He looked back into the pail, the water still cloudy but clearing enough to see something else harbored in the bucket’s bottom. He thought it might be his own reflection. Then the water cleared more and what lay in the bucket assumed a round and pale solidity, except for the holes where the eyes had been.
When I first read the above line from the prologue of Ron Rash’s new novel The Cove I immediately had to read it again. Wait a minute, there is a skull in a bucket at the bottom of a well? Did I read that right? Then I had to re-read the whole prologue. It was almost like that line in Deliverance where the arrow seems to appear in the man’s chest. (It turns out Lewis has shot the man from a great distance, and from the back, so the arrow suddenly thrusts out of the man’s chest.) The parallels between Rash and Dickey don’t stop there. One of my personal favorite elements of Rash’s fiction is the language, and as a native of East Tennessee I can tell you that he gets it right, for example:
After Hank left, Laurel washed the cups and dishes and flatware, filled the gray berlin kettle with pole beans and set it on the stove to simmer. She went to the sink, sifted soda powder on her toothbrush and brushed her teeth before she tied her hair back with a crimped hairpin.
As my mother-in-law says, “good country people”.
Ron is a great friend of Lemuria and does a great reading. Hopefully he’ll read from his most recent poetry collection as well.
Join us on Wednesday, April 18th for a signing and reading with Ron Rash at 5:00 and 5:30.
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