A Country Called Home - Hardcover

Barnes, Kim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307268950 ISBN 13: 9780307268952

Publisher: Knopf, 2008

Synopsis

With her acclaimed memoir In the Wilderness Kim Barnes brought us to the great forests of Idaho, where geography and isolation shape love and family. Now, in her luminous new novel, she returns to this territory, offering a powerful tale of hope and idealism, faith and madness.

It is 1960 when Thomas Deracotte and his pregnant wife, Helen, abandon a guaranteed future in upper-crust Connecticut and take off for a utopian adventure in the Idaho wilderness. They buy a farm sight unseen and find the buildings collapsed, the fields in ruins. But they have a tent, a river full of fish, and acres overgrown with edible berries and dandelion greens. Helen learns to make coffee over a fire as they set about rebuilding the house. Though Thomas discovers he can’t wield a hammer or an ax, there is a local boy, Manny—a sweet soul of eighteen without a family of his own—who agrees to manage the fields in exchange for room and board. Their optimism and desire carry them through the early days.

But the sudden, frightening birth of Thomas and Helen’s daughter, Elise, changes something deep inside their marriage. And then, in the aftermath of a tragic accident to which only Manny bears witness, suspicion, anger, and regret come to haunt this shattered family. It is a legacy Elise will inherit and struggle with, until she ultimately finds a hope of her own.

In this extraordinary novel, Kim Barnes reminds us of what it means to be young and in love, to what lengths people will go to escape loneliness, and the redemption found in family.

About this title

About the Author

Kim Barnes is the author of the novel Finding Caruso and two memoirs, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country—a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize—and Hungry for the World. She is coeditor with Mary Clearman Blew of Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers, and with Claire Davis of Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty. Her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, MORE magazine, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She teaches writing at the University of Idaho and lives with her husband, the poet Robert Wrigley, on Moscow Mountain.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

1960

The druggist waited, whistling, looking out the window, nodding to each person who passed along the Main Street of Fife. It was early, the bank not yet open. The warming September wind wafted through the door seams. On the north hill, he could see the sun just hitting the flat metal roof of the Clearwater Mental Hospital and, across the shared parking lot, the high school. Dr. K often joked that the children of Fife could look out their windows and see their future before them.

“How much?” Manny asked again. The boy was tall enough to meet the older man eye to eye, but he kept his gaze on the faded counter as though some miracle might transpire there.

“Same as last time.”

The cola sat between them, dripping condensation. Manny laid out three pennies, pretended to search for more.

“Don’t got it, do you?” The druggist was not an unfriendly man but brusque and burly, built more like a butcher than a purveyor of medicine. Dr. K, the locals called him, his full name, Kalinosky, too much to mess with. His role in the town went beyond the filling of prescriptions and the dispensing of antiseptics: he diagnosed strep throat, checked children for lice, scoured the wounds caused by pitched rocks, chain saw slips, bicycle wrecks.

“No, sir.” Manny freed his hands, let them drop to his sides. He peered at his shoes, the seams stretched and frayed.

Dr. K sighed, shook his head, pointed toward the door. “Broom’s just outside. Make yourself useful for an hour.”

Like others in Fife, Dr. K knew the details of Manny’s life: his parents’ move from California to the isolated Idaho land they believed a more honest place; the strange little canvas hut that inspired the town’s curiosity and contempt. His father’s insistence on learning the dying art of horse-logging from an old man who stank of sweat and juniper berries. Manny’s birth just a few miles up Itsy Creek, and the death of his mother twelve years later when his little sister, born already dead, was followed by the blood they could not stop flowing. The father, once admired for his native ingenuity and his matched team of Percheron geldings, had headed south to find work and never came back. The good women of Fife had proceeded with a kind of communal adoption, passing the responsibility for Manny’s care from one to the other, each week a different mother, father, cast of siblings, and then the cycle repeating. Dr. K remembered the morning he’d opened the drugstore to find Mrs. Keasling wringing her hands, repeating again and again that der boy, der boy was missing. Dr. K had found Manny where he thought he would, asleep in the fair barn, his father’s auctioned draft horses snuffling his hair, placing their great hooves gently beside him.

Manny stepped outside with the broom, scattering the cats that had gathered for their morning meal. Too many toms, Dr. K thought. Too many litters, but he couldn’t turn away a single one of them. He watched as Manny worked the windows clean of cobwebs, pleased with the care he took with the corners. Despite everything, or maybe because of it, he’d grown into a fine young man: tall and strong-shouldered, more handsome than he needed to be. Thick dark hair, dark eyes, skin like an Italian, Dr. K thought. He looked like he might be broody, but wasn’t. When Manny ran the broom a final time along each crack of the sidewalk and knocked the bristles clean before stepping back into the store, Dr. K opened the cash register and pulled out a dollar bill.

