In the twilight of the Civil War, a Union soldier meets a runaway slave and returns with her to his family homestead in Vermont, launching the story of a bold, interracial union and its myriad consequences. This passionate couple and their descendants will grapple with the ongoing devastations of the war, racism, and a haunting family legacy that lies dormant until a grandson is driven to discover the secret of his ancestors.
Spanning the post–Civil War era to the edge of the Great Depression, In the Fall is an expansive saga of a rapidly evolving America—from life on a farm, through the final years of Prohibition and bootlegging in the resort towns of New Hampshire, to the advent of modern times. “Remarkable for its grace, felicity and precision,” Jeffrey Lent’s debut novel is an utterly compelling vision of America, and an unforgettable portrait of an American family (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
“Jeffrey Lent has quietly created some of the finest novels of our new century.” —Ron Rash
“Jeffrey Lent builds characters and their world like a painter layering his canvas, telling his story but substantiating it with color and light.” —Tim Pears
“Sentence by sentence . . . Lent’s language draws you in like a clear stream in summer.” —Tim Gautreaux
In the twilight of the Civil War, a Union soldier meets a runaway slave and returns with her to his family homestead in Vermont, launching the story of a bold, interracial union and its myriad consequences. This passionate couple and their descendants will grapple with the ongoing devastations of the war, racism, and a haunting family legacy that lies dormant until a grandson is driven to discover the secret of his ancestors.
Spanning the post–Civil War era to the edge of the Great Depression, In the Fall is an expansive saga of a rapidly evolving America—from life on a farm, through the final years of Prohibition and bootlegging in the resort towns of New Hampshire, to the advent of modern times. “Remarkable for its grace, felicity and precision,” Jeffrey Lent’s debut novel is an utterly compelling vision of America, and an unforgettable portrait of an American family (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
“Jeffrey Lent has quietly created some of the finest novels of our new century.” —Ron Rash
“Jeffrey Lent builds characters and their world like a painter layering his canvas, telling his story but substantiating it with color and light.” —Tim Pears
“Sentence by sentence . . . Lent’s language draws you in like a clear stream in summer.” —Tim Gautreaux
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Overview
In the twilight of the Civil War, a Union soldier meets a runaway slave and returns with her to his family homestead in Vermont, launching the story of a bold, interracial union and its myriad consequences. This passionate couple and their descendants will grapple with the ongoing devastations of the war, racism, and a haunting family legacy that lies dormant until a grandson is driven to discover the secret of his ancestors.
Spanning the post–Civil War era to the edge of the Great Depression, In the Fall is an expansive saga of a rapidly evolving America—from life on a farm, through the final years of Prohibition and bootlegging in the resort towns of New Hampshire, to the advent of modern times. “Remarkable for its grace, felicity and precision,” Jeffrey Lent’s debut novel is an utterly compelling vision of America, and an unforgettable portrait of an American family (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
“Jeffrey Lent has quietly created some of the finest novels of our new century.” —Ron Rash
“Jeffrey Lent builds characters and their world like a painter layering his canvas, telling his story but substantiating it with color and light.” —Tim Pears
“Sentence by sentence . . . Lent’s language draws you in like a clear stream in summer.” —Tim Gautreaux
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802196514 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 560 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The boy's grandfather came down off the hill farm above the Bethel road south of Randolph early in the summer of 1862, leaving behind his mother and the youngest girl still at home along with a dwindling flock of Merino sheep and a slowly building herd of milk cows. Norman Pelham was barely seventeen, but he was well built in his homemade fine-stitched suit of clothes. His silent manner and extra height deflected any question of his age. His father drove him in the wagon and neither spoke during the hour trip to the depot in Randolph. The summer dust rose up through the trace chains and settled on the braided bobs of the team's tails. Norman was a serious youth who doubted that the secession of near half the states in the union would be quickly resolved. Still, his death seemed remote and unlikely. He planned to do his part as well as he could, but no hero's blood pumped through his veins. He had no desire for glory beyond traveling back up that same road one day. But he did not speak with his father of these things and his father offered nothing of his own fears that morning. Instead they tracked the course of crows over the valley and watched as men they knew worked at the first cutting of hay in the broad flat fields along the river. Some of those men rested their scythes to lift a hat or arm in greeting, some had sons already at the depot or in Brattleboro and some would soon follow. Father and son would incline their heads to the greetings with no need for words, for all knew their destination. They rode on to the strained creak of harness leather above the heavy wheels crumbling the road dust, the father's heart clattering as if loosed from a pivot in his chest and the heart of the boy also in fearsome ratchet. There had been no argument between them, no discussions of fitness or age. The father would have gone himself but could not. The boy was not going in his place. The boy was going on his own.
