Book Reviews : Spellbinding Visit to ‘God’s Country’ in Pennsylvania

Spellbound: Growing Up in God’s Country by David McKain (University of Georgia Press: $18.95, 257 pages)

When I read a review copy of a new book, it is my habit to turn down pages to mark a memorable turn of phrase, or an intriguing fact, or a particularly telling anecdote. After reading the first 50 pages of “Spellbound” by David McKain, I realized that nearly every page was dogeared. And then I stopped marking the pages.

The book, I realized, is too beautiful to be treated so casually--I wanted to keep it on my own shelves, and to share it with my friends.

“Spellbound” is a modest, understated book--the autobiography of a mid-20th Century Tom Sawyer, who “never felt happier than when I did something others considered dangerous”--and yet it is a book of tremendous power and superb accomplishment.

Memoir of Childhood, Family

“Spellbound” can be described accurately enough as a memoir of McKain’s childhood and adolescence in what’s called “God’s Country,” a reminiscence of the hard-scrabble Pennsylvania oil towns where he grew up in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and a biographical sketch of his mother and father.

But the book is also something more--a hymn of the small joys and little brutalities of life, a prayer to the redemptive power of memory. The authors’ father, Charles McKain, was an “armchair Klansman,” a victim of “falling sickness,” a failed minister who was not much more successful at running a pet shop. The Rev. McKain died, alone, in the State Hospital for the Insane at Gowanda.

Still, McKain writes: “Whenever I found a chance to be proud of him I was proud.” Ida McKain was a schoolteacher and a lay preacher with the strength and fortitude of a pioneer woman, a durable faith in God, and a sly, ironic sense of the world: “The world needs courage and love,” she tells her son. “One of these days you’ll get so broad-minded you’ll go flat.”

God’s country, as McKain tells us, is to be found in the remote stretches of the Alleghenies in north-central Pennsylvania. It’s a very real place, and McKain’s vivid recollections of childhood and adolescence--the joys and sorrows of an unremarkable life, great and small, natural and man-made--are plainspoken and unsentimental.

“Is it God’s country, or has God forsaken it?” McKain’s mother would ask. “That’s what I want to know.”

Dream Cannot Be Shaken

But, as we discover in “Spellbound,” God’s country is also a place in the heart and the soul--a place that McKain describes with the perfect clarity and the awful intensity of a young child’s fever dream.

“One morning I jumped out of bed, flew down the hall, and slammed the bathroom door all in one breathless thrashing of arms and legs, seeking a place to hide,” he writes of one childhood dream about a dead sister whom he knew only from a framed photograph. “On fire with the promise of morning, the bathroom was always brilliant. I hid there when dark thoughts clouded my mind. I woke from a dream I could not shake.”

McKain, a poet and an English professor at the University of Connecticut, is a man of deep compassion and a writer of quiet but impressive style. Passing moments and commonplace scenes are rendered as exquisitely detailed portraiture, as a kind of poetry:

“On Grape Day no one else could pick but Grandma,” McKain writes. “Grandma climbed to the top of the stepladder herself, snipping each cluster with special pruning scissors, the ones with a brass spring she kept locked in a private drawer. ‘Blood of Christ,’ she announced solemnly, handing a cluster down as though it was made of glass.”

Author Promised to Remember

McKain explains that he was lured back into these poignant but somehow unsettling and even dangerous memories by the illness of his aging mother. He closed up his mother’s apartment, distributed her few worldly possessions, but he could not escape the insistent ghosts of memory, the dream that he could not shake.

“I promise to remember what it was like growing up in God’s country,” he vowed. “I promise to remember.”

In “Spellbound,” David McKain has kept his promise, and for that we must thank him.