The last in the Kirkman family cycle by one of our most treasured writers
In Look Back All the Green Valley, Jess Kirkman returns to the North Carolina mountain town of his boyhood to be with his ailing mother and finally settle the family's accounts after the death of his father ten years ago. Cleaning out his father's secret work room reunites him with the irrepressible Joe Kirkman and leads him to make new discoveries--in the dusty room he finds an unusual machine made of stovepipe and ceramic, and a handwritten map. These clues lead him to uncover a part of his father's history he never knew. Rich in the story telling traditions of Southern Appalachia, Fred Chappell's magical novel celebrates a way of life that has passed. Look Back All the Green Valley follows Chappell's three previous novels--Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You, Brighten the Corner Where You Are, and I'm Am One of You Forever--and concludes one of the most rewarding cycles of novels in recent memory.
The last in the Kirkman family cycle by one of our most treasured writers
In Look Back All the Green Valley, Jess Kirkman returns to the North Carolina mountain town of his boyhood to be with his ailing mother and finally settle the family's accounts after the death of his father ten years ago. Cleaning out his father's secret work room reunites him with the irrepressible Joe Kirkman and leads him to make new discoveries--in the dusty room he finds an unusual machine made of stovepipe and ceramic, and a handwritten map. These clues lead him to uncover a part of his father's history he never knew. Rich in the story telling traditions of Southern Appalachia, Fred Chappell's magical novel celebrates a way of life that has passed. Look Back All the Green Valley follows Chappell's three previous novels--Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You, Brighten the Corner Where You Are, and I'm Am One of You Forever--and concludes one of the most rewarding cycles of novels in recent memory.
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Overview
The last in the Kirkman family cycle by one of our most treasured writers
In Look Back All the Green Valley, Jess Kirkman returns to the North Carolina mountain town of his boyhood to be with his ailing mother and finally settle the family's accounts after the death of his father ten years ago. Cleaning out his father's secret work room reunites him with the irrepressible Joe Kirkman and leads him to make new discoveries--in the dusty room he finds an unusual machine made of stovepipe and ceramic, and a handwritten map. These clues lead him to uncover a part of his father's history he never knew. Rich in the story telling traditions of Southern Appalachia, Fred Chappell's magical novel celebrates a way of life that has passed. Look Back All the Green Valley follows Chappell's three previous novels--Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You, Brighten the Corner Where You Are, and I'm Am One of You Forever--and concludes one of the most rewarding cycles of novels in recent memory.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466860520 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 12/17/2013 |
| Series: | The Kirkman Family Cycle , #4 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 354 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
TRAPPED!
Time has no secrets. You can watch a clock all day and never learn a thing.
— Fugio
My mother possessed a bristling armory of useful talents, but a gift for dying was not among them. I recalled the duties she had undertaken over the years, the offices she had fulfilled in regard to the jester's motley of business enterprises my father initiated. She had served as handmaid and general manager, as field laborer and nurse, as accountant and secretary, as critic and counselor, as gofer and governess, and their lives and happiness throve. Sometimes she had complained of her burdens, for they were weighty, but mostly she had performed those multifarious tasks cheerfully. My parents adored each other, even though the expression of that adoration was shadowed by a dark mordancy of temperament on her side and by a vigilant teasing playfulness on his.
He was Joe Robert Kirkman and she was his beloved Cora, his mainstay and counterpart but not his mirror image. Where his nature gleamed with streaks of fantasy and sparkled with uninhibited impulse, hers was rooted in the clinging clay of pragmatism and patched here and there with fatalistic gloomings. My mother was rather less gay than my father, maybe a little less generous, but she was equally brimful of life; it was only a quieter kind of life than his. Yet her fullness of life ebbed quickly from the brim when my father died, hammered to the floor of their living room by a massive heart attack. He had been watching the great spectacle on the television set he called, in one of his futuristic waggeries, his "visiscreen." It was an almost brand-new twenty-one-inch-screen Zenith. The date was July 20, 1969, only hours before one man ventured a small step and mankind made a giant leap. All during the 1950s, my father had predicted that Americans — men and women together — would rocket to the moon. His prediction was dismissed by our neighbors and even by his admiring cronies as being only another example of his plentiful eccentricities. But I believed him. When I was a teenager, I sometimes imagined that he might be the first man to fly to the moon.
Maybe he was.
