STRANGE BIRDS IN THE TREE OF HEAVEN
By Karen Salyer McElmurray
Hill Street Press, 288 pages, $25
During the Depression, a pioneering corps of photographers hired by the Farm Security Administration lit out across America and returned with thousands of images of rural life. The pictures were explicit and often heartbreaking, a record of lives lived under this country’s most prolonged and widespread experience of poverty. Yet despite their hard subject matter, despite the portrayal of almost unimaginable duress and deprivation, many photographs from that time have a strange, solemn beauty.
It is almost always the photographer’s control of light that counts — the deathly, bleached-out midday of Georgia, the pennies-from-heaven light that lies like snowfall in the close hills of Kentucky, the formal and ethereal skies unfolding over the Virginia mountains. It is the presence of that light, the singular way it occupies the landscape and the faces pointed toward the camera, that gives those well-known images of Depression-torn America their riveting clarity.
Karen Salyer McElmurray, in her debut novel, “Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven,” has done for the town of Mining Hollow, Ky., what those photographers — Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Wolcott — did for the American South and the heartland. She has found the light, and fixed her eye on it, and captured it in the midst of some of the darkest years of the century and in one of the darkest places.
Tricks of light reveal to the characters the face of God in ordinary surfaces. Reflections in ponds take a human shape. Rays of light suggest hope to the hopeless. For the people who live in Mining Hollow, light wields a force as powerful as any other. In Mining Hollow, the light may be tormentor or comforter, lover or demon; it may be blinding or elusive, spectral or benign, clear or misunderstood. But it is a central player in the lives of the characters and in McElmurray’s effort to convey the time and place of her story.
This is the story of a family: its fevered, fanatical, Scripture-spouting patriarch, Tobias Blue; his daughter, Ruth Blue; Ruth’s husband, Earl Wallen; and Ruth and Earl’s son, Andrew. Set from the years 1926 to 1983, the story is told by Andrew, Ruth and Earl, whose voices leap back and forth across time in a sometimes dreamlike accounting.
Ruth’s life has been marked early by loss. Her mother, Stella — called Little Mother by her lovestruck daughter and her oppressive, Bible-thumping husband, Tobias — abandons her family when Ruth is 10, escaping Mining Hollow’s stinking coal mines and grim poverty. Hired to teach tap dance in nearby Inez, Stella sees on those evenings of dancing a window of opportunity that looks out into a better, brighter world. One night, murmuring incantations of apology and feeding magical charms against blame into the family’s cookstove, she leaves in her feathered skirt and glass beads and tap shoes to seek her fortune elsewhere. A car waits for her outside on the dark road, running its engine.
Left behind, Ruth begins to assess the extent of her loss. “After my mother became a ghost,” she says, plainly, “we continued, Tobias and me, to live in the house of her disappearance.”
For a while, Tobias and Ruth look for Stella.
“One night near a little town called Radiant, the sky turned yellow and two balloons drifted across the moon above a speakeasy where, from the door, I saw lights lowered, silver garlands and confetti, couples gliding past, their arms circling one another, the air full of applause. But nowhere did we find Little Mother.”
Stella’s departure triggers Tobias’ furious decline. He drinks, he raises his hands against his daughter, he threatens and intimidates her with the Bible, he terrifies her with charges of sin and threats of damnation. Ruth, her father’s victim and his handmaiden, is defenseless against her father and his terrifying evocations of an all-seeing God. At an early age she already understands how far she will have to go to overcome the hand she has been dealt in life:
“And a time would come, leaving me looking behind me for the cloud of dust, the demon of change that took hold of everything I knew. Like a better time was ahead of me if I only knew how to look hard enough. That better time always seemed it would look like the sun shining through a dusty window, or like light on water. Only I’d never seen that much light, that much water. It would have taken a mighty angel to take me that far above the earth, above the storms of dust and departure and wishing that would be my life. A fierce-winged angel who could take me to a place of enough water and light to settle all that would come, and come again, and disappear in my life.”
Earl Wallen, a World war II veteran, drifts into Inez one night and becomes the town’s late-night disc jockey. (One set piece that takes place in the radio station involving a mother and her Hula-Hooping daughter has all the morbid comedy of Flannery O’Connor’s best work.) Obsessed by the death of an Army friend during the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he dreams of release from his wartime memories, of sweet-tasting fame as a songwriter, of love and comfort.
Romantic and unbalanced, bedeviled by his own sense of mystification and loss, he marries Ruth (in a reckless compression of the novel’s events) and moves into the Mining Hollow house with his howling, fundamentalist father-in-law and new bride. He promises Ruth they will stay for just a short time, but only a fire years later finally drives them from the house, and then they rebuild within walking distance of the old place. “Before long,” Ruth says, “Tobias and Earl became the same to me, the same voices, saying, Ruth, do this and that, their shadows crossing each other on the kitchen floor.”
And then there is Andrew, Ruth and Earl’s son, who suffers his first homosexual longings at a revival meeting when he is struck with love for the handsome preacher with light glinting off his cobalt glass eye. When he eventually falls in love with a boyhood friend, he must make a choice — a choice with life-threatening implications — about how he will finally define love for himself. Is it on his grandfather Tobias’ terms of hellfire and brimstone? His mother’s terms? His father’s?
The novel’s sensuousness — which McElmurray manages to evoke to mysterious, startling effect in Kentucky’s dark and wasted coal-mining region, in a world of profound poverty and hopelessness — is its greatest strength. It works best, however, when it leaves the realm of overblown and arty emotional abstraction, which McElmurray’s prose stumbles into from time to time, and becomes solid and particular — as when a girl’s dress gapes, revealing “glimpses of dimpled, vanilla moonpie skin.”
For in the end, despite all the shadows and ghosts and tricks of light that flit through Mining Hollow, this is a story about real life, about people trying to finish things that cannot be finished, about trying to raise the dead, about trying to return mothers to their children and wives to their husbands. “Everything,” Ruth says, “Mining Hollow, Earl, myself, was heavy with the weight of a nameless thing, with having, with wanting to have, with not.”
But it is also a story about love, about how salvation can be located, as Ruth tells Earl, in the human experience of love. “This little human thing,” she tells him. “This heart. Any heart. It’s as close to God as you’ll ever get.”
