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<-back It all happened
40 years ago in a Tennessee town. A gun went off. A house caught fire.
And, in the rubble, a man lay dead. One woman, now nearly a hundred
years old, knows all the secrets about that night -- secrets that involve
two brothers, a shiny revolver, an innocent child. And this old woman,
frail and fading, knows, too, that at last the time has come to spill
those powerful secrets. If this whole story sounds familiar somehow
-- well, then Elizabeth Cox has done her job well. Because the point
she makes in her first novel is that most new stories we hear, especially
the ones about disasters, turn out to be stories we've known all along.
They are built right into our bones. And in every new place we visit,
there is territory that's already etched on our souls -- strange territory
that turns out to be familiar ground. Cox's hero, Jacob Bechner, has
had a glimmering of this fact since he was a small boy and traveled
on car trips through the South with his family. Every now and then,
passing a certain piece of land, a clearing in the trees, Jacob would
feel that it was a place he recognized, a place he'd been before. "Not
de'ja vu so much, not a trick the mind plays because the place where
memory is stored goes faster than what is happening in the present,
but a knowledge that is deeper than anything learned so far in life."
Now,
at age 60, Jacob has learned a lot more about life, but there are certain
things that still elude him. What he most needs to know -- and is terrified
to hear -- is the truth about what happened, 40 years ago, on the night
of the fire. He has come back home to Sweetwater, Tenn., to meet with
the old woman, Callie, and find out her secrets. Because the man who
died in that burning house was Jacob Bechner's brother, Drue. And all
that Jacob remembers is that he was there at Drue's house when the fire
broke out and he was holding a gun and that his brother's mouth was
open, "as though he wanted to sing" just before he fell down
dead. Elizabeth Cox seems
to know just how a man like Jacob, a man coming home to face the truth,
would spend his days. In Sweetwater, Jacob dreams about the past. He
flips through the pages of his mother's diary. He plays with his sister
Annie's grandchildren, taking them to the circus and camping in an abandoned
piano box. He stops in at the diner to see his old friends, Ned, Sophie
and Soldier. We can see he's fidgeting and frittering away his time,
putting off his visit to Callie. But there is something else going on
here, too. In his mother's
diary, Jacob finds references to a dark secret -- a secret too terrible
to be written down. At the circus, an elephant goes wild and kills a
man. Later, as Jacob and the children look on, the old elephant is burned
alive in its cage. The whole incident brings to mind a story Drue once
told Jacob about a fire at a live bear show. And, in the night, inside
the piano box, the young child, Ty, cries out for his father, much the
same way Jacob himself calls out Drue's name in his sleep. Day by day,
in Sweetwater, Jacob sees these things and he begins to understand what
he only half knew before, that there is a pattern to tragedy that cannot
be altered; that the same sad songs are sung and sung again. And what
Elizabeth Cox shows us is that it is this understanding, as much as
anything, as much as the secrets he learns from Callie, that will allow
Jacob to make peace with his life. There is a nice,
spare quality to the language in this book. Cox can use her words like
blunt instruments -- at times, they deliver a knockout blow. But this
style is a difficult one to sustain throughout the novel. After a while,
the characters all sound alike in the steady, sturdy way they talk.
They sound homogenized. Listening to Jacob and his family, we'd have
a hard time guessing they were from Tennessee. And, we'd have a harder
time, still, guessing that this novel is set in 1984. From the evidence
we have here, Sweetwater is a town that time forgot -- a town flash-frozen
in an age of innocence, where hunting and funerals are still the major
social events, where folks don't seem to know that television exists,
and where hungry children never ever clamor to be driven to the Burger
King. Elizabeth Cox has been a short-story writer and she may not yet be on familiar ground with the novel. She leads us along a twisting narrative course in this book, and some scenes turn out to be blind alleys. Still, this is not a journey that we regret taking. Because, along the way, Cox lets us peer into a few of those special clearings in the trees. And, like Jacob, we know we've glimpsed magic that we can't quite explain. ©1984 Washington Post |