~ A Parchment of Leaves, by Silas House ~
An Irish descendent riding up Rosebud Mountain to clear the land passes an eighteen year old Cherokee girl of such stunning looks that he cannot get her out of his mind:
Her eyes were chips of coal; her lips, the colour of peach light at dusk.
p12
On her part, Vine is instantly smitten by Saul too. Shortly after he rides by, she hears cries for help and he comes rushing to her carrying his brother Aaron, younger by just a year, bitten by a copperhead. Vine cures him with snakeweed, which her people learnt is efficacious against this particular venom, and this gives Saul a chance to thank her, and court her. Shortly after, they are married.
Esme, Saul and Aaron’s petite, feisty mother, proves to be a delightful mother-in-law to VIne. Saul and Vine build themselves a new house on land she gifts them, with the help of Saul’s entire community. Although Saul’s people live only a few hours horse ride from the Cherokees, it is as if they live a world apart.
Soon after marriage, Vine and Saul have a little girl, Birdie. Vine delights in her family, and in the landscape. Her way of experiencing them is part of what lends this novel such charm and particularity:
Her [Birdie’s] hair blew around and rainblack lines across her peach-coloured lips, her eyes dark as a bluebird’s. Very briefly, like a cloud passing over, her whole face smiled. Something said to me, Take this moment. Memorize it, tuck it into that place which is made for such things. Put it there so you might be able to pull it back someday and run your fingers over it. I knowed I would be able to close my eyes and picture this evening, the sky already turning purple, the air so sweet that I could taste it on my lips. I decided to have this picture of her, standing there at the edge of that flat piece of flower land, a place so strange and beautiful that it looked as if it had fallen right out of the sky.
p71-72
Vine also makes a good friend, Serena, who is a midwife, and who has a fairly useless husband. The only fly in the ointment is that her brother-in-law, Aaron, is infatuated by her. Vine tells her husband, but he denies the truth of it, even while she knows he actually already knows.
All this time I had wondered to myself what his great fault was. I had laid awake some nights wondering why other women had men who laid drunk all the time, who took their fists to them. Some women had men who wouldn’t work or had another woman in town or whipped their children a little too hard. But here was my husband’s great wrongness, and I should have seen it sooner. He would always chose his family over me.
p76
Saul works for a sawmill, and with war going on, his boss asks him to go to Laurel County to log a whole mountainside of pine trees for turpentine.
In 1917, Laurel County was still a long ride, more than an hour by far and much farther by horse
p84
Vine is dismayed, but Saul goes there to work, living away from home and his family, both to make money for them all, and to assist the war effort since he is not enlisted. In his time away, Aaron makes his move on Vine, trying to get her to leave with him. She rejects him clearly and definitively, demanding he leaves at once or else she would tell both his mother and brother. He does leave, without telling his mother why. Some months after, Aaron returns, with a bride, Aidia.
Without wanting to give anything away by revealing the rest of the plot, suffice to say that this tale pulses strongly, seen through the eyes of Vine, who loves her family, loves her land, and loves nature intensely. It is a story about guilt and forgiveness, about endurance and survival. It is a delightful read, focused on Vine’s unusual consciousness and distinctive voice; and in the background are hints of hatred for Indians, prejudice against them, mistreatment, etc. But House keeps those threads in the background, a menace like a low growl in Vine’s life.
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