave markers from an age before time. Others say a great wind-blow came up over the moun­tains a thousand years ago and ripped out the trees and carried away all the goodness in the soil so that nothing could ever grow there again. Nearly everyone thinks it's haunted ground. There's never been a picnic on the Barrowfields, of that you can be sure.

If anyone ever knew how my father's family found themselves there, in Old Buckram, their stories have long since been silenced by many steady turns of the imperturbable clock and no record of that enigmatic journey has been left behind. My grandfather, whose given name was Helton, told me once that the family might have migrated there from the far north sometime in the 1700s, down the Great Wagon Road that ran from Pennsylvania to the North Caro­lina Piedmont. He said our ancestors were probably some of the first settlers on this rugged and unforgiving land. "Goes to show," he told me, "that my and your daddy's folks were none too smart."

The family was damn poor, impossibly poor, like almost every­ one else in the mountains, but over time through hard work and determination they managed to cultivate a fairly dignified exis­tence. The children were well cared for even if food and clothes were hard to come by. Helton was a laborer who would take what­ ever work there was a nd do it honestly and diligently without com­ plaint except for whatever he might have said to God on Sunday mornings during prayer. He worked for several years on the Blue Ridge Parkway as a dynamiter for the WPA and after some time had lost his hearing in one ear and was immune to most conversa­tion that was conducted in his presence. He became somewhat like an old dog that sits quietly in the corner of the room, oblivious to all the goings-on around him.

I know of nothing extraordinary that he did in his life, except that he worked five days a week and remained married to my grandmother, Madeline, despite uncountable bitter winters and un­ relenting poverty. He accumulated no money and no property of consequence. On the date of his death, he owned nothing of real value other than a middling farmhouse that leaned when the wind blew and a plot of fit-for-nothing land he'd purchased at auction for five dollars an acre. The only book he ever owned or read was the Holy Bible, which came to me when he passed away. On the first blank page of parchment, there is a note from his father-my great grandfather, William-that says in barely legible scrawl: "Read this Bible and govern yourself accordingly." The next page contains a faded reproduction of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane by Heinrich Hofmann. My grandfather signed the Bible and over time wrote into its pages several annotations of unknown provenance, the first of which appears at the beginning of the Book of Genesis. It reads simply "4004 B.C." For him, this is when time began.

Despite living in Old Buckram his entire life, my grandfather appeared in the local newspaper only once. Against his better judg­ment, he ran for office after being encouraged to do so by the pastor of his church, who regarded Helton as a quiet man with common sense and decency. Confusingly, after a brief political campaign during a frigid autumn, he wound up with only two votes out of the twenty-five that were cast. The newspaper reported only a sentence:

T. VANHOY OF VELLUM's CASKE DEFEATED H. L. ASTER FOR THE OPEN SEAT OF COUNTY COMMISSIONER BY A WIDE MARGIN.

Knowing that he'd voted for himself, he'd only say later that it made him trust both his wife and his preacher a good deal less.

The next day, before he went into town, he took great pains to clean and ready his gun- a fact that was observed with silent concern by everyone in the family. To hear Maddy tell it, he stood from the table and inserted the pistol with significant gravity of movement into his belt. At long last, she said, "Helton, where in tarnation are you going with that gun?" He said, "I figure a man that's got no more friends than I do would be wise to protect him­ self." Whereupon he closed the door behind him and walked the long road into town. He never ran for another office, and no one ever suggested to him that he should.

As a boy I used to ride with my grandfather in his rusted Ford pickup truck to the Buckram Abattoir north of town some days after school and on some weekends. On the main level, the store sold bacon, sausage, vegetables, and various other subsistence items. Out behind the store was a large cement slab with four crudely cut channels running to a black drain. On the sign in the front was a black and white hog.

At the Buckram Abattoir, everybody knew...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: HOGARTH PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0451495640
• ISBN 13: 9780451495648
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar