Familiar Ground: A Novel

Introduction

Familiar Ground was my first novel.

Even though I received my MFA in poetry, the first time I wrote a story I felt lowered into a deep groove that felt familiar. Fiction seemed more congenial to me. The next summer I attended the Saranac Lake Writers’ Conference, where I submitted my story to be discussed by writers and editors. I had never attended a writer’s conference and did not know what to expect. On the small plane that took us to Saranac Lake I sat next to the poet Carolyn Forché and talked with her nervously; but before the plane landed I grew airsick. Everyone heard about it so the first thing anyone would say to me (after being introduced) was always, Oh, you’re the one who threw up. So began the conference and my early introduction as a writer of fiction.

Despite that humble beginning, the conference went well: my story was accepted for publication by Fiction International and an agent asked if I planned to write a novel. I said sure, because I tend to say sure to things that I have no idea how to do. Since I have never been good with following a book of instructions, I knew that I would not read Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (though I might profit from reading it now). Instead, I returned home to Durham, North Carolina, to enroll in a class at Duke University focusing on the sonata and symphony. My way of learning one thing has always been to learn something else. (Incidentally, other novels were written while studying astronomy, biology and botany, and the Blues.)

While writing Familiar Ground I listened each day to the form of a sonata, noting the inclusion of statement, development, and reiteration, with reminding phrases that kept returning throughout the piece. I listened to symphonies by Dvorak and Beethoven, studying the tonal changes, or the way that action often increased after a melodic period. And though I was never accomplished enough to apply the structure directly, I did imitate the rise and fall of action and wrote my first novel. I did not care if anyone noticed the music that I heard in my head, but I hoped the reader might experience a rhythm.

For five years I worked on my novel and when I finally sent it to that agent who had invited it, she said that it was not the kind of novel she preferred. She rejected it. Instead I sent Familiar Ground to other agents who said they were interested. In time, I chose one and Atheneum soon bought the novel.

Since it was my first novel, and since I do not read my novels after they have been published, looking at it now I see the work of this younger writer struggling with clunky transitions and an overabundance of loss and death. Not to give too much away, but the most horrific scene in the book is the description of an elephant burned alive as punishment for breaking loose and becoming a threat to the circus audience. This scene is the only event in the novel that actually happened—at a fair in Tennessee. The woman who told me about it said that she could hear that elephant screaming from her house five miles away and she could still hear that sound in her head.

The first chapter of Familiar Ground introduces an old man and a boy who meet on a train. Oddly, that first chapter stayed the first chapter. This has not happened since in my writing. My first chapters in later books often ended up somewhere in the middle or even toward the end. I also include in this novel (as I have included in most of my books) a kind of Jungian shadow-character—one who is either simple-minded, or a man with a wounded heart, or sometimes both. Yet the character is strong with courage and compassion.

Soldier, in Familiar Ground, is a mentally disabled young man who was both loved and mistreated. I formed the character of Soldier from some kids I knew in my teaching experience in Special Education—which I taught for six years while in my twenties. I never got over it. Teaching kids ages seven to eighteen with limited mental abilities opened my eyes in unexpected ways. First, I realized that they had no meanness in them. None. It takes intelligence, I guess, for planned meanness; and though these children could be bad, I never saw an ounce of malice. I enjoyed spending my days with human beings of that character. I also felt inspired by how hard they worked to accomplish something. One boy, crippled terribly with cerebral palsy, and with mental abilities that were impossible to judge because of his barely intelligible speech, had learned to ride a bike. As I watched him ride down a hill then turn to come back up, he was wobbling and I could not even fathom how many times he must have fallen in the process of learning to ride that bike. His pride in himself was enormous, as was my pride in him. I became acutely aware of how easily I give up on a difficult task. My love and admiration for these students—with their range of abilities, sense of humor, honesty, and a willingness to forgive the wrong done to them by other students—never left my mind. In my most recent novel, A Question of Mercy, a young man of limited mental abilities is a central character. I never learned so much about being human as I did while teaching those remarkable kids.

