a novel
“What gets carried down, and whether anyone alive can refuse it.”
Literary Appalachian crime
Della Combs left her Appalachian coal town at nineteen and did not come back, not for her father's funeral, not for her grandfather's, not for the rest of it. Twenty-two years on, she is a Knoxville paramedic, and the phone is ringing at four in the morning.
Her brother Wade is in the county jail. A Blackridge Coal land man named Tully Renfro has been found face-down in Sorrow Hollow with his skull caved on the left side and a piece of unmined coal placed on his chest.
In 1961, in the same hollow, a different company man went in and did not come out. Della's grandfather Hollis half-confessed to that killing on his deathbed, in front of her, when she was twenty-one. He gave her one detail nobody else knows. It is the same detail the present case turns on.
To defend Wade, Della has to know what Hollis did. To know what Hollis did, she has to walk back into the rooms she fled — her mother's kitchen, an old widow's porch, the boarded company office above the railroad track — and listen to the people her absence has left behind. The mountain is patient. The men who run it are not. And what gets carried down a family is not always a thing anyone meant to give.
The question is not who did it. The question is what gets carried down, and whether anyone alive can refuse it.
The phone went off at four eleven in the morning. I was already awake, the way medics learn to be already awake — not from sleeping light but from sleeping shallow, the body holding itself just under the surface of the night so that no sound comes as a surprise. The number on the screen was not one I had saved. The area code was the one I had not dialed in twenty-two years.
I sat up on the edge of the bed and put my feet on the cold floor and let the phone ring once more before I answered, because that is the discipline. You do not answer in the dark with your voice still in your throat. You give yourself one ring to be a person.
For readers of
Ron Rash · Daniel Woodrell · Tana French
A literary thriller that earns both words. The hook is graspable — brother accused of grandfather's crime, sixty years on. The investigation is fair-play: the clues are placed in plain sight, in order. Underneath the procedure is a book about a woman returning to the place she fled and learning that the question is not who did it but what gets carried down.
By the last page the central crime is solved — both crimes, present and past — and the answer is not the comforting one. There is a verdict, and a reckoning inside it that the verdict does not touch. The book ends on a door, and you will know exactly which door, and what is on each side of it.
This is a work of fiction. Caldwell County, the people in it, and the events of the book are products of the imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.