Book Review

"In the Fall"

by Jeffrey Lent

 

In many respects Jeffrey Lent’s In the Fall is a remarkable historical novel.  Lent is a skilled narrator, he is knowledgeable about his subject matter, his observations about human conduct are incisive, and his characters are intriguingly exceptionally complex.

 

Lent’s story spans three generations.  It is essentially three novels all of which relate to a violent event that occurs in Sweetboro, North Carolina, at the end of the Civil War.  Without giving away important details in the story, I offer the following summary.

 

A young slave girl, Leah, is sexually attacked by her white, half-brother Alexander Mebane.  She strikes his head with the hot iron that she has grasped off the kitchen stove.  Believing that he is dead, she seeks advice from the stable-man, old slave Peter about how to escape. Days later she encounters Norman Pelham, a wounded Vermont soldier, lying in underbrush as the Civil War comes to a close.  Sensing that he is a kind man, believing that she must atone for killing Mebane, she nurses him to health.  They commit to each other and walked back to his family’s farm in Randolph, Vermont.  They are married; they have three children.  Leah is haunted by what she has left behind in North Carolina.  Twenty-five years after the 1865 traumatic event, she goes back to Sweetboro to find answers to questions that have progressively daunted her.

 

The second part of the novel focuses on Leah and Norman’s youngest child, Jamie.  At the age on nineteen, in 1904, he leaves the family farm and finds work in Barre, Vermont, making deliveries of home-made whiskey for his criminal boss.  He meets a young woman, Joey, a singer at a local, private night club.  He befriends her and then rescues her after she has been beaten by the brother of city police chief.  They flee to Bethlehem, New Hampshire, close to Mount Washington, a tourist town with grand hotels that cater to the rich and famous.  Jamie becomes a hotel manager and eventually establishes a bootleg whiskey business.  Joey pursues a higher level singing career.  After a rocky relationship, they marry.  They have two children.  Tragedies follow.

 

The third part of In the Fall is about part of the sixteenth year of Jamie and Joey’s older child, Foster Pelham.  Living on his own, discovering a letter to his father from one of Norman Pelham’s daughters in Randolph, he goes to his deceased grandparents’ farm and learns from his two aunts the story of his grandparents’ meeting and what the aunts know about Leah’s return to Sweetboro twenty-five years afterward.  Foster has not known anything about his grandparents.  Intrigued, empathetic, Foster goes to Sweetboro.  He discovers that Alexander Mebane is alive and is the source of the evil that has adversely affected his grandparents’ lives, his father’s life, and his own short life.

 

This exchange between Leah and Norman illustrates Lent’s narrative skills: pointed dialogue, visual clarity, intimation of depth of character, attention to detail.

 

She said, “I look at you, you know what I see?  Norman?”

“I got no idea.”

“I see a man gentle right down in his soul.  All the way down.”

Then she was quiet and when she spoke again her voice had lost a little edge and he heard it right away, a little less certainty and he felt this loss in his chest like hot water.  She said, “So me.  You look at me what do you see?  Norman?”

His face furrowed like a spring field, wanting to get this just right.  He had no idea what to say and kept looking at her hoping she’d wait for him, hoping she’d be patient.  Hoping he’d find his way not out but through this.

She didn’t wait.  She said, “You see a little nigger girl wanting to eat up your biscuit, your bacon, whatever you got?  You see me thinking my taking care of you once overnight is something I can trade for lots more than that?  Or maybe even just nigger pussy ready for you to say the right words, do the right thing?  That what you see, Norman?  And she reared back away from him now, sitting still on the bench, upright as if at a great distance, her back arched like a drawn bow, eyes burning wide open as her soul welled up but not at all ready to pour out without something back from him.  He watched his hands turning one over the other, the fingers lacing and relacing until he realized she was watching him do this.  He slid around and lifted his right leg over the bench so he sat straddle-legged facing her front on.  With his face collapsed in sheer terror, he said to her, “Leah.  All I see is the most lovely girl I’ve ever seen.”