Finally, I learned to write by reading. As well as I can remember, while writing this novel, I was reading Marilynne Robinson, Richard Yates, Fred Chappell, Robert Penn Warren, Jane Smiley, Carl Jung, and Faulkner, of course. I don’t know what, in particular, I learned from them, but their insights and stylistic force have stayed with me. More recently I have been absorbing the work of Cormac McCarthy, Knut Hamsun, Margaret Atwood, J.M. Coetzee, James Baldwin, and, again, Marilynne Robinson. I am grateful to these writers and many others for their ability to see the world with clarity, for exquisite use of language, and for the psychological complexities of their characters. I hope to learn more from them for my next novel.

ELIZABETH COX

A Public Place

Jacob came to Sweetwater, Tennessee, by train. It was autumn and he felt unhoused in spirit, but he always felt that way in autumn. What brought Jacob back to Sweetwater was a letter from a woman who must be close to a hundred years old and a newspaper clipping that (though he had not read it in years) Jacob found he still knew almost by heart.

The train was one of the few trains left now for traveling, most being turned into boutiques or restaurants. This train went its route from Virginia to Tennessee, stopping at towns along the way to let off coal or passengers. And it seemed to Jacob that they didn’t ride long before the train rumbled and squealed to its first blistering halt.

Jacob brushed a shock of hair from his forehead and removed his coat, a sportcoat made of soft wool, too hot for this day, but his favorite. He read and reread the clipping, hoping to find something not noticed before. But a small boy distracted him. The boy was running, swinging himself by the arms of seats. He stopped at intervals, giving anyone who might wish the chance to speak to him. Jacob nodded and the boy sat beside him, assured of welcome.

Ever catch a fish? the boy asked.

Yeah. Did you?

Caught two.

You did?

Caught two this big. The boy reached with his arms as wide as he could.

I’ve never seen a fish that big. Where did you catch a fish that big?

It was some whales.

Whales? No.

Yep. Two whales. The boy looked Jacob straight in the eye. I caught ’em.

That’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard, said Jacob. What’s your name?

David Harley Roberts. The boy scratched his head. His hair was cropped short and stuck up the same length all over. What’s yours?

Jacob Bechner. Jake.

You call me Harley.

A woman’s voice broke from the next car and the boy slipped from his seat, making a motion with his hand that indicated he would be right back. He pushed the curtain that separated the two cars. David, the voice called. Come clean up this mess.

The boy poked his head back through the curtain and held it beneath his chin. He looked as if he were in the shower. She calls me David. He waited for Jacob to nod. But my name’s Harley. You call me Harley. He vanished again. Jacob watched the movement of the curtain regulate itself to the movement of the train, and was dozing when the boy returned and sat beside him.

My Mama’s asleep.

So was I. She won’t mind if you sit here?

Uh-uh. Harley stiffened his legs in front of him and Jacob thought he might say something about his shoes. You know those whales I told you?

Yes.

Do you believe that?

That’s what you told me, said Jacob.

I didn’t catch them yet, said Harley. He lowered his legs. But I could if I wanted to.

Harley, said Jacob in a serious tone. I look at it like this. And Harley looked at Jacob as if Jacob would tell him something profound and long-lasting. You could if you wanted to.

The boy pulled a candy bar from his pocket. It was mashed and softened, but he offered it anyway. Want some? Jacob took it and halved it. They ate, licking the chocolate and using their fingers as spoons.

Do you have kids? Harley asked him.

Yes. I have two sons. Well, one now. But he’s not little anymore.

I’m not little anymore either.

No. I know. Jacob cleared his throat. I mean, he’s older now and has a family of his own.

Do you know how old I am?

Nine. Jacob spoke this with conviction.

Nope. I’m five. Harley swept the piece of paper clean with his finger and licked off the last of the chocolate. But I look nine.

