‘Cove’ a place of eerie others

It's the summer of 1918, during the last days of the war, a few months after Hank Shelton has come home from the trenches to rejoin his sister, Laurel, in the cabin they’ve shared since their parents died years ago. It’s in a cove just outside of Mars Hill, N.C., a small college town that has suffered heavy losses among its menfolk, and where anti-German sentiment runs so hot that even a professor of German is targeted with suspicion and abuse.

Laurel and Hank know exactly what this feels like. They’ve been terrorized, chased out of town and excommunicated as thoroughly as two witches in any medieval village.

The cove was once their parents’ greatest hope, with its lush groves of chestnut and fruit trees, and arable land for growing corn and tobacco. No one warned the Sheltons that it was “a cursed place” long before they arrived, “where ghosts and fetches wandered” and nothing could grow or thrive, a place that would snatch both parents, leaving the children on their own.

Blamed for every misfortune in the cove -- and some outside of it -- Hank and Laurel still aren’t welcome in Mars Hill; women hide their babies’ faces from Laurel, whose port-wine birthmark has always been seen as a sign of her otherness. But Hank, who lost a hand and won a Purple Heart “over there,” has earned the townspeople’s grudging respect. He is close to marrying a local girl, but can’t yet admit to Laurel that he plans to move to his bride’s family land.

It will leave her even more isolated in the cove, where she’s already so friendless and desperately alone that she’s begun to wonder, lately, whetherif “she herself might be a ghost. Did a ghost even know it was a ghost?”

Little wonder that when Laurel first happens upon a flute-playing stranger in the woods, she suspects he’s “something my lonesomeness imagined.” When Hank hires him as a temporary handyman, Laurel senses her chance for a normal life: hHis name is Walter and he’s a mute, and he has no idea about her past.

Rash sets Laurel’s yearnings in the world of a fable, complete with shadowy woods, extinct birds, townspeople who seem moments away from lighting the torches, fairy rings of “toadstools and witch hazel,” and strains of unearthly music. But the story takes a more realistic turn when we meet another kind of loner, local aArmy recruiter Chauncey Feith.

Though he lives in town, Chauncey is seen as the man responsible for sending boys overseas into harm’s way while he stays safely at home. All too conscious of his dubious role, Chauncey proves his patriotism by fighting shadow battles with the decorated vets and in harassing an ancient professor he believes is a spy.

As events brings Chauncey closer to Laurel and Walter -- whose muteness, we discover, has different origins than he claims -- Rash uses these three outsiders to explore the porous boundaries between heroism and foolhardiness; superstition and bigotry; patriotism and xenophobia. Always a master of restraint and foreshadowing, he builds the suspense with well-placed clues and disclosures, as well as one truly heart-hammering scene that uses a simple farm chore to unbelievable effect.

All the more baffling to find him holding the reader’s hand by caricaturing the townspeople as harridans and thugs, leading us to wonder who’s calling who cursed. During the lynch-mob frenzy that thuds through the latter part of the book, Chauncey in particular comes across as cartoonlike, a snarling, jackbooted Barney Fife, reluctant to lead but afraid not to.

In the quiet eye of the storm, the romance between Laurel and Walter is one of “The Cove's”’s lingering delights. Theirs is no blazing love affair, either, as the jacket copy promises. Rather, it’s a slow-burning, delicate flame that owes its existence, as Laurel points out, to the hidden gloom of the cove itself, and it is one of those flickers of color in the dark that Rash tenderly fans into life.

Despite her lovely, nearly Elizabethan phrasing, it’s no accident that Laurel rarely speaks to anyone and that she falls in love with a man who never talks, whose flute imitates birdsong. Some of her best lines question what life would be like if “everyone could make sounds” as beautiful as the music Walter plays: “We’d never want to speak. We could just call to each other, let each other know we weren’t alone.”

Witch hunt, spy hunt, scapegoat, birthmark: iIt’s all the same, Rash tell us, as long as we fear The Other. As Chauncey pores over German books in the town’s library, seeing danger in every foreign letter, he might as well be trying to read the cove, a place not so much cursed as forever set apart by its own odd, difficult beauty. In its story, we hear the unique voice of a region made all the more poignant for how few will ever hear it exactly this way again.