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destined to “cut his find in two” (36), and the deer resurrects “from a sleep men would never know” (37). The efficacy of White’s words makes the most outlandish actions believable, including those of the main character of “Hawkins’s Boy,” who reburies his son’s corpse each night after wild dogs “get at the limbs glowing pale as quartz in the shallow ground, gnawing through the shroud of croaker sacks” (7). The “sins” of these characters exist in a world where the past leans against the present to the point of pain. In “Give Up and Go Home, Jasper,” characters seek a “place [where] we all go when we go down to forget ourselves
and what we lost some place just beyond faithful memory” (54), a sentiment that appears throughout the collection. In stories like “A World of Daylight,” there might not be such a place; revenge dislocates Packer, who is searching for Drema Chase, the woman who caused his brother’s death. Packer’s plans are known: “this ain’t a town for secrets” (89). Another character guarantees an alibi. The plan becomes reality during “the Lord’s weekend” (91), with Packer showing up at Drema’s trailer and playing Playstation with the boy there until she arrives. The surprise in the story’s final act shows that the power of a revenge story often exists more
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in well-crafted anticipation than actual vengeance. “Winter by Heart,” perhaps the most arresting story in the collection, shows White at his best, both in terms of language and content. Luke Messer’s hands are an important part of this tale, as in the image of him pressing “his bare palms to the warmth still living in any such surface” as “car windshields, polished granite, black paint,” and then “his lightly whiskered face” (119). Luke is searching for Old Carter Marsh, but the emotional core of this story is Alice Forester, a woman his father had married three weeks after meeting her.
His Story, History, and Home: Gary Neil Carden Receives north carolina Award for Literature by Lorraine Hale Robinson photograph by Carl Iobst
Gary Neil Carden, storyteller-author-painter-teacher, received the North Carolina Award for Literature at a gala ceremony held October 30, 2012, at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh. The North Carolina Awards, the state’s highest civilian honor, recognize the highest achievement in the fields of the fine arts, science, and public service. Carden’s life was shaped by his father’s murder, his mother’s abandonment of him, and his hearing impairment, an inauspicious beginning by most measures. He was raised by his grandparents in a then-remote cove in Jackson County, and this mountain milieu was rich in material that Carden has now woven into his writing and storytelling and depicted in his painting. He grew up “listening to a great deal of foolishness about bad blood [his], black Irish curses [his grandfather’s], and the evils of being left-handed [he couldn’t play a musical instrument].”1 The stories he heard were recounted at family events such as reunions, weddings, and funerals. At the center of these stories is an intensely personal element: relatives or neighbors might be described as
1
This and the next quotation are quoted from Carden’s website.
above Jeff Messer playing Horace Kephart in Gary Neil Carden’s
play Outlander, Swain County Center for the Arts, Bryson City, NC, 25 Sept. 2012