The boy slept beside Jacob most of the night before the mother came to get him. Jacob woke several times (kicked awake), finally finding the boy’s feet in his lap, but later finding the boy gone. Light was beginning to come and he recognized more clearly the trees and fields that moved by. And as they passed rows of sugar cane, Jacob wished to step down and cut stalks from a summer field. As a boy, he worked one summer in Alabama and split the cane stalk, watching the place where moisture would appear. Each thin, firm stalk held in its wooden case a sweet pithy substance and a texture that would last. Nothing seemed so noble to him then as sugar cane, so pleasurable to carry in his hand. The stalks now were cut and broken flat for winter. Jacob raised his hand to greet the day, his fingers ranged long and thin with knuckles that stuck out hard like bolts. The day came up over the slow fields, and for a while when the light was right, Jacob could see both the trees outside and the reflection of the couple asleep across the aisle, not by looking at the reflection or the trees directly, but looking at some point further out that allowed him both visions.

You coming? Jacob’s sister called to him from the house. She had fixed a big meal for his arrival and leaned from the porch to find him. You coming, Jake? Annie looked old to Jacob, finally old, her arms pushing out like leavened bread. Her hair, a dull gray, uncolored, uncut, was pulled into a tight, high knot. But she moved with an agility that belonged to her youth, and Jacob still loved to look at her.

Sweetwater lay nestled in a valley surrounded by high mountains and hills. A river snaked through the valley as though for years it had been looking for a way out. Jacob had walked into the field behind his sister’s house. Annie’s house was beside the river. It had been the house where Jacob grew up. He knew of no one anymore who, when they returned home, returned to their actual home. The house itself was modest, but each window faced a splendid countryside, a mountain range with foothills blue or purple depending on the distance, and a river where barges hauled coal from Virginia mines. Annie raised her children in this house and now brought grandchildren to let them learn what they could from roaming the hills by day and watching the mountains at night.

Dinner’s getting cold, Annie called again. She shaded her eyes to see him. Jacob waved, knowing she would not see, but would notice a wave, knowing too that her dinner was a long way from being cold.

Jacob walked across the field toward her house, her voice. He could see the river both here at Annie’s house and farther off a thin strip he knew was water. Mountains rose up from that strip, large and wide, as though they had been planted there.

He stumbled, then lifted what he stumbled on: a bone of an animal, two feet long, two-and-a-half feet maybe, with a grand old knob at either end. The knob (knee? shoulder?) begged his touch and he rested one hand on top of it. It seemed a small head in his palm and he wondered about the size of an animal whose joints could be as large as this. He searched, scanning for more evidence, something that would tell him he had stumbled across an ice age beast, an animal that ate nothing but berries or leaves and weighed one hundred thousand pounds, whose cry was at once both high and deep and similar to what lay inside Jacob’s own head on days he couldn’t hold it down. He laid the bone beside the tree, deciding it was a cowbone, nothing more, though not really deciding, just leaving it in this way.

He pressed the back of his neck. It ached with the long ride here. He had spent one whole night and most of today on the train. As he looked down, he noticed, as though suddenly, how his clothes appeared unkempt. He buttoned one button higher on his shirt and hoped it made a difference.

When he walked into the house, he could hear Annie at the stove, as she asked why people didn’t come to dinner when they were called, asking no one in particular, the stove. Jacob spoke to Albert, her husband. He waited at the table in the wheelchair he had been bound to since a young man. Albert asked how Molly was and said he wished she could have come with Jacob. Jacob told him she might come for a weekend. Annie set a large pot in the middle of the table and Albert lifted the lid. He praised the cut carrots and sizable potatoes wreathed against the dark meat. They took large helpings of everything.

Often at night, Jacob pretended to return to Sweetwater and find that what was written in the clipping was only a dream. Not that he dreamed of it anymore, but by lying awake he pretended to dream.

It all happened within a few moments: Jacob entering his brother’s house, hearing a shot, and even before he heard it his infallible intuition announced Something will happen here or I will be changed. Incumbent upon him was some nameless happening.

