Something I read described Peelle as a Southern writer. Self-transplanted to the South about two years ago, still curious about it, I picked up this book in hopes of gaining insight. Peelle sprinkles her stories with good regional details: people reading the penny-saver, F-350's ticking in parking lots, "new families plant spindly dogwoods" in a new subdivision, the obsession with fireworks. Yet, those are just outward trappings. I'm not sure that Pelle aims or hits on any deeper, defining spirit or ethos, nor am I certain that can be done.
The South as place figures largest in the provocatively titled story This Is Not a Love Story. The narrator is a mother who stumbles across old photos while packing her daughter off to college. The photos recall a lost, romantic summer from her youth. That summer, naively fashioning herself an artist and photographer, she'd headed South because she "had never been and [it] seemed so mysterious: raw and dangerous and full of relics of a long-gone era." She believed "this mystery...would more than make up for my lack of talent, because any photograph I took could not help but capture it"(116). The mystery she butts up against is Tommy, a charming but alcoholic good-old-boy nearly twice her age. The two spend the best part of a year living on a houseboat, celebrating a carefree, careless summer of riot that goes bad.
The narrator of this story insists that in the South, "it's not the places that are haunted, it's the people. They are trapped by all the stories of the past, wandering a long hallway lined with locked doors, knocking and knocking, with no one ever answering"(121). Peelle's people are haunted by the past in various ways. The photographer-want-to-be tells her daughter that until she came across the photos, she'd never recalled this reckless episode from her youth. Yet, the memory is clearly there, suppressed bec because too sad, too dear, making what came after too pale. After retelling it, her daughter quips, "It sounds like those were the days."
Similarly riven by a rich time in her past, the narrator of the lovely story Sweethearts of the Rodeo, recalls the time she and a girlhood friend spent working on a run-down, poorly-supervised horse-farm. Central to her memory are two ponies the girls rode daily: for work, play and fantasy. She ends her telling, "Lately I've been thinking someone should write an elegy for those ponies. But not me"(63).
Memory can suffer worse ends. In Phantom Pain, taxidermist Jack Well's craft is all about capturing the quick of life. He criticizes the work of his lackluster and younger assistant as "graceless, stiff, hastily and sloppily done." To get it right, to "capture" the animal, "at some point in the process....you have to let the animal lead you. After all, it's not clay or paint or iron you're working with. What you're working with has....been a living breathing thing, for years has been blinking, snorting, sleeping, grazing, scanning the horizon"(31).
Old, despairing, Jack looks over his shop and notes, "some of the [his] early work has already gone, popped at the seams, mice long since eaten the glue and made nests out of the stuffing. How long will the restof it last? Longer. But not forever"(44). Likewise, Jack's lost even the memory of a more vital time. Silently, to himself, he warns a group of young people he observes: "you'll grow tired of everything....that's when you'll start regretting that tattoo. Not because you see it every day. But because you don't even notice it anymore. Because you thought it would last forever, and remind you of something forever. And it doesn't"(34).
Peelle's collection is wisely bookended by the two most engaging stories. Capping the collection, Shadow On a Weary Land features three feckless, social misfits who watch helplessly as their home in rural Brown's Ridge, a Southern everyplace, is gradually turned into urban sprawl. All three had sought refuge here and had come to find the comfort of home here in this once rural place. Now, as the bulldozers and construction crews arrive, he and his buddies helplessly mourn. They also pass their time searching for mythic hidden treasure that, according to local lore, Jesse James and his brother Frank buried in Brown's Ridge when the two outlaws lived there incognito, masquerading as solid citizens.
While mourning the loss of a place that approached home, the narrator admits, "None of us can claim to belong here"(162). He also throws into question the idea of the pristine, or perfect moment, that needs to or can be restored. The narrator rejects the prophetic announcements of his zoned out buddy who walks around with a copy of Isaiah torn from the Bible. Turning his back on the assumptions of such narrative, he confesses, "I'm not sure what I believe in at all, save the law of the conservation of matter, which means everything is made of what came before"(176).
While engaging and moving, this story gets a bit chatty. Peelle sometimes lets her characters muse a little too much and do a little too little. They are prone to offering nice, tidy aphoristic thoughts that come acros a little false at times.
Her best story, the opener Mule Killers avoids excessive introspection and philosophizing. In it, the narrator recalls how his mom and dad came "together" while living on a tobacco farm. They meet the year when "big trucks loaded with mules rumbled steadily to the slaughterhouses" as farmers moved to tractors in the interest of making money.
The field hands miss the mules. They are "used to sleeping all down the length of a tobacco row until the mules stop, waking just long enough to swing the team and start on back up the next"(2-3). The narrator's grandfather who owns the farm misses the mules. The narrator recalls "My grandfather understood mule power. He celebrated it. He reveled in it. ....When his wife died young of a fever, it was not a horse but Orphan Lad who pulled her coffin slowly to the burying grounds"(5).
His father harbors a love for the mules. During the last summer with mules on the farm, the narrator's father "has become secretive about the things he loves. His love is fierce and full, but edged in guilt. He loves Orphan Lad: Orphan's sharp shoulders and soft ears, the mealy tuck of his lower lip. Music. Books and the smell of books, sun-warmed stones, and Eula Parker"(3).
Eula is "a slippery and myetrious girl, and my father's poor heart is constantly bewildered by her fickle ways"(5). To provoke Eula's jealousy, the father takes up with her drab best friend. Eula's hair "swept up off her neck, thick purple-black and shining," while the nameless friend has "onion-pale hair"(7). The nameless girl with onion-pale hair is the narrator's mother. For her, the attention from the narrator's father is a dream come true. When he takes her out for a soda, "she has trouble "believing that she is sitting here at this counter, having a soda with a boy"(8).
However, his pursuit is simply a gambit and it fails; Eula doesn't care that the father has taken up with her friend with onion-pale hair. Stung by her indifference, the narrator's father takes up with the girl with onion-pale hair. He takes her "to the hayloft, a back field, the mule barn, the spring house: anyplace that was dark and quiet for long enough that my father could desperately try to summon Eula's face, or else hope to forever blot it from his mind. Long enought that I, like a flashbulb, could snap into existence"(10).
There's mystery to this story. The mother, like the mules, seems a thing of the past, unappreciated and dismissed. We never discover if the narrator's father ever grew to appreciate or love the mother, or whether he continued to see through her, forever wounded by his unrequited desire for Eula. It's a strange story. It creates compassion for a character who remains a cipher. Everyone around her is drawn with some detail, but she's left largely untold, in keeping with what would seem a perfect humility that comes from being plain.
Animals are prominently featured in almost every story. They are presented as mysterious, virtuous, and humble. She uses them to evoke a consciousness and virtue we as humans may have left or evolved from to our own loss.
In Phantom Pain, the residents of the town where Jack Wells has his taxidermy shop keep sighting a panther despite the fact that such animals haven't lived in the area in living memory. Wells skeptically mutters:
If a panther really is up there, sniffing out an ancient path its great-great ancestors once followed, is at this very moment twitching its great muscular tail and arching its back to run tis claws down the trunk of a tree, dropping to all fours to nose at a beef jerky wrapper filled with dirty rainwater and picking around rusted old tin cans and television sets to make its way into one of thsoe hollers, meowing a lonely meow, well-Jack thinks, pulling in his driveway and stopping to check the empty mailbox in front of his trailer-then I pity the old bastard.(37)
Yet, loss and pity aren't the only two strains in this collection. If it doesn't offer concrete hope, it does suggest that within the natural, in the presence of animals, it's still possible to regain a sense of anticipation and wonder.
