BOOK REVIEW / FICTION : Panoramic Vision of Racism and Obsession in the South : WATER FROM THE WELL b<i> y Myra McLarey</i> ; Atlantic Monthly Press $21, 166 pages

The same 1917 cyclone that drove a two-by-four through the skull of the Baptist minister in Sugars Spring, Ark., while he was eating a heavy breakfast, blew his beautiful young wife 30 feet up a black oak. Isannah hung from her long red hair until lifted down by David Ben Sugars, the best-looking white man in town. David conceived a great passion, but when he went to call one night, Isannah was in bed with Sam Daniel McElroy, the best-looking man on the black side of town.

If another white had found them, Sam would have been lynched. But a formidable mother had taught David to be fair to black people, and he tiptoed away. Later, as sheriff for 26 years, the same fairness earned him respect from both races; among others, from Sam McElroy, who became a successful businessman and lived to nearly 100. In all his life, David’s only fall from grace came when his dormant obsession with Isannah--who had long since moved away--got him into a brief fling with another red-haired woman. Afterward, he returned to Little Jewel, his feisty and universally admired wife; the other woman, too, moved away.

The six stories in “Water From the Well” are an intricate weave of lives that run from 1900 to the 1970s, and reach back to slavery days. In 1905, for instance, the 12-year-old Sam McElroy believes that he sees a horse come for his Great-uncle Ransom, who lies dying in the next room; and that the old man, suddenly transformed back to the indomitable young slave who was castrated for running away twice, and who later instigated a bloody protest riot, jumps on the horse and gallops off.

Myra McLarey writes evocatively and with shrewdly calculated effects. She is orchestrating a panoramic vision of change in a small Deep South community. She does it in stories, some tall; in lushly dramatized scenes, in snatches of gossip and recollection. Her book is a folk opera with soloists and chorus: After some particular event we get a collective reaction. The characters move to a kind of narrative music.

McLarey’s defects are occasional slickness and a lush counterpoint of tart and sweet. As with the film “Driving Miss Daisy,” it is possible to feel that things could not be better done, but that better things could have been tried. The characters are exquisitely carved and polished; sometimes you wonder, as with a small boy dressed for church, whether there would be more rough freedom if they were less perfect. The magical realist touches are used with restraint but they tend to become emotional cuing. Magic can flatten.

Yet the author, whose first book this seems to be, is impressively adept and often more than that. She has a gift of comedy, a lyrical impulse, a fertile wealth of stories and an achingly discriminate ear for how characters of different races, sexes, ages, passions and intentions speak. Above all, she has a remarkable ability to write scenes in which two or three different sets of tensions wax and wane at the same time; and even in the same sentence.

There is nothing finer in the book than the baseball game that opens it. The all-white Sugars Spring team has been stood up by another team in the county league. “Just for practice,” they decide to play “the coloreds of Chickenham.” (The whites use that name for the black section; the blacks call it Bethel. It is one of McLarey’s canny details: to name is to be sovereign.)

On a pasture between the two parts of town the two teams meet. By the end of the third inning, Sugars Spring is ahead 21 to nothing. Bethel plays wildly; one fielder keeps shouting, “I gots it,” and misses, another falls down each time he goes for the ball. Out of the zaniness, fear filters to us. It is 1917; everyone is being polite but the blacks know they are expected to clown and lose.

So when Sam McElroy drives by and is persuaded to take a turn at bat, a chill sets in. It stills the laughter of the black spectators and makes the white women, who had turned to go fix supper, turn once more. The white pitcher makes a patronizing joke; Sam stares, unsmiling, and smashes the ball into town. Looking at no one he runs around the bases and bowls over the white catcher who has intentionally failed to move off the plate. Shockingly--the collision might have passed--Sam makes no move to help him up; instead, he goes to his truck and drives off.

McLarey has laid a dynamite train; we wait for it to go off. But she is after something more complex. There are lynch feelings among the Sugars Spring men--evoked in bitten-off scraps of phrase and gesture--and lynch fears among the Bethel women. It is 1917, after all. And nothing happens; it is not 1905. Over the 70-year span of her stories one of McLarey’s most remarkable achievements is to know exactly what her calendar says.