In Randolph, they drew the team up away from the depot and backed the wagon around so it was headed home. The team stood with dropped heads, sweat lather foaming around their backpads. The father wrapped the lines once in a loose loop around the brake lever and stepped down out of the wagon. Norman climbed down the other side and reached behind to lift out a valise with twin straps that held a winter coat, canvas pants, a boiled white shirt, a small inscribed Bible, extra socks and a razor. All but the razor had been brought at his mother's urging. Norman had planned to carry the razor in his pocket, confident he could always find a strop and soap of some kind. He thought the army might even provide these things. He didn't know; there was no one to ask.
There was a crowd around the depot, which was strung with homemade bunting. His father reached out, took his hand, and they both grasped hard, then dropped the other's hand at the same moment, as if from long practice.
"Well," his father said, his eyes drifting over the wagonbed toward the team.
"Keep an eye on my sheep," Norman said.
"Yuht," his father said. And then added, "Dodge them bullets."
"I'll do her."
His father nodded. "I'll get on to home then."
Norman raised the valise and held it against his back, with his elbow in the air. He echoed his father. "Yuht." As he turned away and walked toward the crowd, he realized for the first time that he would be around far more people than he was used to, yet knew all he needed to do was keep quiet and he could be as alone as he liked.
He rode the train south to Brattleboro for the rest of the day. Around him, men were eating food out of sacks or bound-up in cloth. Norman opened the valise, intent upon retrieving the razor and leaving the rest behind him, and found there on top a piece of cold mutton, tied up in paper and string, and a loaf of new bread along with a half dozen hard-boiled eggs. As he peeled the shells off the eggs, he thought of her egg money going with him. After he ate all the mutton and bread, he closed the valise and kept it held tight between his feet, razor and all.
In Brattleboro the next morning he signed the muster rolls and was issued a uniform and gun as well as a dozen or more other related items. He lived in a tent with five other men from rare and unknown parts of Vermont and went through a couple of weeks of drills and simple training that struck him as having little to do with anything at all. He learned over time that he was fortunate in having officers who were neither ambitious nor career men, but who had age and experience. In early July, they rode trains south and joined the thronged mass of the Army of the Potomac. Norman now carried only his razor in one pocket and his small Bible in another. He'd saved also his extra socks.
It was late September of 1865 before he passed through Bethel on his way back to the hill farm, months after his fellow members of the 2nd Vermont had returned in pairs or small groups. Although word of him had spread beyond that group of veterans, they would not speak of him; any of them who were approached by his mother would only assure her he'd be along any day and last they'd seen him he was fine. There were still those few whose eyes rose over whatever length of road they could see from time to time to see if the figure in the distance was him. Some among them even doubted he'd come at all, but even those doubts were less of a judgment than a curiosity. They were not the sort of men to place themselves in another's shoes and would not voice an opinion unless the matter bore directly upon them. And this with Norman did not. Still, they watched the road.
