Heart-Side Up

by Barbara Dimmick

Overview

Days pass. She grows accustomed to how the saw bursts into life. She makes it roar, quiets it, by adjustments of choke and throttle. In time, she pulls the start cord with a little flourish. Like a boy in a fairy tale with an enchanted sword, she lops off deadfall with mere touches of the blade's rotating teeth, branches the size of her thumb, her wrist, her upper arm. She finds herself ankle-deep, shin-deep, knee-deep in what she has cut, discovers that a forest takes up a whole lot more room when you cut it into pieces and pile it on the ground.

Zoe is attacked in the classroom by a bright-eyed boy who gives no warning. The searing scars from the strokes of the knife are a constant reminder that she is not safe, ever. Clutching her bottle of anti-anxiety pills, she goes to the mountains of Vermont to find Dayton, the man she lost to God years before.

Dayton is living in a controversial monastery, so isolated and extreme that the Catholic Church does not acknowledge it. Impulsively, Zoe buys a half-finished house with no running water, no heat. The only town for miles is Shroveton, whose inhabitants are immediately suspicious of Zoe's arrival and place bets as to whether or not she will last the winter. But it is here, through the back-breaking labor of felling trees, fetching water, and keeping warm— with the help of a dog named Gus— that Zoe is able to be near Dayton, but at a safe distance.

Strange signs of resentment and anger, however, creep into her new life. Someone leaves a gutted doe on her property, hacks off her dog's tail, and haunts her dreams. Ultimately, Zoe is forced to confront her deepest fears: bodily danger and the truth about Dayton.

In Heart-Side Up, Barbara Dimmick delves into the darkness of fear, love, and trust, and shows that prayer can be the rhythm of hard work and salvation, simply the process of surviving.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555973629
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	05/01/2002
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.32(h) x 1.16(d)

About the Author

Barbara Dimmick is the author of the novel, In the Presence of Horses. At various times a horse trainer, homesteader, and college professor, she now lives and writes in northern New England.

Read an Excerpt

Heart-Side Up

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By Barbara Dimmick

Graywolf Press

Copyright © 2002 Barbara Dimmick
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-55597-362-0

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Chapter One

Zeke is adamantly opposed. Reckless, he says: Impulsive. Perhaps even dangerous. - You're the one who suggested it, Zoe counters, half-flirtatious, mysteriously come back to life. - I suggested you call Dave, he retorts: Because it seemed to me you hadn't let go of him. - Dayton, she corrects, calm and sweet: And you were right. I hadn't let go of him. - But Zoe, he says, eyes narrow: This is.... She knows he's upset; usually he avoids the use of her first name. - Are you saying that I'm crazy? He rocks forward, lets his chair fall to its casters with a muffled thump. - Precipitous. She smiles, securely out of his therapeutic reach. - Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it you who kept saying I needed to make a new life? In the end, they talk logistics. He suggests she keep her apartment, put her things in storage. To Zoe, he's suddenly very young, almost frightened, and she doesn't tell him that she's given notice on her lease, and that she'll fill the car with what she might need and sell the rest. He writes a new prescription for Xanax, but warns her it will only last so long. Then he plucks a card from his drawer, writes on it everyone phone number he has, private line, home phone, pager, cell phone. Zoe stans. Her time is over. Zeke remains seated, looking up at her a long while. Worriedly, he shakes his head, gets to his feet, says: - I always thought you were remarkable. - Crazy as a loon, more like. He holds out a hand, wishes her luck, and as she's going out the door, reminds her to call. - I'm sure they must have phones there. In fact, there is no phone. No running water, no electricity either. Only plywood flooring, untaped Sheetrock, a padlock on the front door, a little wood scattered in the shed. There is an outhouse though, and 493 acres, plus or minus. She has great affection for the plus or minus, learns that all north country deeds include this caveat, since surveying up and down and across the sides of mountains has a distinct inherent inaccuracy. She's buying herself a forest, a small clearing, and a structure that can't quite be called a house. It's a shell, weatherproofed, with a rubble trench, concrete-block foundation, a standing seam roof, plywood sheathing. There are windows though, a whole bank of them on the south wall, and doors, insulation, a gas range and gas refrigerator, a woodstove and an ocean-blue ceramic tile hearth. And for amenities, that's it. The realtor called it a camp, tried to interest Zoe in something more civilized, a cottage or chalet, but if Zoe has one reason for buying this particular place, she has twenty. She thinks she'll like the solitude, although she guesses what she really wants is the absence of other people's feelings. She has the money, and she figures a project will be good for her. The people before her sank every time into it, every free hour and free weekend, until it killed their marriage. But Zoe thinks she can indulge her old interest in architecture, thinks she understands the logic of the floor plan, mutters to herself about primary space, secondary space. She will be one of those latter-twentieth-century architects who lives onsite, learns the place and its rhythms, and then she will redesign as needed, her own stamp. Before she buys the place, she stands alone on the porch and imagines a little architectural gem looming at her back. And then there's this: she's twelve-point-two miles from Dayton's gate. Plus or minus.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Heart-Side Up by Barbara Dimmick Copyright © 2002 by Barbara Dimmick . Excerpted by permission.
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.

