A Father’s Sage Advice
How many of those pearls of wisdom in the form of old sayings that your parents used to constantly repeat do you still recall? Maybe not a lot of them, but chances are there are at least two or three that get stuck inside your head and never leave. It’s very easy to think that kids don’t listen to the advice their parents give them, but the evidence proves otherwise. The things get drilled into the head tend to stay there and even take on more meaning that we might suspect:
“This is what I told myself as the campfire warmed my back and the night-side of the world echoed in the dark. The truth is the truth. And that soothed me like a balm.”
Pa
The novel is narrated by a young boy named Silas. His mother is dead and so it is just him and his father. And like most fathers of the 1800’s—and the 1900’s…and the 2000’s—his Pa is not exactly an overflowing fount of information about himself:
“The truth is, Pa doesn’t talk about himself much. His life is like a jigsaw into which I try to fit all the tiny pieces of what I know.”
In the Bog
A creepy section of the wilderness is known locally as the Bog. Nobody cares for it much and with good reason, although they could not adequately explain why. After his first ride through, Silas could tell them plenty. Of course, they wouldn’t believe him if he did, but he could certainly tell them plenty about why everybody is right to feel disquiet in the Bog:
“They were ghosts, each to their own purposes. Their own mysteries. Speaking their own stories. Young and old. Children, too. Drifting past us like water around a rock.”
The Love Story
Although the marriage did not last long on account of death coming early to the bride, the story of how his mother and father met is one which brings great comfort to Silas. Enough that he has made his father recount the story time and again. Like a fiction from the Bible does to the gullible, it is a tale that brings light to Silas when most he needs it:
“There are stories we hold near in times of darkness, and this is mine.”
Setting
The time period in which the story is general set is conveyed at one point in one perfectly modulated metaphor. The language is simple yet precise, filled with enough information to give what used to be a person of average intellect enough to narrow down the timing of the events to within a year or two. Of course, things are much different now and only those with a superior intellectual grasp of American history are likely to get that close in proximity:
“The nation had only just emerged from the bloody carnage of its civil war, and the scars were still everywhere.”