My mother never recovered from the loss of her husband. Oh, she made it through the necessary rituals well enough; her usual valiant courage was equal to those ordeals. She managed to complete some of the most urgent of the business demands: tax forms, will probate, debt arrangements, deed searches, and so forth. But then her body began to weaken as her spirit crumbled and her strength of will deserted her little by little, like a cone of sand leaking away to the bottom of an hourglass. She claimed in these days that she could wish for nothing more ardently than to lie in the earth alongside Joe Robert Kirkman, her Ariel, her Puck, and her Prospero all in one.
This wish is a common, an honorable, and an ancient desire. I remembered how Roman Ovid had given it warm incarnation in his Metamorphoses with the story of Baucis and Philemon. They were an elderly couple who had loved each other always, who had lived in peace and amity since their first hours together. When benevolent deities in human disguise made it possible for their secret hopes to be granted, the husband begged only that neither of them would have to experience the loss of the other. The wish was granted; Zeus changed Baucis, the woman, into a linden tree and her husband into an oak. Their branches intertwined and together they formed an everduring arch. When my mother voiced her wish to join my father, a few scraps of Ovid's verses murmured in my head.
And yet when death did approach, when my mother's heart fluttered and threatened to cease its pumping, she drew back by force of an undesired strength. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was yet too powerful. She suffered from congestive heart failure, a disease that filled her lungs with fluid and her mind with terror. Extinction drew nigh upon her, but then a glimpse into the unresonant abyss would send her soul scurrying, like a terrified lapdog, back to the warmth of the world, back to the treachery of living. After a while, she made a kind of peace, accepting the necessity of having to die in the good Lord's own good time and not according to a schedule of her own devising. But she bowed to it with an air of deep regret, as if she was disappointed in herself.
Then there came periods when she was bedridden. Now she would study her worldly affairs and think of duties undone, tasks that my sister, Mitzi, and I were to carry out. Some of these were merely trivial, but she would brook no argument, and we, ever mindful of her failing health, could offer none. When Mitzi and I conferred about some of these minor concerns, we would complain in good-humored mock-gloomy terms. "Trapped!" we would exclaim. "She's got us exactly where she wants us. We're caught like mice in a trap!"
Some of the things she wanted were of middling importance. The first of these was the burial arrangement. If she could not join my father immediately, as she so expressly prayed to do, she wanted to make certain that when she did die, she would be supine by his side. The second item of urgency was my father's last remaining hideaway workshop; it had been left untouched since his demise, and she wanted it cleaned out, sorted out, and set in order. There were other chores, too, but they were of less moment.
How could we deny her? There she lay in the bed she detested in the new-smelling infirmary she abhorred in the retirement community she was not reconciled to, and she issued Mitzi and me our orders in no uncertain terms. When she spoke to me, she tried to straighten herself, scooting back against two propped pillows at the headboard. She may have thought this taller posture lent her commands more authority.
It twisted my heart to look at her. Her face was gray and peeled-looking, her eyes watery. Painful arthritis had wrenched her hands into bony knots. Her hair had always been thin and was now so sparse that she had gathered it into a wispy topknot and secured it with a pink ribbon tied in a bow; this style resulted in a Kewpie-doll look that made her crushing sadness appear a little ridiculous. I couldn't help remembering how bright she used to look, her pert intelligence animating her features. That was the way she was supposed to look, I thought, and the way she looked now was like an ill-chosen frock; it simply was not her.
This room was too small for me to sit beside her. I had to heave a ponderous armchair, upholstered in squeaky lime green plastic, to the foot of the bed and lean forward toward the footboard bars as she laid out her plans. I expected to agree to her every demand, even to the ones that made no sense to me.
"You want to make sure Jeff Halsted finishes paying off his loan," she said, "and you need to send a gift for his daughter's high school graduation."
"All right," I said.
"What will you send?"
"I don't know. What do you suggest?"
She flapped a hand in listless impatience. "I'm all finished with those kinds of concerns now. You'll have to decide things like this from now on for yourself."
"I'll ask Mitzi. This is her specialty."
"You can't rely on your sister for everything, Jess. You've made a bad habit of that."
"That's true."
"And there's an awkward patch of ground by the corner of the Lindsay pasture that we never got resurveyed. You'll have to get that done if you want to sell or build there."
"All right."
"Have you heard any word about Aunt Bessie Scott? They say the doctors can't do a thing for her."
