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Overview
Vera Violet recounts the dark story of a rough group of teenagers growing up in a twisted rural logging town. There are no jobs. There is no sense of safety. But there is a small group of loyal friends, a truck waiting with the engine running, a pair of boots covered in blood, and a hot 1911 pistol with a pearl grip.
Vera Violet O’Neel’s home is in the Pacific Northwest—not the glamorous scene of coffee bars and craft beers, but the hardscrabble region of busted pickups and broken dreams. Vera’s mother has left, her father is unstable, and her brother is deeply troubled. Against this gritty background, Vera struggles to establish a life of her own, a life fortified by her friends and her hard–won love. But the relentless poverty coupled with the twin lures of crystal meth and easy money soon shatter fragile alliances.
Her world violently torn apart, Vera flees to St. Louis, Missouri. There, alone in a small apartment, she grieves for her broken family, her buried friends, and her beloved, Jimmy James Blood. In this brilliant, explosive debut, Melissa Anne Peterson establishes herself as a fresh, raw voice, a writer to be reckoned with.
""Vera Violet is the most authentic and exciting debut I've read in a long time. At once gritty and jaw–droppingly lyrical, Peterson's voice is a clarion call for the downtrodden and disenchanted. Reading Vera Violet is nothing less than a visceral and stirring experience."" —Jonathan Evison, author of Lawn Boy
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781640092327 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 02/04/2020 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
| Lexile: | HL620L (what's this?) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
FIGHTERS
A long time ago, a scowling face with shaggy dark hair stared up at me during recess. The new boy wanted me to come down from the big wooden tower. He yelled with scrubbed hands cupped around a red mouth. The wind took away his words.
Tanya, Tammy, and Sherrie stood around the thick pine logs with crossed arms. They would not let the new boy through. Because I was the leader. And I said who could climb the ladder to the top.
I beat the boy after school. I did not say a word before or after. I beat him because he stood against the brick wall alone like he was a fighter. So I came up to him fast with a sucker punch. He doubled over, and I pushed him down. I gave him a swift kick for good measure.
As he lay in the mud gasping, I retreated and threw handfuls of pea gravel from the wooden tower where Tanya, Tammy, and Sherrie waited. It rained down on his curled form as he struggled for air. The fistfuls of small rocks were meant to tell him: I am a fighter. I was born for this.
My body was tall and gangly. I was boyish and ugly with holey jeans and dirty clothing. I had devil-colored yellow hair that hung down in long greasy strands. Insatiable blue eyes. A face that glared. My teacher sent a note home to Mother. It told her I was "negatively influencing the other female students." And I "incited them to violent acts."
Mother told me I had to stop and slapped me hard. She gave me extra chores. My brother, Colin, laughed. My sister, Mima, scoffed. My cheek burned and felt puffy where Mother's hand slapped my face. But my wooden tower was the best place. I knew I would go back there. Day after day.
Before I got on the school bus the next morning, Mother sighed and told me I did not fit my name: Vera Violet. "I named you after my mother and she was a gentle lady." She told me Vera was my grandmother's first name. And violet was the flower she loved best. A flower that grew in the prairies south of town. On mysterious humps of earth named mima mounds. Mother told me I didn't act like her mother or those little purple blooms. She knew deep inside that I could not stop fighting. That I was born for it.
When I got to school, the Fighter Boy got his revenge. He caught me at first recess. Real quick. He grabbed my arm and held it. It was picture day. They handed out little black combs for us to straighten our hair with. He had his in his front pocket. He took it out and swiped at my arm. He did it hard because I was squirming to get away. He used it like a knife. He got me right below the elbow where my skin was pulled taut.
He didn't think the black plastic would cut me. His eyes popped open wide in surprise when it did. He watched the blood drip to my wrist. He dropped my arm like it was hot metal, stared ferociously into my eyes, and grinned. The next instant, he turned tail and ran. I held my fingers over the wound and stared after him. A calculating calm settled in my young mind.
