The Flash and Fragility of Revolt : IN A FATHER’S PLACE <i> by Christopher Tilghman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $18.95; 214 pp.) </i>

The cartoon fox chases the cartoon rabbit around a clump of trees. And since panic is quicker than desire, after a few circuits, the rabbit is chasing the fox.

Literature starts with an emotion in pursuit of a writer. The course is tricky and keeps doubling back on itself. The solitary workroom, the dry holes, the exercise that depletes instead of fortifying, the struggle to jam the ghost into running shoes--no wonder it so often ends with the writer padding along after the emotion.

Christopher Tilghman’s first collection of short stories runs the race both ways. Almost all display moments that are triumphs: a phrase that switches on the light, a sudden impulse of thought or feeling that calls a tide on the point of turning. In many of them, though, we get the sense that the author has seized an occasion to write very well. In two, it is as if the occasion had seized the author and given voice through him.

The people in Tilghman’s stories--set mostly in rural areas or in small or middle-sized towns--are value-seekers. They look in themselves, their past, their communities for signs of life and meaning. Somewhat unfashionably, they care a lot and prize their own caring.

In the beautifully drawn “On the Rivershore,” Tilghman poises everything upon a series of frontiers. It is set in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay Country, where the farmland lies so low and flat that it seems to merge with the water. “On hazy days,” he writes, “the big mansions, their pecans and honey locusts like sails, seem to be making their way, somewhere, on the shimmer of the Bay.”

The frontier may be hazy, but it is there. The farmers and the watermen form two separate and mutually wary communities. When a farmer kills a fisherman who has been abusing his daughter, a war is on the point of erupting. Two cooler heads prevail, one on each side; an abuse has been committed and paid for, they conclude.

But there are other frontiers, and Tilghman delicately superimposes one upon the other. There is youth and age; the killing and the subsequent confrontation are witnessed by the farmer’s 12-year-old son. In the showdown that ends peaceably, he will hear--and later, as an adult, understand--the restraint imposed by a different frontier, between past and present.

A way of life is passing on the land and the water. The farms are slipping from the hands of their proprietors; the watermen’s prosperity will slip away as well, and with it, their clan pride. We hear the times changing in the troubled words of accommodation spoken by Ray, the farm overseer, and Morris, the older of the two crabbers.

A different growth into understanding is told in the lovely “Hole in the Day.” A South Dakota farm wife, desperate at being pregnant with her fifth child, slams her legs together one night as her husband is making love, jumps out of bed, packs some clothes and drives off.

“She ran from that single weathered dot on the plains because the babies that kept coming out of her were not going to stop, a new one was just beginning and she could already feel the suckling at her breast. Soon she will cross into Montana, or Minnesota, or Nebraska; she’s just driving and it doesn’t really matter to her where, because she is never coming back.”

In these few opening lines, Tilghman captures her drowning despair, the flash of her revolt, and also its fragility.

Grant, the husband, sits rigidly for hours in the chair from which he’d watched her pack. “He feels as if the roof of his house had been lifted,” Tilghman writes. Come morning, the four children wake up; Leila, age 8, numbly takes charge. Unable to move, Grant hears the sounds of the children coping: “In the kitchen the baby wails as he is passed around.”

After the explosion and the subsequent silence of the crater, movement returns. Grant packs his pickup truck, drops Leila with a neighbor and two of her brothers with his mother. Nobody will accept the 2-year-old, so he takes him along. He doesn’t know where Lonnie, his wife, has gone, but he will find her.

The search--farmer and baby driving from town to town--is grand folly. But it is also a grand act of faith. Tilghman’s story of the trip is the story of a man, out of a suddenly purified love, casting himself upon fortune. The baby--”a buddy, willing and cheerful to go along, always surprised by events”--is his talisman. Without him, he reflects after he has found Lonnie and they have made peace, his instinct would have failed; he would not have sensed where to go.

It is touching and comic, this mad search and peaceable reunion. Something has been learned. And Tilghman has accomplished what only a true storyteller can do: make the impossible inevitable.

In other stories, the characters and their discoveries are less convincingly joined. “A Gracious Rain” is a contrived, “Our Town”-like sketch of a factory worker who dies and returns in spirit to sit on his front porch and to reflect that death is just as inconclusive in a small town as life is. “Mary in the Mountains” describes the lethal coldness in the heart of a gentle woman. Tilghman has fashioned a target out of her, and shot it.

The same feeling of a target, of a story as an occasion for literature, comes in the title piece. Like “Riverroad,” it is set in Maryland and tells of an era passing. The setting--a shore mansion filled with things from a more gracious time--and Dan, its protagonist--an old lawyer who has vegetated since his wife died--are well drawn, if familiar. Dan’s son, a writer, has come home for a brief visit.

With Nick, the son, comes Patty, his girlfriend. She is an intolerably sharp-tongued, arrogant and greedy young woman who “tore up”--in Nick’s admiring if cowed words--the English Department at Columbia. She prowls the house with price tags in her eyes, flaunts a book by Jacques Derrida, the fashionable literary deconstructionist, and prods Nick to work faster on his novel.

It will, she assures a dismayed Dan, “deconstruct” the family. At night, Dan overhears her giving Nick directions to her orgasm. An explosion comes, with a total lack of surprise. Patty is not simply a mean effigy; she is a regular Guy Fawkes stuffed to the sneer with gunpowder.

“Norfolk” tells of the estrangement between a ‘60s couple when he goes off to sea in the Navy and finds he likes it, and his wife stays at home to be arty. It arranges its characters woodenly, though there is some lovely writing in it.

“Loose Reins” recounts a son’s distress when his mother, widow of a rancher, marries a broken-down cowhand. It too is stiffly arranged around its point, although it boasts one shining scene. The cowhand picks up a crystal bowl that the son has brought as a wedding present, and his words challenge the young man’s simplistic contempt. “I’ve never scene nothing so pretty that I can hold in my hands,” he says. “It’s like mountain water.”

Tilghman’s ladders, rising like Yeats’, out of the human heart, are fine ladders, and when they sit firmly, they give a glorious view. Too often, though, they slip on the strewed rags and bones of which he does not yet seem ready to take account.