End of the Line

The Road by John Ehle.  University of Tennessee Press.  401 pp.  ****

I wanted to read the first novel in John Ehle’s mountain series because it’s set in a place I often inhabit (and where I am self-isolating during the pandemic) and because I knew Ehle to be a skillful writer, having reviewed one of his novels years before.  The Land Breakers was a spectacular success, one of those moments when a novelist exceeds even his own high reach.  It took place in an almost unimaginable period of North Carolina history (though Ehle imagined it), the 1780’s, when the area had hardly been developed at all.

The Road takes place a century later, but seems to be located in roughly the same spot, and includes a couple of families from the previous novel (Ehle has written eight novels in the series in all; apparently one family continues throughout).  But because it concerns a specific subject—the building of a railroad line that would connect the mountains with the lowlands, even just as far back as Old Fort or Morganton, which are right at the base—it seems more self-consciously historical than The Land Breakers, as if Ehle had done research and it almost hampered him.  The Land Breakers is brilliant work of the imagination.  The Road is a historical reconstruction.  It isn’t a great novel, but is fascinating in its own way.

There is one man, Weatherby Wright, whose vision it is to create this railroad line; he’ll finish it or die trying.  I’d almost call him a Captain Ahab figure, except that he’s a sympathetic and winning person, and all the people who work for him love him.  There are various sub-plots, but it’s ultimately Wright’s novel, and in that way it’s a sad book.  He got the railroad built, and it also broke him.

He wasn’t building the road for his own profit.  As we found at the end of The Land Breakers, there was no way for mountain people to get produce or anything else to a market where it could make good money.  That novel ends with a long trek in which a number of farmers try to take livestock and other items to the market in Morganton.  The trip is a disaster, and the novel ends badly.  It seems at that point that mountain people are condemned to poverty.

Unless a railroad connects them to the lowlands.

North Carolina was a poor state in 1880, and there wasn’t much money for the project, so it was forced to use convict labor, under dreadful conditions.  The men lived on beans, cabbage, and cornbread.  Female convicts had come along to cook the food and wash the dishes.  Predictably, both convict groups were predominantly black.  And on Saturday nights—weirdly, for so puritanical a place—they were allowed to mingle together in a wooded area and have sex.  That was their recreation.  Ehle is quite realistic, though not prurient, about sex in both of these novels.  That’s one of the things I admire most.

The novel’s most winning character is a woman named HenryAnna, one of Ehle’s country women who is beautiful, mildly flirtacious, sure of who she is, verbally inventive almost to the point of being poetic.  She is exactly like a wonderful female character in The Land Breakers, and is a descendant of that woman.  I found it odd that two women even from the same family would be so much alike, a hundred years apart.  But the creation of these women is a marvel.

The men’s job is brutal.  They create tunnels through various places in the mountains, and that work is both dangerous and difficult: even breathing the damp dusty air is not good for them.  A major cave-in is absolutely horrific.  Also toward the end, there’s a flu epidemic that almost wipes the project out.  Wright has the choice of shutting the project down and doesn’t do it, and that is the fact that finally breaks him.  He loved the men who worked for him, and felt he had let them down.  Reading about that flu epidemic in the midst of our pandemic felt eerily familiar.  It was almost more than I could take.

One charming aspect of the book is that there are young men called Mountain Boys who do various jobs for the project.  In one way they’re not good workers, because they’re independent and hate to be told what to do.  But they hunt for meat to feed the workers, and when Wright himself is lost in a cave for a long period of time, having broken his leg, they go out looking for him.  They search for people strictly by intuition, like the process of dowsing for water, but after a period of time all of the Mountain Boys were standing at the same cave.  And though it was infested with rattlesnakes, one went in after him.

This book seems to be part tall tale and part historical document, a much different book from The Land Breakers.  But I liked it for itself.