So they saw him pass along the road that Indian-summer morning with the sugarbush maples flaring on the hillsides and the hilltop sheep pastures overgrown with young cherry and maple. Word ran along the road ahead of him so near all his neighbors and townspeople saw him walking in the long easy stride of one who counted walking in months and years not miles, a rucksack cut from an issue blanket strapped to his back and by his side a girl near his own height in a sunfaded blue dress and carrying her own cardboard suitcase bound with rough twine. Norman wore his army brogans while the girl walked barefoot in the dust, her own pair of wornout boots tied together by the laces and slung over one shoulder. Norman raised his hand to greet those he saw and most nodded or waved back. And those that hung back in barn doorways or stood behind curtains he paid no attention to, satisfied to pass them by and telling himself he held no malice to those who ignored him. At one point the girl said to him, "They watching us."
"They been watching us all along the way."
"They has been. But these your folks."
"All they got is the right to look."
"Maybe."
"No maybe about it," he said. "They can look all they want and think what they like, it don't matter to me and it don't matter to you." And he meant what he said; he'd walked through any fear he might be wrong back in southern Virginia. There was nothing cocksure or militant in how he felt, just his own certainty at having settled his fears and doubts. If there was any hesitation left in him it came from his great tenderness for her, his knowledge of the cruelty a person may inflict upon another and his determination to shield her from any damage that his own people might cast upon her. He was not simple in love but ferocious with it.
They turned off the road less than a mile from Randolph village to climb the half mile of gravel track to the hill farm where only his mother and youngest sister now waited, his father kicked in the head by the old mare as he bent to pick up a dropped dime two years before. The letter with this news had reached him just days before the battle of Fredericksburg in which men died before, beside and twice behind him as his body recalled his father's advice and he dropped in a long swivel from his knees to rise again with the breech-loading Springfield coming up before him. His older sisters married and gone, Miriam on a farm in Iowa, Ethel to a paper-goods man out of St. Louis. As he and the girl passed the final house along the way, the farm wife was in the side yard stringing laundry, with her arms full and her mouth agape with pins, and so was unable to wave or call greeting but just watched them pass by, the neighbor boy grown war-hardened and the green- eyed girl with her African body so lovely in the fall sunshine, her skin the color and luster of hand-rubbed heartpine. Norman called out and the girl raised a hand in a gesture the woman read as saying You're over there and I'm over here and I'm going to stay right here unless you invite me otherwise. As they continued on up the hill, Norman thought he heard the soft spatter of clothespins falling into the grass behind them.
He was wounded twice. The first time was at Gettysburg when the 2nd Vermont found the breach in the flank of Pickett's fated charge and waded in to turn the battle, charging across the field through the offal of dead and dying men and horses, the siren of battle at full crescendo. Norman was wounded as a red-eyed cavalryman swept through them with his sabre flaring in the dying summer light and sliced Norman's right arm deep to the bone and the sabre flew up from the blow and was coming down again. Norman had dropped his Springfield but raised his left arm as he threw his body against the man's horse behind the long blade and drew the man down on top of him, knocking the wind from himself and leaving it to others to drag the rebel man from Norman and run bayonets through him. They saved the sabre and presented it to him when he returned to the company from the hospital at Lee's old home outside Washington but he did not want it, still able to feel the sweat coming from the cavalryman's mustache and chin as he came down on him, still able to smell his glaze of fear and death as they struck the earth and the sky darkened with the bodies of his comrades closing over them.
The second wound came almost two years later outside Richmond after that city fell and Lee's army was crumbling before them. It was late in the day when the company crossed a small stream with the dogwoods blooming and the few spring leaves on the trees fine and pale, the size of mouse ears. The men they were pursuing had gained enough ground to turn their one fieldpiece upon the 2nd and fire off a final canister of grapeshot that blew apart a dozen feet from where he crouched with the others in poison ivy and trout lilies, hearing the whistle of the grape coming in. While the shell fell short, it sent something hard through the air, a piece of tree perhaps, which struck Norman in the head, tore apart his left ear and left him unconscious and alone while the company camped around him. Sometime during the night he woke and, still senseless, crawled off in the manner of a sick animal seeking better shelter in which to die. He awoke in mighty pain at dawn next to a hedgerow somewhere in Virginia, his ear a throbbing thing attached to him and his brain ill and scattered, shivering with the dew already burning off before the rising sun and his tongue thick with wanting water. He'd rolled onto his good side to keep his ear in the air and away from the ground. He slept some like that and waking again saw a girl squatting there beside him, her face serious as death itself and her hands cupping a dipper gourd of water as she asked him, "Is you dead?"