That night, I dreamed of mima mounds covered in early blue violets. Undulating hills stretched on for miles. There was a zigzag fence. My black-and-white retriever ran beside me.
The Fighter Boy waited on a mound with his arms crossed — frowning. Fescue brushed his pant legs. Violets blinked their purple faces among the green bunchgrass. Flowers covered the hills as far as we could see.
Together, we walked through wet areas between mounds. We traveled deep. The standing water was warm and dark — it covered our knees. We slipped down farther, into a low spot between two bulges of earth. A space filled with calm and awe and secrets. A place of otherworldly hope and violence. Into the soil. The water heaved silently. It was over our heads. We were inside my female body. A womb. And it was filled with dark water.
I woke from the dream in a strange mood that lingered. The night had offered a sensation that changed me. In the morning, I went to my wooden tower first thing like always. I looked out at the playground from my cold, windy, queenly position. I knew I felt different. I knew, as the rain came down, I loved the Fighter Boy.
Small children are capable of great love. Love that overwhelms. Love that changes small worlds completely. Dangerous feelings that blot out everything.
That day, a rumor rippled up and down the hallways of the grade school: The Fighter Boy was kicked out of school forever. The principal insisted on it. He saw how the Fighter Boy smashed the face of the older fifth grader (the would-be bully — the thief who robbed the Fighter Boy of his baseball cap).
The rain still poured after school let out. Kids shivered inside their raincoats in the bus lines. I saw Tanya, Tammy, and Sherrie standing with their hands on their hips in front of the wooden tower. They waited.
But I snuck out a hole in the back fence. I slid down the mud bank to the bottom where raging wastewater bubbled. I waited for my bus alone in the wet weeds. I threw rocks the size of pigeons into the muddy torrent of water. I counted the minutes out loud as I sat. My bus would take a long time yet.
Tanya, Tammy, and Sherrie finally came to find me. They had to sneak down one by one. We were all dirty and wet and pressed close together. They sat next to the water with me. We threw rocks the size of starlings. And sticks as thick as pencils. I told them about mima mounds and purple flowers. Tammy smoked a cigarette. They left one at a time to catch their buses. Mine was the last — rural routes always took the longest.
The wind picked up. My feet were numb inside my muck-caked rubber boots. My body grew stiff beside the stream of grimy runoff. I stayed there as the gusts blew my hair, the wind whipped the bare skin peeking through the holes in my jeans, and my ears grew red and ached. I listened to the breeze rustling the red alder leaves. I waited for the wind to carry the sound of the yellow school bus and the smell of diesel exhaust.
I waited for the wind to return to me the words it had stolen. When the Fighter Boy yelled up at me — with scrubbed hands cupped around a red mouth.
CHAPTER 2HILLBILLY MUSIC
My father was so good-looking he induced certain sounds in a viewer. His sideburns boasted reverb. His crooked smile was outlaw country music. The calluses on his palms made them rough-hewn lumber that boomed and thudded. His arms were heavy and powerful like Les Paul guitars.
I called him Dad, and he worked swing shift, so I didn't see him during the week. But on the weekends he told me stories in the driveway. I handed him tools while he hunched shirtless over his pickup that broke down a lot. He propped the hood open with a wooden stick, and I helped. It always took a long time.
After the note came home from my teacher, he told me different things than usual. He told me about the prisoners with shaved heads who weren't allowed to speak. In the hills among the big trees. The sawmills and logging camps. Douglas fir one thousand years old. I listened carefully to every word. I pictured shoulders hunched over loud machines. Blood boiling inside silent bodies. Anger. Frustration. Thick, dark forests. Before all the trees were cut down. Way back. That first white baby born in Washington Territory — a crying infant with no home. Dad talked about steep hillsides. Old growth. Men in shackles and chains. The blades screeching and moaning. Mountain devils waiting. Lumber barons with evil hearts, heavy pockets, and mouths salivating as they watched the prisoners die on cold windy floors. Their chains caught in the machinery. Their shaved heads a bloody symbol. Their scalps shorn with dull straight razors to stop the spread of lice, demoralize their hearts, and help them forget they were human.
