One of the featured writers at this year’s Summer Fishtrap Writer’s Conference at Wallowa Lake was Joe Wilkins. Wilkins, who teaches at Linfield College in Oregon, is a writer who is new to me. I recently read, and loved, his new novel, The Entire Sky.
If you have been someone who has enjoyed the work of writers like Kent Haruf and William Kent Krueger you might also like Wilkins’ work. The Entire Sky is his second novel. His first, Fall Back Down When I Die, is on my to-read stack.
The Entire Sky is set mostly in eastern Montana, where Wilkins himself grew up on a ranch. Other parts of the novel take us to Seattle locales, including Rainier Beach and Seward Park in southeast Seattle.
The main character, Justin, is one of our world’s “lost boys,” a description used by another character in the novel, Liane Bouchard, an English professor at a small college. After killing, in self-defense, his sadistic Uncle Heck, an abusive alcoholic, Justin runs. Eventually, one night he climbs out of an empty livestock trailer in which he had stolen a ride to find himself in Montana near the sheep ranch of an aging rancher, Rene Bouchard, Liane’s father.
Rene, who is in deep grief over the recent death of his wife, gives Justin short-term shelter: a bed, blanket, and something to eat. Short-term extends into weeks as Justin pitches in to help an arthritic Rene with the work of lambing season. It’s all new to Justin, who is overcome when he finds himself holding, in his hands, a newborn lamb. Both Rene and Justin are in desperate need of the hope the new lambs symbolize.
They are also in desperate need of one another. Justin has never had a reliable or decent man in his life. His father disappeared early. His mother is an alcoholic with a string of bad boyfriends. Rene, of the age to be Justin’s grandfather, is both decent and reliable, but more. Beneath a gruff exterior he is compassionate and courageous. And Justin fills a hole in Rene’s life as well, the one left by the death of Rene’s youngest son, Franklin. Struggling with being gay, Franklin had, after repeated experiences of being bullied, taken his own life.
The novel unfolds in both the rural and urban settings, with Rene being the crusty embodiment of an older way of life on his beloved Willow Creek ranch. The urban scenes, largely flashbacks, are the haunts of lost boys like Justin and their absent or damaged parents. The rural/urban contrast might have bent toward a romanticization of the rural over the urban, but for Wilkins it became an exposure of the dark sides of small town life in eastern Montana.
How does an old man, Rene, deal with the grief not only of losing a wife and a son, but a larger grief — Rene finds that he no longer understands the world in which he now lives, a world which used to make sense to him. Meanwhile, Justin, a skinny, long-haired blonde kid who loves Kurt Cobain, and who feeds himself by busking on Seattle’s streets, has never known any world that made sense. There are other characters and sub-plots, including the Montana landscape, both harsh (at times) and haunting in its beauty.
Toward the end of the story Justin is again on the run after taking a beating at the hands of a local bully and then plunging his knife in his assailant’s butt. Justin jumps in Rene’s truck, Old Blue, where Rene’s dog, O’Malley, happens to be waiting. He takes off. After a couple days on the lam Justin stops at a roadside cafe. At the counter sits a broken-down sheepherder named Bassett. Unbeknownst to Justin, Bassett had worked for Rene until Rene fired him earlier that spring.
Bassett recognizes both the truck and the dog, but doesn’t let on to Justin, except to say, “The man who owns them he’s a hard-to-please son of a bitch is what he is. I believe over the years he’s fired me near a dozen times. Justin’s heart seizes and stumbles. The old sheepherder smooths his greasy hat onto his head. “Thing is,” said Bassett, “he’s taken me back a dozen and one. Son, if you need a place to go, I know one. I believe you know it too.
“As if to anchor himself against the world’s sudden lurch, Justin takes hold of thick, dirty fur at the nape of O’Malley’s neck. Puts his other hand on Old Blue’s cool metal hide. I went and made, he says, too much trouble. Justin looks down, looks away. Swallows at the pure, bone-shattering sadness welling up in him, sadness overflowing like a mad, muddy river. I did, he goes on, something you can’t take back.
“Well, Bassett says, and sucks at his lips, that wide gap where his teeth should be, I guess you’ll have to live with that. But don’t flatter yourself, kid. Don’t go thinking you’re the only one who’s ever made a bit of trouble.”
That scene reminds me of the old line, “Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.” It is also as good a way of describing the unexpected incursion of grace as I’ve read in quite some time. “He’s taken me back a dozen and one.”
Wilkins is unflinching in showing us the hard underside of human nature, our cruelty and callousness — both of which seem to have found new forms in the last century. But as real as all of that is, it isn’t the only word, nor the last one, in Wilkins work. Grace is.
Discover more from Post Alley
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
