How Tragic History Can Lie Just Beneath the Starkest Crime

To everyone except his Aunt Marie, Flint Zimmer is a bad kid. A hoodlum. Incorrigible. At 16, Flint escapes from the Montana reformatory where he has spent nearly half his life. He hitchhikes 600 miles to the home of his mother, Frances, near Flathead Lake. She feeds him and gives him a little money but tells him to leave--which he does, stealing her car and taking along his 10-year-old half-sister, Cecile Vaughn.

Is Cecile a captive or an accomplice? People prefer to believe the former, but an elderly doctor the pair assault and rob testifies to the contrary. They drive southeast to the Crow reservation that includes the Little Bighorn battlefield. Some of Flint’s ancestors, the Native American branch, came from there. But what’s waiting for him is only further tragedy.

The car breaks down, so he tries to hijack another. The first vehicle to appear on the empty plains contains a woman and her baby. The woman, delivering supplies to the reservation for her church, is saintly and unworldly; she would willingly abet Flint and Cecile’s flight, if they only knew. But nothing in Flint’s experience would let him believe this, so he commits another crime--this one so atrocious that society will never forgive him.

Though his Aunt Marie will.

The riskiest and most interesting thing about Melanie Rae Thon’s third novel (following “Iona Moon,” “Meteors in August” and the short-story collections “Girls in the Grass” and “First, Body”) is this choice of narrator. Marie has been deaf since childhood. She can’t speak, except in sign language. She lives with her widowed father and rarely travels even the 20 miles to her sister Frances’ house. How can she know all the things she silently tells?

By the end of “Sweet Hearts,” Thon has partially answered this question. Marie has gathered much of her information by reading the papers, watching TV, attending Flint’s trial, mourning with Frances. The rest she has imagined, in a sustained effort of historical recall and personal empathy that Thon intends for us to emulate.

“If the boy is all bad,” Marie muses, “we can be safe again; we can cut evil out of ourselves.” But she knows better: “We put the gun in his hand. We said, Don’t use it.”

An outsider herself, incapable of being listened to, Marie traces a family saga of violence and abandonment that began a century ago when a Crow woman married a man of the Metis, impoverished mixed-race people who wintered in caves and hauled their belongings in crude carts, welcome neither in the United States nor in Canada, neither in white people’s towns nor on the reservations.

Flint’s grandmother, Rina Devere, excelled at mission school and dreamed of working toward college, but the first and last job she found was at the Zimmer motel. Pregnancy and marriage trapped her. Her daughters, Marie and Frances, believe that when she drowned in the lake at age 30 it was suicide.

When Frances was Flint’s age, two boys from a bigger town got her drunk at a carnival and raped her in a field. She recoiled from Flint, the product and reminder of that crime, and neglected him in favor of later children.

“These are not mitigating circumstances” in a court of law, Marie admits, but a novel is different. The fragmented structure and lyrical prose of “Sweet Hearts” convey a truth: that frontier cruelties still poison our society, just as rivers are tainted by toxic runoff from long-abandoned mines. And if the family pattern she insists on seems stark and fatalistic at times, the range of emotion Thon has her intuit in other characters’ lives--and share with us--is remarkable.