He told me the men worked in leg-irons, and if their fingers caught in the blades, they were sometimes cut off with common carpenter saws. Dad shook his head and let me know "they didn't have doctors. Didn't have real prisons. They had those work camps at first. Couple rich fuckers wanted to get richer." He stared at me. A shotgun warning surged from his black Irish blue eyes before he said, "That's what greed does."
In my mind, the unspoken words huddled underneath the prisoners' thirsty tongues. Frustration erupted in their tired bodies. It coiled and raced and circled in fierce, red blood. Their words did not come out through crooked, set teeth. Clenched jaws halted. The men were voiceless. And their tongues stumbled clumsily even when free.
"And what about later?" I asked him.
He was quiet before he spoke. "Later, they buried the men where they died. In shallow, unmarked graves. Broken chains, falling logs, and violence killed them."
I imagined their blood mixing with the sawdust. I imagined them falling asleep to the phantom nighttime hooting and chattering of northern spotted owl. The trees looming far above. The rain pouring down.
When Mother came home and found me in the driveway with big, wild thoughts in my head, she scolded him. Dad told me these things because he saw something in my eyes. A hunger that would remain. A hardness that must have meaning. He saw how I strutted when I walked.
My life would be difficult. I was a fighter. And I was born for it.
He oiled his boots at the foot of my bed as he talked before bedtime. He caught my eye before speaking. Sometimes, when I stared straight into his eyes in the dark I heard a fiddler playing notes in the devil's key. Sometimes, when I looked at how his black hair swept across his forehead, I heard wicked harmonicas telling secrets.
He told me that Wesley Everest was thrown off the bridge on Mellon Avenue three times before his neck finally snapped. And that young boys were taken out of town regularly and beaten one by one by men in city shoes. He told me that even as the workers' faces were filled with purple bruises, the desperate boys asked what right the lumber barons had to the land in the first place. They asked how they could steal and exploit so decadently. Wesley Everest hung from the bridge all night. His teeth broken and bloody — caved in with the butt of a rifle. The men castrated him and shot his body repeatedly. Dad told me that neither coroner in town would take the dead man in the morning. And no one was prosecuted for the murder. His jailed friends were forced at gunpoint to dig the hole where he was buried.
He told me that in New England hundreds of years ago Irish, Scottish, and poor English servants conspired together with African-born slaves to escape to freedom. He described the rebellions. And how afterward the masters forbid them to interact. And they were not allowed to marry one another. He said runaway slaves with light skin used to shave their heads to blend in. He explained to me that white trash was a name created for those who lived in mixed neighborhoods. It was a name for the poverty that remained in spite of skin color. He told me how rednecks were workers of all skin colors who protested unfair treatment. "Those words shouldn't hurt you." He patted my feet and turned my light down low. He set his boots against the doorframe.
Mom lingered in the hallway and listened. He walked toward her, and I could hear her reprimanding and him sighing. Her words, "Giving her confused nightmares," floated across my sleepy eyelids. I saw them spelled out. Colin snored lightly. My parents kissed in the dark.
Dad told me those things back when his truck still ran. When he was twenty-seven and good-looking. When he whistled and music played out of his radio in the driveway. When the future was bright and existed. Before we moved to Cota Street, I could fall asleep in the trailer in a clear-cut surrounded by other O'Neels. On those nights, I thought the wind chime was the rattling of the prisoners' chains. And my dreams were of business owners who slept lightly — their billy clubs waiting.
But in my dreams, the men with shaved heads had brilliant eyes. Even though they were ensnared. Even though they were never allowed to speak.
