Ron Rash writes like a landscape painter and it is the land that is the heart of this haunting tale of love, murder and loss. The characters in his story are motivated by a yearning to leave some part of themselves in this world after they are gone, something connected to the valleys and mountains they so dearly love.
It’s the early 1950s, Korea is the war of the hour and most of the men in this novel have survived its killing fields, or those of WWII, to come home to a different kind of killing in the browning fields of Oconee County, South Carolina. In the Appalachian mountains and the small towns of the Carolina foothills, drought is bringing down the corn and tobacco and drying up the rivers and creeks that feed those fields. But Carolina Power has something else in mind and it hangs in the air like the August heat. Most of the farms are in Jocassee, a Cherokee word meaning “valley of the lost” from the legend of a drowned princess whose body was never found. This legend foreshadows the story line as much as nature’s portents (the signs of things to be and not to be) that the mountain people watch for and live by.
The novel — which won the Novello Festival Press Prize for 2002 — is told in five voices: the sheriff, the wife, the husband, the son and the deputy. It begins with the High Sheriff and the crime.
When he drives out from Seneca and watches the soil change from red to black to rocky, he reminds himself that he doesn’t miss the hoeing and the hoping for rain that he left behind when he moved to town. Atmosphere and place are real — we are pulled right into that county and into the characters’ minds. We hear from Amy, the wife, whose voice is as strong and compelling in the telling as the men who give us their view of this Appalachian world and the drama that knits these people together. Amy’s tale of passion and lovemaking with two very different men has its own gentleness of voice, a gentleness that carries over to the men desperately in love with her.
The setting takes us back to Cheerwine, Double Cola crates and Goody headache powders, to a time when people ate dinner in the middle of the day and maybe settled down at night for a good read or some mending after supper. And the unlucky families, like Billy Holcombe’s, got the hail, the polio, the lightning starting a fire in the barn. If there were someone to blame it would be the Widow Glendower, whose potions and omens are woven throughout the story. She seems to rise straight out of the Celtic culture of witches and soothsayers, someone in the oral tradition of the Welsh epics or the literature of medieval times. And yet Rash brings this strong, lonely soul to life as he does again and again with these characters — especially the hardscrabble farming and mountain folk.
Similes and metaphors fall from the mouths of Rash’s characters as naturally as leaves from dogwoods in late summer — the sheriff watches buzzards “drifting down slow as black ashes over the trees,” Amy struggles with “thoughts of bad times laid deep in my mind like river snags,” and her husband, Billy, knows the ground’s so thirsty, it’ll drink up a dead man’s blood before you could “tell a man’s life had spilled out there.” This is a book of images from the natural world, a world that is totally integrated into the characters’ daily lives.
An old-time mountain story played out in the 20th century, One Foot In Eden follows in the footsteps of Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek and Charles Fraiser’s Cold Mountain. Told with classic overtones in the roles the characters play, the plot involves two old women essential to the tale, one of them, Widow Glendower, providing mood and foreboding like a Greek chorus and the other, Mrs. Winchester, moving the action forward in profound ways. We have the love triangle and the violence and tragedy it brings. There’s the good sheriff, trying to bring some justice, or at least forgiveness, to all of this. And the fifth and final teller is the deputy whose words are like an epilogue and also like a deputy tying up loose ends after the sheriff and the participants in the crime have played their parts.
Finally, it’s a rich and lyrical language that is Ron Rash’s gift to us, from the wise and moving words of the people in his novel to the whispers and secrets given up by the land he knows so well.
Ron Rash will read from One Foot In Eden at Creative Loafing Carolina Writers Night, a part of the Novello Festival of Reading. The event takes place Wednesday, October 16, at 7:30pm in the Neighborhood Theatre on 36th Street in Historic North Charlotte. The event is free.
This article appears in Oct 9-15, 2002.