He lay there etching her against the pan of his brain: the fine raised cheekbones that brought all focus of her face to her wide eyes already bright before the sun added light to them. The fine cleft chin he wanted to hold as an apple and the lips cracked with her own fearsome journey and still lovely as if chiseled from a piece of veined rose marble. Still he could barely speak from pain but felt he must or she would flee, thinking him dead or somehow dangerous, and so he said, "I just need to lay here a bit." Then, his head and ear booming, he asked, "Is that water you got there?"
She nodded and held the back of his head as he drank and then settled him slow back onto the ground and he slept again. When he woke later she was still there and the gourd was full again and she helped raise him up and gave him water. The sun was up but they sat in the thin shade from the hedge. She had biscuits and a hunk of ham with the mold scraped off and she fed some of that to him and he slept more. At full dusk he was awake again and heard whippoorwills calling each other off in the darkening woods. The girl stood over him this time. She said, "You got to get up and walk. It ain't far but you got to go. Another night here fever gonna carry you off. I spent too much time to have that happen." He saw that she had blankets looped long and narrow over one shoulder. She said, "You ain't that bad hurt. You ain't dead. Rise on up now." And when he was standing, his body pressed to hers and one arm around her and one of hers around him, he asked her name and she paused, her face turned away from him down into the folds of the blankets she carried. She said, "Leah."
"Why that's a pretty name," he said. "From the Bible."
And again slowly as if gauging him she said, "I guess so. Anyway its my name."
He wanted to tell her she was prettier than her name, any name, but the words were wrong; that, and he was still seeing her blackness, still thinking of her as the most beautiful colored girl he'd ever seen. As the land fell away with the dark, the pain in his head was made a lesser thing against the girl beside him.
They moved that way into the night, the girl leading him through fields as he struggled to find his own balance and when that would not happen finally let himself move along with her as with a current. She led him down through a woods of old oaks and into a narrow ravine with a small stream and he guessed this was where she had carried his water from. In the dark she brought him to a hidden dugout shored with logs and shielded with a thicket of rhododendron, the open front of the dugout half covered by a hand-laid drywall of stone, old enough so the surfaces of the stones were soft with moss. Inside she made a fire with flint and steel, and in the light they ate the rest of her ham and she brought more water up from the stream. She kept the fire small but with the food it warmed them. She asked where he was from and he told her and she asked where that was and he said up by Canada and she knew where that was. He asked where she was from and she thought about it and then said, "Round here." He didn't know if she was lying or telling the truth and knew it wasn't his business to probe. She had every reason not to trust him and he realized how exceptional her care of him was, how great her risk had been and in her eyes still likely was. He sat with her in the cave, built he guessed by her own kind. Word of this place and others like it passed along a vein of trust, a line of knowledge outside the reach of his own race, and he looked at her, feeling he was beginning to know her. The idea of sex bloomed in his mind and he moved a little away from her and took up one of the two blankets, leaving the most room he could for her by the fire and told her, "You've been awful helpful. I just want to tell you that. Dawn tomorrow I'll get out of your hair and get on and find my regiment. They'll probably go ahead and shoot me for deserting anyway." And seeing her eyes flare at this he said, "That's a joke. I bet they think I'm dead. Probably think I'm a ghost when they see me."
She made a face at him that was not quite a smile. "You're not any ghost."
He grinned at her. "Not yet anyhow."