Then as he turned over in bed, he would pretend Drue was still alive, that he would meet his brother on the street or that Drue would come to visit Jacob. And at those times he gave to Drue a life, one full of children, a wife and job. And in that near-sleep wish-state, Jacob even talked with Drue, asked whatever came to mind. But the difficult part to pretend or even to imagine was his brother at the age he would be now, sixty-four. He could not bring up the image, aged and gray. The brother he talked to and pretended alive was always twenty-three, though Jacob himself grew older, older than his older brother. Sometimes though he had a memory of them both as children, something they did, some argument, and those memories were easier and left him feeling freer from guilt.

For the times that he dreamed, leaving Drue on the floor in the hallway of the house, he could smell the odor of burning, and he would call out Drue’s name, loudly, in a loud voice, Drue, Dru-u-ue, drawing it out to a thin screech as it had been drawn out inside him over the years. The noise always ended in an explicable high pitch. And to Molly or anyone who heard it late at night (the children, a guest, anybody), it made all surfaces seem black and watery, the noise itself becoming an impregnable shadow. So Molly would say, Wake up, Jake. You’re having a nightmare, but the next morning she always pretended not to know what it was about.

When Molly took Jacob to the train station she had packed his bag to stay for several weeks. There would be a hunting trip, so she included his gear. Some of it lay loose around his bag and she cautioned him to keep up with it.

You look like a child, she told him, a worried child.

Jacob handed her the clipping, yellow and brittle, from the Sweetwater Sentinel which was now called the Herald. Molly knew this clipping, knew all about it, and in fact had saved a copy for herself in a drawer beside her bed. When she handed the clipping back to Jacob, he gave her something else, a letter. It was the one from Callie.

She must be close to a hundred years old by now, said Molly, looking to the scratchy signature. What does she say? She strained to read, but found the arthritic writing too difficult to make out.

Jacob said that he didn’t know exactly, then looked to Molly as though he should have to say no more. He folded the letter and clipping and slipped it into his inside jacket pocket.

Molly didn’t speak too quickly of what they had not spoken of in so many years. After a few moments, she asked, What is it? So Jacob decided to tell her. Here. In this place where people wandered and drank Cokes and spoke irritably to each other. In this public place he told Molly what he had not told her before. His words fell on her like hard rain, seeping deep enough for her to hear, and Jacob hoped, forgive.

I went to Drue’s house that night, Jacob began.

Whose? Molly thought he was confused.

Drue’s. Drue’s house. Jacob’s expression looked as though someone had just given him that information. When I got there everything was dark, so I thought he had gone to sleep, probably on the sofa, and lay there still. I called out, hoped to wake him. I wanted to apologize. I had been angry with him and I think I even hated him. He looked to Molly. Molly needed no reminding. She nodded to tell him she remembered. Then Jacob pointed to the floor as though the floor would be included in what he had to tell. They both looked down.

"But as I went into the hallway, I noticed a lamp in the back room and I could see all the way down the hall like it was a tunnel. The kitchen window had a reflection, a lamp was on back there and there was firelight from the room where Drue was. It was reflected in the window, so that the glass seemed yellow.

"I heard scuffling and something bumping into furniture, so I stopped before I could see into the room. I thought at first that Drue’s dog was tearing at something, playing. I looked to the gun case beside the door. It was already open. One of the revolvers Drue kept clean and ready to fire was gone. I picked up the other one. I called out Drue before going farther in and when I did a gun went off somewhere in the house. I knew I didn’t do it, or thought I didn’t. I don’t remember when I put the gun down. I could still hear noises, no words. Drue didn’t answer my call, and it was like my calling out had fired the shot. I wanted to ask what was happening and have someone stand up and explain to me what to do. I hoped it would be easy." Jacob shifted in his seat. Molly didn’t move.

"I stayed in the hallway. I don’t know how long. Not long, I