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Editorial Reviews

Barbara Dimmick comes as close to precision as one can in a field that doesn't allow it: love. Zoe, of Heart-Side Up, faces her challenges with grace, fear, and a good dog. It was a pleasure and honor to stand by her side for the length of the book.” —Joe Coomer

From the Publisher

Attacked in her Rhode Island classroom by a knife-wielding student, Zoe Muir finds her psychological wounds are harder to heal than the cuts on her body. At the start of this bittersweet novel of recovery, Zoe's young psychiatrist, Zeke Polushka, helps her with Xanax and good-natured humor, though her dependence on the former erases any appreciation for the latter. In the course of one of their sessions, Zeke suggests that the pain and suffering inflicted by the slasher opened up wounds caused by the loss of her first love, Dayton Reed, so she tracks down Dayton, who has joined a small and idiosyncratic monastery in rural Vermont. Eager to escape her increasingly claustrophobic life, Zoe uses her settlement money to buy a cottage near Dayton's retreat, with no electricity or running water, on a huge plot of land. The locals treat her with a mixture of distrust, disdain and outright disgust. Only politician Hal Westerbrook and constable Spark Everett show genuine interest in Zoe, though their motives are unclear. Zoe begins working through her rocky past and finds her spirits lifted when Spark gives her a dog to keep her company. But when strange and scary things begin happening to Zoe once more, she questions whether she can ever trust anyone again. Dimmick (In the Presence of Horses) whips up a storm of paranoia and suspicionmostly in the head of the tormented heroineas her novel proceeds to a teasing conclusion. (May) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Like a ripped-from-the-headlines episode of TV's Law and Order, this second novel from Dimmick (following In the Presence of Horses) describes the aftermath of a horrendous physical attack at a Rhode Island school. In this particular incident, a knife-wielding student has disfigured teacher Zoe Muir. Unable to return to business-as-usual, she moves to northern Vermont, buys an unfinished house in the woods, and attempts to reconstruct her life. She develops a comforting routine by chopping firewood, hiking, tending her dog, cleaning the outhouse, and building walls. Yet something is amiss in Zoe's remote paradise. Local residents, she discovers, are resentful of financially stable outsiders like her who are changing the tenor of their New England community. What's more, the emotional security Zoe imagined finding in her new environs is fleeting. Heart-Side Up looks at the nature of friendship and explores questions of religious faith, piety, identity, sexuality, and trust. Wonderfully engrossing and haunting, it is a timely look at violence, pathology, and the intersection of survival and redemption. Highly recommended for all public and academic libraries. Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A tightly focused and lightly peopled study, Dimmick's second (after In the Presence of Horses, 1998) makes good use of a hardscrabble rural setting as a young woman fleeing trauma attack goes in search of the only man she ever loved. Zoe is a learning-disabilities specialist at a New England college until a frustrated, knife-wielding student slashes her almost to death. Subsequent therapy and a generous settlement from the boy's rich parents enable her to take a bold step: to locate her hometown boyfriend, Dayton, whom she hasn't heard from since he dumped her eight years before to pursue his religious inclinations. Zoe tracks him to a remote town in northern Vermont, learns that he's part of a radical Catholic community that refuses to acknowledge the authority of the Church, and decides on the spur of the moment to buy an unfinished house and hundreds of acres on a nearby hillside. As she becomes adept at handling a chainsaw to cut her winter wood supply and working on her house, Zoe also takes time to spy on Dayton and his community, trying to decide what she should do about him. Then, however, the gift of a big, woofy dog from her only neighbor (the town constable) lands Zoe in the midst of a long-simmering town feud. First, the guts of a deer are left in her driveway; then her house is ransacked and the dog's tail hacked off. Zoe knows again the paralyzing fear she thought she had escaped, but, amazingly, from this brutal violation of her privacy comes the gift that will bring Dayton back to her. Matters of the heart, spirit, and life on the land converge nicely here, but all the vitality in the story belongs to Zoe (and her dog), while the other characters just pass through like somany wisps of cloud.

Kirkus Reviews