"Some strange kind of man, that's what you are."
"What're you talking about?"
She shook her head and said, "Scuse me." Her tone sudden with spleen she stepped around him, ducking low until she was outside, and he lay and watched her disappear in the darkness. When she came back she was silent and so was he. Something had been extended from both of them, some straw bridge from one to the other, but then it had fallen apart and not either of them knowing what made it fall but both knowing it was gone. As children both feeling the fault and afraid to admit it. So they said nothing.
During the night she moved him close to the scant coals and wrapped in her own blanket had spooned against his back and so he woke at bare dawn with her against him and he lay without moving until there was light in the treetops and she stirred behind him. Through both their blankets, he felt the long muscles of her thighs against the backs of his and her torso and breasts pressed tight to his back and one arm flat against his chest inside his own blanket. Only when he felt her wake fully and leave the dugout did he move at all, so that when she returned he was up with his blanket folded, moving his arms and legs to wake. She led him to the stream and there ordered him onto his hands and knees and held his head in her hands and lowered the wound into the shock of water, letting her fingers run over his scalp to clear the matted blood and woods-trash, her touch warm even in the cold water. When he stood he found his balance and she stepped back from him and as if accusing said, "Should have done that yesterday."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "In The Fall"
by .
Copyright © 2000 Jeffrey Lent.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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.
What People are Saying About This
Truly marvellous...written in prose as crisp and lovely as a clear October morning in Vermont's green mountains, In The Fall is nothing less than an American epic...compelling and entertaining...a master work.
Jeffrey Lent's In the Fall is an extraordinary first novel which bears no resemblance to a first novel. Lent has the expert mastery to create his own reality. It is a fulsome and harrowing tale and I cannot reccomend it highly enough.
Reading Group Guide
1. The novel begins with Foster Pelham watching his father bury several coffee cans in the woods, and then shifts back in time to Norman Pelham leaving for the Civil War. Why has Lent chosen to frame the narrative in this way? Are the coffee cans and the money they contain in some way symbolic of the family history that Foster eventually seeks out?
2. Comparing his war experience with Leah's slavery, Norman thinks, "the worst men could do to one another wasn't the clear gore of Marye's Heights or the wreckage of Petersburg but the relentless small decades of generations of Sweetboro, North Carolina. Which all the efforts of battle might change but not erase from the thinking walking talking breath of the woman down the valley before him. What was he to say, Rest easy now? With both of them knowing however far the distance and unlikely the location she would never, and so neither would he, assume that peace was theirs to hold the way others assume that peace could be held" [p. 32]. In view of what happens to Leah later in the novel, is Norman's distrust of the future prophetic? Or is this simply the projection of a mind that has witnessed great pain and suffering?
3. Leah is a strong and outspoken person, as evidenced in her first meeting with Norman's sister Connie. Why then does Leah fear that Norman's mother "would take one look and read the weakness there that trembled constant as water running, the pith of despair and turmoil of her soul" [p. 25]? Is this insecurity something that Leah hides from Norman? How well do they know each other? Why can't their marriage successfully protect Leah from her past?
4. In the followingexamples, what details make Lent's descriptive prose particularly effective? "They rode on to the strained creak of harness leather about the heavy wheels crumbling the road dust, the father's heart clattering as if loosed from a pivot in his chest and the heart of the boy also in fearsome ratchet" [p. 7]. "It was late in the day when the company crossed a small stream with the dogwoods blooming and the few spring leaves on the trees fine and pale, the size of mouse ears" [p. 11]. What is distinctive about the way he uses language? How does his prose writing style differ from his style when writing dialogue?
5. Abigail and Prudence remain unmarried because they are "too black"; Jamie, it seems, can "pass" for white. Does Jamie's life take a different path than his sisters' because he leaves the place where people know his story, or is it because he is more passionate about getting what he wants? Does Jamie's life show that it is possible to reinvent oneself?
