LAND THAT MOVES,
LAND THAT STANDS STILL
By
Kent Nelson
Viking, Penguin Group
Hardcover, ISBN 0-670-03226-3
257 pages, $24.95
Previously published in Bloomsbury Reviw
Ken Nelson is a master of his craft. The rural life of living with the elements of
the land, with its tough truths, is caught precisely in Land That Moves,
Land That Stands Still. The
characters are indelible. Haney is a
sculptor who no longer sculpts but should but does not because running a
The secret she discovers almost destroys her and her college-age daughter, Shelley. While Mattie also radiated independence, if not willfulness while her husband was alive, she refused to ride in his Lincoln, and she won t ride in it now that he s dead Shelley must find a way past her uncertainty in a new world where nothing looks like it did before, colored by a deception she d rather not have learned, something which angers her to such an extent that she throws all of her father s sculptures in a ravine outside the house, a scene reminiscent of the husband in Angle of Repose who with bare hands pulls up the rose bushes he planted for his wife, yanking them up by the roots, one-by-one, the thorns cutting his flesh.
With Spring comes not only the hard work of the ranch, but an Indian boy named Elton whom Mattie catches sleeping in the barn, then in the Lincoln, and because of her own broken-home as a child, she slowly befriends the boy, leaves him food on the porch, takes him in, and sets him to work on the ranch where they can use all the help they can get. There s postholes to dig, fence lines to build, fence wire to string out, an irrigation system to fix, machinery to repair dawn to dusk work that can wear a man down to nothing, and women, too.
You pull for Mattie to make it. She s a woman who while married went skydiving when her husband forbade it, who walked four miles off the road to sleep on a rock outcropping to see how far she can see, who wanders out of the kitchen at dawn in her robe to watch hawks in the sky. She s haunted by the failure of her marriage that she and her husband never admitted was a failure, that they didn t sleep together for the last eight months before he was killed, and one of his sculptures, entitled Man and Woman Separated by Air, with a woman hovering over a man, is the one that pricks her conscious the most. And now she must survive, knowing she never could have made her husband happy, or herself happy with him, for which she blames him and herself.
That he hadn t told her had been his failure,
but not reaching him was hers.
To survive, she places a want ad for a hired man, and Dawn shows up, a tall good-looking woman akin to a New Ager who is on the run from a husband she despises she stole his mother s ashes and dumps them in the river but she can fix any machine, and she tries to fix Mattie, too. Here s how she got the job from Mattie:
Dawn finished her beer and got
another from the fridge. I don t drink
on the job, but you said I m not hired yet.
Are you a religious nutso or a Sunday school teacher? I can t work for someone who believes in that
shit.
I don t consider it shit,
Mattie said, but no, I m neither of those.
Dog, Dawn said she pronounced
it Doog. Dog is God spelled backwards,
and doog is good spelled backwards.
That s what I believe in. Good.
They all have scars from the past, something Mattie and Shelley can t face, Dawn willingly buries, and Elton refuses to discuss. The writing is clear and simple, the emotions are not:
He revised his will last
February, Barton said.
He never said anything to me.
You re generously provided for,
Mattie. Don t worry about that.
I don t care about being
provided for, Mattie said. I care he s
being buried in
Death and survival are the issues here, and maturity, new levels of consciousness, old ways giving way to new. For Shelley, she must come of age with the hard bright and dark unknown of the future rushing right toward her:
Her brother was dead; her father
dead. Her mother was going to die,
too. And she was going to die,
and Bryce, and Dawn, and Elton. Everyone
was going to die. The earth would die. The sun, too.
The thought panicked her. She
would not be missed. No one would be
missed. She would not know what
happened, what her great-grandchildren would become, perhaps not even her
grandchildren or children because she would be dead, while the universe went
on.
For Dawn, the world remains connected between what works and what doesn t, where being an outcast is not being an outcast, where words are insufficient but emotions are not:
There were worlds within worlds,
worlds falling down and taking shape simultaneously, stars dying and being
born. There was no time, just stop-time,
no time at all. She gave no thought to
the future, though neither did she want to be a spectator of ruins. Time was a construct people invented for
themselves, and what they accomplished in the world and what they accumulated
meant nothing. She believed that. Such insignificant measures mattered only i a
moment that didn t last, important to those who knew nothing else. What she believed in was a way of seeing and being
that needed no words, an existence without language based on sensing the world,
feeling it. Words were only useful as
inexact translations, clumsy tools, means to an end. They were never enough in themselves.
What Mattie learns is healing, living through bad healing, and finding good healing, and for that they all come together on land that moves, that stands still.
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