“Here. Buy yourself some real food.” Dr. K slipped the pencil behind his ear, wiped a hand the length of his face. “Listen. You need to get out there and do something. Ray Coon’s logging outfit might need a swamper. Or what about the railroad? Didn’t I hear that they were hiring?”

Manny shrugged. “Guess I’m okay.”

“Okay? What’s that mean? There’s just no reason for you to be living like a hobo. It’s one thing when you’re a boy to be spending your days piddling around at the river, but you’re about past that now. Pretty soon, if you’re not doing nothing, you’ll be good for nothing.”

Manny nodded, agreeable as always. “You got more work you’d like me to do?”

Dr. K sat down on the high stool he kept for resting his feet. “Another few months, I might use you for delivery. Bad weather sets in, business picks up. Which reminds me—how many jars of VapoRub you see on the shelf?”

Manny counted three, one large, two small. The druggist grunted, made a note on a piece of paper. “Better order more. Those Carter kids eat that stuff. Mother thinks it does them more good from the inside.”

Dr. K was tallying his laxative inventory when a man stepped in. Dress shirt and shoes, pants still holding a crease. Sharp nose and chin. Hair just past a good cut. Outside, a faded red Volkswagen sat at the curb, a young woman in the passenger seat, holding her hair away from her neck, fanning herself with a map.

Dr. K moved to rest his meaty palms on the counter. “Yes, sir. What can I help you with?”

“I’m looking for Bag Balm.” The man’s voice had a strange cadence.

“Bag Balm we got.” Dr. K pointed around Manny. “Grab that green tin, Manny. Large size?”

The man nodded his head and pulled a money clip from his pocket.

Not many people came in who weren’t known by the pharmacist in some intimate way. He’d sold the boys their first condoms, seen most of the town’s women through menstruation, childbirth, and menopause. He prescribed headache cures and hangover remedies, administered narcotics to the suffering and sedation to those stricken by grief. If this new man had settled himself within the county, Dr. K would soon make him familiar; if he were only passing through, Dr. K would extract some anecdote to amuse or enlighten the next customer who came in.

Dr. K extended a thick hand. “Burt Kalinosky.”

“Thomas Deracotte.” The stranger shook quickly. He seemed less nervous than efficient. Knew his business and wanted to get on with it.

“Just traveling through, then?”

“We’re here from New Haven. Connecticut. My wife and I have purchased the Bateman place.”

“Sure, I know the place. Knew Olie, too.” Dr. K dealt out the man’s change and followed him to the door. “Bateman place, huh? Last I heard, it’d gotten pretty lean.”

The man took a moment to examine his shoes, looked out the window to Main Street before turning his attention back to the pharmacist. “You might let people know that we’ll be looking for a few laborers. We’ll be able to offer room and board, once our buildings are complete.”

“Well, then,” Dr. K said, “you should meet this young man. He could use some work.”

“How old is he?”

“Manny? Hell, I’m not sure exactly. How old are you, Manny?”

Manny cleared his throat. “Near eighteen.”

“He’s got a good head on him. Only fault that I can see is that he’d rather fish than break a sweat. That and read books.”

Deracotte’s face relaxed. His eyes were stone gray, the color of river rock. “What are you reading these days?”

The boy flushed with the sudden attention. “Great Gatsby, sir.”

Deracotte gave a slight nod of approval. “Are you a fan of Fitzgerald?”

“Guess I’m not sure yet.”

The man smiled. “How about Monday morning to start? Do you have transportation?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you know the place?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. I’ll see you then.”

Dr. K watched through the window as Deracotte ducked into the little car and said something to the woman, who nodded and laughed.

“You better be grateful. I might decide I want that job myself.” He walked to the cash register, began counting change into the till.

“Bet he’s that doctor we heard might be coming,” Manny said.

Dr. K stopped counting his money long enough to gaze toward the door, process the possibility. “You think?”

“I do.”

The druggist stacked the quarters, then the dimes, scratched numbers on the back of a receipt. “Wonder what that would mean.” He touched the nickels, looked up at Manny blankly. “I can’t remember how many goddamn five-cent pieces there are in a dollar.”

“Twenty,” Manny said.

“Yeah,” Dr. K said. “Twenty.” He let them drop back into the till one at a time. “Guess a doctor might mean more business. More prescriptions to fill.”

“That’s true.”

“Injured wouldn’t have to travel so far.”

“You’ve always been good to come to.”

Dr. K let his fingers rest in the drawer. “I think I saved your life once.”

“You did. When I swallowed all the baby aspirin.”

“Yeah, that’s it.” The druggist’s eyes focused, took on more light. “You’d crawled up on the counter, got into Lily Wendle’s medicine cabinet. Whole bottle. Ate them like candy.”

“I remember you holding my head over the sink.”

“Made you drink raw eggs and vinegar.” The pharmacist snorted. “Nothing stayed down. Taught you a lesson, too.” He rolled the bank bag snug. “Think you can work for that man?”

“Guess I might see.” ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0307268950
• ISBN 13: 9780307268952
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288