“The Evening Hour” by Carter Sickels. Bloomsbury; 336 pages; $15
Cole Freeman has lived his entire life in the rural coal mining town of Dove Creek, W.Va., mostly with his grandparents, who raised him after his mother ran off. He’s one of the few young people left who is not mired in drug addiction or a low-paying job at one of the few businesses that haven’t closed down.
In a town devastated by brutal mountain top removal, the constant blasting, flooding and pollution have driven the natives either out of their homes or out of their minds. The water is undrinkable, their houses are ruined from the explosions, and the coal company’s offers for the now-worthless land they own keep dropping.
Cole’s plans to escape crashed and burned 10 years ago, and now he works as an aide at the local nursing home, where he displays an unexpectedly gentle touch with people as scarred and ravaged as the land surrounding them.
He even maintains his own regular outreach program, making trips to check on the house-bound elderly, bringing them food, cigarettes and drinking water. He has known them all since he was a kid, knows what they’ve been through, understands their quirks and tolerates their grievances.
If it sounds too good to be true for a 27-year-old nursing-home aide trapped in a hellhole, it is, because Cole also remembers which patient owned every watch, ring, brooch and bracelet he has ever stolen from them when he unloads the valuables at the pawnshop after he gets off work.
The outreach visits? Well, those sweet grandpas and grandmas he ferries necessities to are also his “suppliers,” trading their unused prescription drugs for cash to pay their bills. His last stops are to the local junkies and speed freaks, many of whom are former classmates and friends, to resell the pills that they’ll crush and snort.
He sees nothing wrong with this give and take, as long as he makes sure no one “gets hooked,” and the old people who give up their meds feel no pain. “It wasn’t a bad thing, what he did. People needed him, counted on him. He gave them what they asked for.”
Besides, it’s not that different from the example his grandfather set, a Pentecostal preacher who once cared for the “dying, the sick and the broken,” who taught Cole to memorize Bible verses and how to hear God’s voice up on top of the mountains: “God talks to you, but he don’t talk to your ears, he talks to your heart.”
Not that Cole has ever heard it. His “harlot” of a mother, a stutter he thinks is punishment from God, and a secret he has buried so deep it’s forgotten — all these have added up to convince him he’s bad to the core, and he believes what his granddaddy always told him: “There’s only two kinds of people: the saved and the unsaved. Ain’t no in between.”
With his thieving and drug runs, Cole’s definitely in the second camp. Yet he can’t stop the Bible verses that still run through his head during his lonely drives to make his after-hours deals: “It was times like this, in the darkness and quiet, that the words sometimes returned, ghostly and pale like the Indian pipes hidden in the woods.”
Novels about Appalachia have to work hard to overcome hillbilly stereotypes — the meth heads that have replaced moonshiners, the snake-handling Holy Rollers, the ignorant, the toothless, the isolated communities clinging to superstitions and ignorance. Author Carter Sickels, who grew up in southeastern Ohio, close to neighboring West Virginia, has an unerring eye for the complex makeup of the men and women who still try to make a life in towns like Dove Creek.
Cole is a series of contrasts: His spare tones reflect the resignation and bitterness of a man determined to go down with the ship. But the voice we hear in his head still believes in the “world beyond this one” that his grandfather showed him, where there was “more than a person could see just with his eyes.”
His stubborn ties to the land and hatred of the mining company come across like any stiff-necked Southerner, yet his appreciation of the beauty around him erupts in flashes of concise poetry, as when he remembers how the mountains looked to him as a child: “Light shining through the tops of the trees; green moss on stumps; blooming foxglove and little pink azaleas, like teardrops.”
Other well-drawn characters — a gay ex-con caring for his dying landlady; Cole’s long-lost mother, Ruby, with her “furious, lovely eyes” and hopes for a fresh start; and his former best friend, Terry, now deep into drugs — flesh out Cole’s “congregation,” which grows more needy and broken each day.
The novel spans a year, in which his grandfather dies, and Cole draws closer to his mother and to Terry, trying to administer to everyone while ignoring the cracks, like the ones in his grandmother’s house, that have begun to appear in his own foundation. When events climax in exactly the kind of evening hour Cole’s granddaddy predicted, he is forced to choose between saving a dying community and saving himself.
How we heed our conscience in a changing world is one of the questions this book asks; where do we go to hear it when the places where it speaks to us are being destroyed? Sickels’ stunning debut novel offers an aching glimpse of how to listen.
Fiction
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