"I haven't heard."
She would think of more things to do or to inquire about, then stop. "Are you sure you'll remember all this?" she demanded. "Maybe you'd better get a pencil and write it down."
"We're all set," I told her. "Mitzi has a list all written out. Everything you've mentioned so far is on her list."
"Yes." She nodded sagely. "Yes, of course. Jess, I don't see why you can't be more like your sister. She knows how to get things organized so she doesn't waste time and energy. You —" Now she shook her head as if perplexed. "You're too much like your father, always trying to do a hundred things at once and never getting a one of them done."
"I wish I had Mitzi's skills," I said, but my contrite admission did not mollify her. She had already locked into her familiar routine of describing to me my character flaws and wouldn't be satisfied until she had tallied all she could think of. She began with the obvious — my excessive drinking and total lack of social grace — and went on to details of my slovenly appearance, then finished with a topic she knew would irk me sorely, the obscurity of my literary expression. I had the feeling that she was going to make me submit my shoe shine and the hinder surfaces of my ears for inspection.
Now she shifted back to the topics at hand. "But you understand how important it is to get the burial arrangements straight. And you know we've got to clean out Joe Robert's personal workshop."
"Well, I think Mitzi and I have about got the burial arrangements completed — and I came all the way up from Greensboro just to look into that workshop."
"That's the only reason you came?"
"And to have a cheerful visit or two with you, of course. We take that for granted."
Her expression was one of mildly sardonic amusement, but part of my sentence was true. I had come up to take care of the workshop, but the burial arrangements were far from complete. That matter weighed darkly upon me.
As soon as the spring semester had ended and I'd filled in the necessary paperwork and lugged it to the proper administrative pigeonholes, I'd left the neo-Georgian buildings of the campus and driven 250 miles west to the mountains of North Carolina to try to take care of family matters. Since I was likely to be gone at least a week, Susan stayed behind. Our garden would claim most of her attention, she said, but I pictured her grooming our cats, Chloe and Marty, reading the complete works of Margaret Maron, and eating nothing — repeat: nothing — but praline caramel ice cream. When I got back home, we would celebrate what I hoped would be my triumphant return. I would take her out to Valencia, a nifty Spanish restaurant on grubby Tate Street, where she would fall upon a mountainous green salad and a lamb chop like a ravenous animal, an unlikely hybrid of bison and tigress. But my return would hardly be triumphant unless Mitzi and I could get the business of my mother's burial straightened out. Unforeseen complications had arisen in that regard.
"You shouldn't rely so much on Mitzi," my mother said. "She has a busy schedule, an important career. You shouldn't go running to her about every little detail."
"Come now. I'm not entirely helpless," I said, feeling, as always, painfully vulnerable in the face of her criticism. "I manage to move about the world without continually falling on my face."
"Yes — because your wife props you up. Without her, you'd be facedown most hours of the day."
"I'm not such a hopeless case, am I?" "You're a dreamer. Head in the clouds. Nose in a book. Pointless schemes. If Susan didn't look after you, I shudder to picture the condition your affairs would be in. Making footnotes. Writing poetry nobody can understand."
"Well, maybe I am a hopeless case. But you've had time enough to come to terms with it by now."
"What was the name of that book you wrote?"
"River was the first one." It was the hundredth weary time I'd said so. She knew the title and knew I knew she knew.
"And what was that strange name you signed to it?"
"My pen name is Fred Chappell. If I signed those books 'Jess Kirkman,' you'd have a conniption fit. Some dark family secrets are aired in those poems."
"I don't see how it could make any difference what name you put to it. I never heard of anybody who read your River."
"What — nobody? Not a single living soul?"
"Well ... I did talk a couple of my friends into trying it, but they didn't understand it any better than I did."
"Maybe they're not used to reading poetry. Or maybe they just don't care for it."
"They're not dumbbells. ... If you're going to write books, why don't you write what people want to read?"
"All right, next time I'll write a novel. It'll be a detective thriller. I'll put in a secret treasure and episodes of nail-chewing suspense and a flock of mysterious ladies. Plenty of women with possibly naughty ways about them. I'll sign it 'Jess Kirkman' in bright neon letters. How do you think you'll like that?"
"No, you won't," she stated firmly. "You won't ever write anything but more poetry. That's all you ever think about."
