Dishing the Red Dirt : CUTTING STONE, <i> By Janet Burroway (Houghton Mifflin: $21.95; 404 pp.)</i>

When Eleanor Poindexter, a high-strung Baltimore belle, sulkily accompanies her banker husband to a raw Arizona railroad town in 1914, she all but despairs of what she finds. Stepping off the train in a tasteful silk outfit, she meets a warily hospitable array of glances from under poke bonnets. Her house is foursquare stucco, whose design “came out of the Corn Belt by way of failed imagination.” She will never get the red dirt out of it, nor will all her decorating arts ever make it gracious.

Janet Burroway has also tried to embellish foursquare stucco, though its design comes not from the Midwest but from Hollywood. She is a writer who can often show taste and imagination, qualities that improve her model but rarely manage to transform it. With her spoiled Eastern heroine who gradually finds her soul and her independence in Arizona’s red-brown soil, she has attempted Western literature; what she achieves is a Western.

First, she has to extract Eleanor from “Gone With the Wind.” We meet her, a perfect Scarlett, shining at her farewell Baltimore ball, being gossiped about, dancing with a handsome young naval officer “in epaulets and yellow hair” (a wig?) who “whisked her onto the dance floor”; and brooding about her eminent departure with Laurel, her Leslie Howard-like young banker. He is sickly, gentle, prissy, genteelly lustful, and his pale flesh makes hers creep.

Eleanor will be miserable for months in Bowie, a strategic Southern Pacific railroad outpost, where Laurel has taken the bank manager’s job in anticipation of an eventual boom. She is a little sustained by Alma, an independent-minded schoolteacher, and by Maria, her fiercely ambitious maid, who does a demon job on the red dirt, and aims to learn English and get away to California.

Before long, she is taking riding lessons from Frank Wheeler, a rangy married man whose dream is to make a go of the marble quarry he got from his wealthy father. They take long, exhilarating rides, they visit an abandoned Spanish mission which--despite Laurel’s opposition--she begins to remodel into a spacious adobe house, and finally they make love at the top of the quarry. The affair is immediately cut short by the cinematically melodramatic death of one of Frank’s children.

Eleanor, who has grown tanned and sinewy--”the metamorphosis of a rose into a zinnia,” Laurel morosely reflects--briefly breaks down, but she will recover to go into a house-building partnership with Alma. Not mean stucco, presumably, but authentic adobe. Eleanor too, we are encouraged to think, has also become authentic.

There are passages of persuasive writing, notably those that evoke the harshly beautiful landscape, and others that tell of Eleanor and a small Mexican crew restoring a well or making adobe bricks for the mission. They are not enough to make up for the stilted story, and the vacuousness of Eleanor, Frank and Laurel.

Fortunately, Burroway improves matters in several ways. One is in her portrait of Maria, the Mexican servant who is determined to rise out of her menial condition. Her English lessons with Alma provide the best writing in the book. She learns voraciously; every word she learns, she uses immediately. Alma teaches her a Ben Jonson poem “Have You Seen But a White Lily Grow” and Maria demands the meaning of “before the soil has smutcht it.” “New acquisitions,” Burroway writes, “rooted in her vocabulary like set-out seedlings. Yes, very likely tomorrow the laundry would be smutcht.”

A fluid and suggestive current is provided by two stories that thread through the main narrative and set it in historical context. They have to do with Woodrow Wilson’s decision, at the outbreak in Europe of World War I, to secure our southwest frontier by providing assistance to the Mexican rebels fighting Victoriano Huerta, and particularly to those operating right at the border under Pancho Villa.

Lloyd Wheeler, Frank’s younger brother, and Sam Hum, his Chinese-American schoolmate, are exploiting a copper claim in Mexico when Villa and his men arrive. Villa conscripts Lloyd into his service. Sam is abandoned after one of Villa’s lieutenants severs his ear in an offhand gesture which Burroway devises as a startling irony.

Lloyd’s adventures working for Villa are lighthearted and entertaining. At one point, he acts as “trust man” when Villa sells 15,000 stolen cattle across the Rio Grande to a crooked American rancher. Lloyd has to sit ahorse in mid-river, to be shot by either side if the other side fails to deliver. Later, he is dispatched to New Orleans to buy Villa a brand-new Packard. By the time he gets it to Mexico, after a series of comic misadventures, it is a prehistoric wreck.

Sam, meanwhile, undergoes a long ordeal, making his way, injured and slowly healing, through the Mexican desert. His father had been a Chinese railroad laborer who left the job at Bowie and, through vision and backbreaking labor, managed to set up a flourishing vegetable farm in the arid soil. He is barely tolerated by the Americans; and as a boy, Sam was bullied at school and found his only defender in Lloyd.

Now, in the Sonoran wasteland, he finds himself doubly a stranger. Chewing on cactus for water, captured for a while by a Villa patrol, fashioning baskets and bartering them for food with the impoverished peasants, he painfully makes his way north.

By the time he gets home he is transformed. By living off the land, with its arid poverty and unexpected nourishment, he has for the first time found a land. By the end of the book, he will be working with Eleanor, another stranger who has struggled her way painfully into a new identity. The parallel is forced, like so much else in the book, but there is authentic power in the evocation of Sam making his way through the desert, resilient and tough as the lizards he thinks of as his emblem.