CHAPTER 3AS I GOT OLDER
We moved to Cota Street when I was nine. Cota kids were born of immigrants and nomads and peasants. There was never royal blood. The families were not written about in important books with hard covers. The struggles reached their steadfast fingers through each generation with precision. Every family was touched.
Sometimes, I thought my own immigrant nomad ancestors weren't really troubled. I imagined them relaxed and flexible — solving problems tenaciously. Good and faithful friends. Fighting and asking questions and making love long into the night. Sometimes, I thought of my great-great-uncles shouting curse words to the wet night sky and laughing. They must have known before me that nothing lasts forever. Not even the new buildings, massive trees, or frequent beatings. I imagined them searching for the wild lands and the wild things. I knew they understood, even as their deaths loomed closer, that someday they would rise again.
As I got older, the steelhead runs were not what they used to be. The big fish were near extinction. Natural resources dwindled down to the barest of bones. The forests that had once seemed to never end were shorn and overwhelmed. Corporations declared bankruptcy. Sold off their excess land. They finished with their liquidations and the mountainsides were left naked. Mini malls and developments popped up out of nowhere. The purple flowers were crowded out by introduced weeds. The butterflies flew away and did not come back.
I watched carefully as timberland became ritzy bedroom communities. The Esworthys, who bought our property after the bank foreclosed on my father, didn't know anything different. They paid me and Colin to tend the stretch of fertilized turf they installed in front of their house. I watched Mr. Esworthy fight private battles with nature using herbicides and clippers. The stream started to look strange.
Distant grocery stores with organic produce from other countries took the place of Mother's backyard garden. Her vegetables went to seed.
The Esworthys stayed on the highway that drove through town. They said they had no reason to visit the city of David. They swam in Wynoochee Lake, took pictures of moss-covered big-leaf maples, fished in the Hamma Hamma River, and gambled on the Squaxin Island reservation. Their wilderness was recreation. It was small and consumable. They conquered it with backpacks and hiking shoes. They had never seen an old-growth forest. Or been stalked by a wild thing.
The Esworthys smiled at my father's ragged shirt and work boots as if they were a funny costume he put on for them. His clothes were out-of-date. From an era long ago. He had worked hard for no reason. The state now had a capitol building and a college, and the timber money had been invested in enterprises we could never touch. My father, and other men like him, were no longer needed. They had little to show for the generations of missing body parts and hard labor.
The Esworthys owned our land now. They would not sell it back to us. A five-bedroom house was erected for the childless couple. It was their second home. They went to the salmon ceremony in August with cameras. Mrs. Esworthy chatted excitedly with Colin and me about the plans to pave the roads to several wilderness areas. She would soon be able to drive her commuter car all the way to the tops of mountains.
Colin and I looked at each other in alarm. I pushed my dirt-rimmed fingernails down into the soil and didn't answer. I knew the men who once owned the lumber companies had put on their expensive suits. And flown away in silver jets. The rain came in autumn like always.
The forests remained clear-cut. Bald hills turned to soupy messes that slid. The silt flowed into the rivers. Entire families of salmon died. Tributaries lost the ability to sustain life. Tourists held their noses against the smell of rotting fish carcasses. Grocery stores in small towns put up signs that read no more credit. Fishing rights that reservations had fought so hard for were almost useless. Their guns stayed in their holsters. It was hard to make a living from fishing anymore.
Downtown, the tidewater mill wasn't as busy as it used to be. The mill workers stood around and shook their heads at the loss. Heavy fog hid the town. The angry prisoners deep inside had been forced into silence for more than a century. The Wobblies had been killed and imprisoned eighty years ago.
My father told my mother that he would try to "work harder," that it was just a "bad time." My mother planted a garden on Cota Street. My father tried to believe his boss paid him what he was worth. He was anxious. He wore his work boots through to the floor.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Vera Violet"
by .
Copyright © 2020 Melissa Anne Peterson.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
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