She stood off the bench away from him and said, “I told you the truth, Norman.  I told you the truth.  But you lying to me if that’s all you see.”

And without even thinking about it he said, “What I see in the most lovely girl and one fat wide world of trouble.  Trouble for both of us.  That’s what I see.”

And now she stepped back over the bench to face him and said, “You got that right.  You got that just exactly right.”  He reached and took one of her hands and sat looking down at their hands lying one into the other, the small slip of warmth between his fingers, her life lying up against his, and still not looking at her he said, “Don’t you ever talk that way to me again Leah.”

“What way?”  Her voice low, already knowing, needing to ask, needing him to tell her.

So he said, “That nigger-this nigger-that business.”

 

Lent’s story exudes authenticity.  Here is what Joey tells Jamie about her being an entertainer.

 

“What that means is I wear outfits that make clear there’s a girl underneath and five or six times a night I stand up on Charlie’s little stage and sing.  Songs like ‘If You Were a Kinder Fellow Than the Kind of Fellow You Are’ or ‘The Man Was a Stranger to Me’ … Between numbers I have to circulate, work up the crowd.  Keep em buying drinks, let em buy me drinks – which is always nothing but cold tea.  … Fellows tip you for a song, you flirt a little bit, they tip some more.  And there’s some who’ll get a crush on a girl and bring presents to her, give her money that sort of thing.  Charlie doesn’t allow his girls to hook but that doesn’t mean some of the girls some of the times don’t make arrangements to meet men outside of the club.  … Now, the thing about that business is you have to pick and choose.  Because what you want to do is keep the fellow coming around, both to the club and on the side.  So you have to work them along, maybe giving a little but mostly putting the idea always in their heads like they’re getting far more than they are, or like they’re just about to.  

 

I was especially impressed that Lent delved into the human psyche regarding coming to terms with one’s aberrant behavior.  Here are several examples.

 

Norman: Telling himself no event lies or falls unconnected to others and that will is only the backbone needed to face these things head on.

Leah: But it was cowards finally who believe they can lay down one life and pick up another and not have them meet again.  …  That no punishment could be greater than to find in herself that all the rest of her life, that new life, all that was made from a lie.  Lying to herself.

Jamie: He believed in luck.  Not the ordinary luck that comes to all in runs of good or bad seemingly out of nowhere but luck searched out, sought in the corners and back rooms and cobwebbed recesses where no other might think to look.  Luck, then earned someway.

Jamie: We can’t ever learn a thing.  We just keep doing the same things over and over.  Not even intentional.  Like we can’t help ourselves.  Like it’s who we really are.  That’s it – we spend our lives just becoming what we already someway know we are.

Jamie: Mostly, …people are cruel, given the chance.

Abigail (Jamie’s sister, to Foster): He hated himself, your father did.  Hated what he was.  Ran out of here and never would come back.  Because he did not want to be what he was.  The same way Mother thought she could leave her old life behind clean he did the same.  But it does not work that way.

Mebane: Every man is a curious thing – each one of us thinks we are nothing so much as our ownselves even as we fume about what had been done to us by others but we almost never see how we pass those wrongs along; we have our reasons for doing what we do and believe them not only to be right but the way things are, the way they have to be.

Mebane: Evil is not a thing that just sums up in a man.  No.  It is a thread that begins to run in a small way and then falls down through the years and generations to gain weight as it goes.

Mebane: It’s what we all do – we find a way to allow what we want but should not.

Mebane: That is what regret does.  It allows you to live with yourself.  You know what they say – all men in prison are innocent?  … it’s that they grow to understand themselves in such a way as to see that moment, the trigger that set them off in the first place, that got them to where they are, they see that as something separate from themselves.  They come to believe, to know, that ever again their choice would be a different one.  Not only in the past but in the future.  Because they cannot allow the truth.

 

In the Fall is well worth a reader’s time to read.