THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 16, 1995 TAG: 9504120569
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LYNN DEAN HUNTER
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines
REDEYE
A Western
CLYDE EDGERTON
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 256 pp. $17.95.
IMAGINE a frontier saga with cowboys, Indians, settlers and businessmen; then throw in a Southern lady, an exploding corpse, some mummies and a bulldog with one red eye and a taste for noses. Move over, ``Bonanza.'' Here comes Redeye: A Western, a Colorado tale told by North Carolina novelist Clyde Edgerton.
Edgerton has set his five previous novels (Raney, Walking Across Egypt, The Floatplane Notebooks, Killer Diller and In Memory of Junior) in fictional Hansen County, N.C., where a wacky Tar Heel-talking cast of characters wrestles with Southern standards of propriety. The human condition as depicted by Edgerton is gently hilarious: Walking Across Egypt opens as Mattie Rigsbee sits down - and through - a bottomless chair in front of her TV; so it happens, against all her principles, that Mattie is forced to watch television before she's even finished cleaning up the breakfast dishes. LordaMercy!
Readers of Edgerton's earlier works will wonder how his unique regional voice works in 19th-century Colorado. I'm happy to report that Edgerton's voice carries. In fact, it sings in four-part harmony. Four first-person narrators, each with his/her own regional diction, tell the tale, accompanied by articles from The Mumford Rock Weekly, letters written at the scene and passages from the Mesa Largo Tourist Expedition Guidebook. The result is a multiregional voice: the sound of the American frontier.
Redeye revolves around the discovery of Anasazi cliff dwellings on a mesa. P.J. Copeland and Billy Blankenship, local morticians-turned-entrepreneurs, gather Indians, archaeologists and settlers to organize the first tourist expedition to the ruins. Within this activity, each of the four storytellers has a plot and theme of his or her own.
Star Copeland, a young woman from Hansen County, N.C., has a love interest; her tale is one of romance. ``I must not let Andrew know how forward I am inwardly, when we have yet to kiss or even hold hands, something that I can only hope will occur during this adventure so that my life will be more complete, more `western,' more `wild' than ever,'' she swoons. Star also renders a Southerner's assessment of Colorado: ``God went to majestic geographical lengths in the West that He never attempted in the South.''
The young orphan, Bumpy, works for the expedition. His is an adventure story: ``When I got to the top of Eagle City, I looked across the gorge and saw all these Indians with war paint standing on these big rocks. Most of them had bows and arrows, but a couple had rifles. I snuck around to the big crooked tree where I could see them and could see in Eagle City, too. Bishop Thorpe was with the Indians and he was giving a loud speech. He'd seen a vision, he said.'' Bumpy is the observer who reports on Blankenship's and Copeland's money-making schemes. They explode a corpse, he tells us. They also try to jump-start the heart of an Anasazi mummy.
Cobb Pittman, owner of Redeye, the ``catch dog,'' is a self-appointed agent of Old West justice; his story is one of conscience and vengeance. ``It was hot and dry, and dusty, but I decided to make the rounds, see could I get a feel for what might be going on. . . Something about the cliff dwellings are calling me to do my duty up there.'' Pittman has dedicated himself to tracking down the perpetrators of the 1857 Mountain Meadow Massacre, in which Mormons employed Indians to kill a wagon train of Gentiles. The massacre, mentioned by Mark Twain and Jack London, happened very much as described in Redeye.
Mudfoot, an Indian, guides the expedition. His focus is the gods - the God of the Mormons, the God of the Quakers and the gods of his fathers. His tale is a spiritual quest: ``The Quaker god is more distant away than the Mormon god and does not say. . . what is true with the force of the Mormon god. But neither did the spirit who spoke to our forefathers.'' Mudfoot's awareness of spirit leads him to make a choice, defusing a crisis that nearly leads the expedition to tragedy.
These four plots move together like four voices singing counterpoint. They harmonize, but don't sing the same song. The result is a frontier saga that is rich, funny, compassionate and sweet. MEMO: Lynn Dean Hunter is a short-story writer, poet and associate fiction
editor of The Crescent Review. She lives in Virginia Beach. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Clyde Edgerton
Jacket design by MOLLY RENDA
Jacket illumination by LAURA LEVINE
by CNB