But my dear and cranky mother was mistaken. Just a year ago, I had actually begun a novel, a tale of intrigue, betrayal, sabotage, and lugubrious peril. My story took place in a university that resembled to a suspicious degree the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where I taught gum- chewing sophomores and intensely political graduate students the arcanities of literature. My plotline involved a married chairman of a Romance languages department who was carrying on a weird affair with a junior colleague, a brash young woman who schemed to push him into divorce and snare him in remarriage by getting pregnant with his child. Her plans were complicated but not ruined by the fact that this à clef chairman (Professor L. J. Moreau in what we may guardedly term "real life") was the cautious but proud possessor of a vasectomy. Yet his paramour was not foiled. She got herself artificially inseminated at Duke University Medical Center, and then ...
... And then my novel collapsed like a punctured soufflé. The observations of character transformed to smart-ass remarks, the "incisive wit" devolved into slapstick, and the satiric tone degenerated into spiteful gossip, and I found myself not describing telling incidents at all, but paying off ancient grudges and unforgiven slights. I had decided, ruefully but not reluctantly, that Jess Kirkman was not born to write novels. I was condemned to poetry. I was a dreamer: nose in a book, head in the clouds. Whoever it was who had brought these charges against me had told nothing but the flat-footed truth.
When I looked at her, my mother wore an expression that convinced me she knew exactly what I was thinking at this moment. I hated that. "I have an idea how to make some money from my writing."
"Really?"
"Dante," I said, trying to sound confident and sensible.
"What about him?"
"I'm working on a translation of The Divine Comedy. It will sell pretty well, I think. People are always reading Dante."
She gave me a narrow look. "How's your Italian?"
"Not wonderful," I admitted. "But I've got learned friends I can go to when I run into trouble."
"Have you got a contract from a publisher?"
"Not yet. I thought I'd better try it out before I got in over my head."
"How's it going?"
"Not quickly."
She nodded. "Poetry again. That's all you ever think about."
"Unfair," I complained. "Not true at all. I think about lots of things. I think about you. How are they treating you in this place?"
This was my unsubtle ploy to steer the conversation away from my shortcomings into the broad fields of her displeasure with her situation. She was bedridden, emotionally fatigued, frightened, and heartsick, and her complaints reflected these qualities of her illness. She took the bait and began to expostulate, faulting every doorknob, coffee cup, thumbtack, toilet seat, television set, and mattress in the building. As I listened to this plenary bill of grievance, a freshet of relief welled up in me. Her querulous moods usually signaled that some measure of strength was returning. As her energy remounted, she became restless, and this exacerbated her bitterness.
I had heard these same complaints a number of times. My attention wandered and I looked out the window into trees glowing emerald in the steady June sunlight. Her room on the third floor gave my mother a view of the tops of the trees bordering the grounds, which were set against the darker green background of Slater Mountain. The warren of streets and houses that comprised the little village of Graceful Days Retirement Community cozied up to the base of Slater, and footpaths, neatly graded and pruned, led into the woods for those seniors who enjoyed comfortable hikes.
She saw where I was looking, and her gaze, too, was drawn to the window. The treetops swayed, flashing green and silver, and then we watched a flock of goldfinches flutter down like October beech leaves from the limbs of a red oak to the ground. She fell silent, pursed her lips, and I could sense the sadness of some fond recollection suffuse her mind. In a few minutes, she said, "Whenever I see that flock of birds, I think of Joe Robert, how much he liked to study nature and think about birds and stars and things. If your father were here right now, he would recall something interesting to tell us. I'm sure he knew all about those birds, whatever they are."
"Goldfinches."
"Yes. He would know about them."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Look Back All the Green Valley"
by .
Copyright © 1999 Fred Chappell.
Excerpted by permission of Picador.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
THE MOON BEHIND THE CLOUDS,
Chapter 1: Trapped!,
Chapter 2: The Tipton Tornado,
Chapter 3: Dr. Electro's Secret Laboratory,
Chapter 4: At the Grave of Virgil Campbell,
Chapter 5: Backward in Time!,
ON THE FOGGY MOUNTAINTOP,
Chapter 6: Clues of the Secret Map,
Chapter 7: On the Track of the Fox,
Chapter 8: Old Times There Are Not Forgotten,
Chapter 9: Into the Unknown!,
Chapter 10: "Perhaps You Are Wondering Why I Called You All Here Together —",
THE MOON GONE AWAY,
Books by Fred Chappell,
Copyright,