6. As his story begins in Part II, Jamie seems to be a surprisingly amoral person. What is disturbing about his choices and actions? Given what we know of his psychology and his past, how might his actions be explained? As time passes, why does he become less inclined to lead a criminal life?
7. Joey, the narrator explains, was "absolutely without belief in love . . . she did not trust anything, least of all herself" [p. 265]. Given this, how do she and Jamie manage to settle into married life together? Is the happiness of their marriage surprising, given the storminess of their first years together? What ideas about themselves do they give up in order to stay together? Given that French-Canadians were also considered beneath contempt in New England society, why doesn't Jamie tell Joey the truth about his own racial background? Why doesn't he tell Foster?
8. Joey thinks of her mother, "she'd become a whore and life had whored upon her. . . . As if life had conspired against her more so than anyone else. Not fate but some abuse from God. . . . A grand fearsome kind her mother thought she deserved" [p. 266]. While a slave, Leah's mother is forced to bear the children of her white master. How closely do the lives of Joey's mother and Leah's mother reflect each other? Does it seem that women are more vulnerable to destruction than men in the context of this novel? If so, why?
9. In the Fall is a long novel, divided into three parts for its three generations. How does the reader experience the pace and the rhythms of the story as it unfolds? Is there a quickening of interest or empathy in certain sections? Does the reader feel drawn equally to each generation's protagonists?
10. Victor Fortini's long-awaited revenge against Jamie takes place on pages 357-366. Given the fact that Jamie has stated earlier in the novel, "Mostly, people are cruel, given the chance" [p. 300], why is he unable to see this coming? What is particularly disturbing about Amy Carrick's role in his death? What might her motivation be?
11. Expressing the stoic philosophy by which she lives, Prudence tells Foster, "The world is a great huge stone that don't care how many times you hurl yourself against it. It just sits there. You might's well sit back and laugh along aside it" [p. 385]. How does this statement reflect the view of history, and of fate, in the novel? Does Foster's temperament, or at least his innocence, indicate that he won't accept this reality without a struggle?
12. Why is it particularly tragic that Leah's search for understanding--her desire to come to terms with her past--leads directly to her death? Does her search and its outcome imply anything about the dangers of revisiting the past?
13. What is the significance of the title? Do major events in the novel happen at that time of year? After speaking with Alex Mebane, Foster thinks, "Slavery he knew then was not the whips and chains of the school history books, not the breaking apart of families or the unending driving labor but some stain far greater and deeper, something that had been unleashed and then bloomed up, between and within at once, both races, white and black, forever and without surcease, tenacious, untouchable and unchangeable. And wondered how a man might know this and go on" [p. 471]. Is "fall" also meant in the theological sense? If so, is there any possibility of redemption in the story?
14. Considering Mebane's explanation of how Leah's mother Helen was his father's half-sister [p. 469] and he himself was Leah's half-brother, his rape of Leah would have been a continuation of the same incestuous pattern. He tells Foster that he has loved Leah all his life [p. 497], yet how convincing is this declaration, given what he does to her? Does Lent lead us to believe that the love between Foster and Daphne, cousin and descendants of the Mebanes (one from the slave side, one from the master side), can transcend the tragic family history? How does the happiness of Foster and Daphne resonate with what has come before?
15. Why does Alex Mebane lie to Leah when she returns to Sweetboro after twenty-five years? Why does he choose the significant details of the story he fabricates for her--his own sexual relationship with Helen, an idiot child called Nell, Nell's murder, her mother's suicide? Mebane has told Foster, "We're getting close on to what is evil. . . . 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" [p. 467]. Is Alex Mebane truly evil, or is he simply the product of circumstances in his environment?
16. The novel's ending juxtaposes Foster's--and the reader's--realization of the extent of Leah's tragedy with a hopeful beginning for Foster and Daphne. How does Foster react to Mebane's story? How does he decide to use this knowledge? What is the effect of the book's final pages?