Books : A Tale of Old-Fashioned Love and Loss Revealed

Winterchill by Ernest J. Finney (William Morrow: $16.95; 239 pages)

You find this novel out gradually, as you would the personalities involved if you lived in the California orchard country, down the road from the Clark family holdings.

Shifting back and forth in time from the 1970s to the ‘50s and fast-forward to the present, the segments of the narrative drop into place like shards of glass in a kaleidoscope; apparently random bits of light and color falling into a precise and formal design.

A Boy’s Viewpoint

The first chapter, set in 1972, is told from the vantage point of a young boy living in the Clarks’ tenant house with Elmo Clark, a Vietnam veteran critically wounded both mentally and physically.

The opening scene is a duck hunt on the Clark property, the teen-aged narrator working as a human retriever for the local sports who come to the Clark pond to shoot mallards. “Now you see why we don’t use dogs. We got Gerald, here,” one of the hunters says. Does he come back in the boat and shake water on you? . . . No sir. . . . Then, on the other hand, he’s got a propensity to smell worse than one. Everyone laughed. I kept poling.”

Shrinking Inheritance

By this time, the Clarks have only about 100 acres left of the 600 acres their grandfather had planted in plums. James, the eldest Clark son, is a huge bear-like man; as tall as his grandfather but coarse and crude. Elmo, the younger brother, looks “used up, as if he’d been the same size as James but then had shrunk and shriveled. . . . I didn’t belong to anyone here,” the narrator tells us.

Bit by bit, we intuit that Gerald’s father abandoned the family, leaving the mother to support the boy by cooking for the hunters and providing other more intimate services. Eventually she also absconded, leaving her son to earn his keep by making himself useful around the place.

Though he tells us he’s a truant, expelled from school for fighting the kids who taunt him, Gerald is supremely articulate, and by the end of the chapter, he’s not only immaculately scrubbed but a star scholar. Elmo Clark would be proud of him, but Elmo is gone; on the streets, in a mental hospital or a veterans home. He’s sent Gerald a graduation gift--a crudely carved and painted duck decoy with gouged-out eyes, an ironic but recognizable self-portrait of a man destroyed by circumstance.

Closer to the Spirit

We won’t hear from Gerald again until the last chapter, when he’s in law school somewhere in New England, far removed in time and space from the tule marshes of Northern California, but closer in spirit to that heritage than the remaining landowners themselves.

The substantial middle sections of the novel allow the Clark saga to emerge piecemeal, elicited from those best qualified to tell each portion of the story. The 1952 segment belongs to Greta, who stays on the Clark place after her migrant worker father moves on. Eventually, she marries the older Clark son, James, breaking the heart of Elmo, who had always expected that she would wait for him to grow up.

Unable to watch as James maltreats Greta, Elmo enlists in the Army to escape his own sensible but loveless marriage. His behavior seems irrational until we remember that Elmo was only a young boy when he discovered his own father’s suicide. Though the trauma is woven seamlessly into the novel, it becomes pivotal in retrospect, marking Elmo as the one who will bear the accumulating weight of the narrative.

A Straightforward Tale

Though author Ernest J. Finney’s technique is oblique, his story is a straightforward tale of those who belong to the land and struggle to maintain it against the inexorable forces of time and progress. The founding grandfather, Jim Clark, is a superbly realized character--opinionated, intransigent, but instinctively wise and gentle in his relationship to his troubled grandson.

Thoroughly contemporary in its preoccupation with durable themes of love and loss, “Winterchill” is simultaneously old-fashioned in its assertion of endangered American values.