Thanksgiving Night

by Bausch, Richard

• ISBN13: 9780060094430
• ISBN10: 0060094435
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-09-13
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

Richard Bausch calls this, his tenth novel, "a love comedy with sorrows." The story is set in the small Virginia valley town of Point Royal, where several of Bausch's other novels and many of his stories take place. It is 1999; predictions of catastrophe blare on the radio, and religious fanaticism is everywhere on the rise. The millennium is approaching. Oliver Ward and his divorced daughter, a young policewoman named Alison, and Oliver's two grandchildren become involved with Holly Grey and Holly's aunt Fiona, elderly ladies with a marked propensity for outlandish behavior. Holly's son, Will Butterfield, and Elizabeth, Will's second wife by that name, have been happily married for ten years but are about to discover how fragile happiness is. And in the middle of all of them is an old priest, Father John Fire, who is a good man, thinking of leaving the priesthood. He is called "Brother Fire" by everyone who knows him, after the famous words of Saint Francis when confronted with the burning brand with which he would be martyred. Close to both Holly and Fiona, Brother Fire also has a part to play in the rapidly unfolding family drama. Thanksgiving Night is a touching and empathetic portrayal of family$...the one we have, and the ones we make. The people who populate these pages are flawed, wounded, stubborn, willful, scarred, often wildly eccentric, and all searching, in one way or another, for love. 1006

Excerpts

Thanksgiving Night

Chapter One

Crazies

From the first overlook of the Sky Line Drive, heading south, you can only see the old part of Point Royal—washed in hazy distance, an intricately laced aggregate of antique houses and white steeples, set among many shades of blue and green and tawny summer. A sleepy, lovely, Virginia country setting.

Up close there are, of course, the complications of the age.

Antebellum porches mixed in with two-car garages and fast-food chains; an Internet café in a glass-front, low-slung building within a block of a town hall that is almost two hundred years old—all of this across from a parking lot and a red-brick radio station with flags out front and a skinny seventy-foot tower behind.

On the radio station lately there's mostly talk, and the subject is invariably the president and his recent troubles. The call-in shows are full of moral outrage. The news, even now, six months after the Senate's acquittal, is still full of the names: Starr, Hyde, and the women, Slick Willy's women, all the way from back when he was governor of Arkansas to the uneasy present, with its rumors of war and the threat of general shutdowns as a result of Y2K. Religionists are growing more strident, and there's apocalyptic zaniness all around, starting with the Hale-Bopp suicide crowd, who expected that there would be a turnstile on the spaceship taking them beyond the stars, and so each one carried a ten-dollar roll of quarters on his person. The news media characterizes these people as intelligent. (One caustic voice on the radio points out that certainly the Hale-Bopp fruitcakes would look intelligent to the media.)

On the other side of the radio station, on a small, red-clay rise of ground, a strip mall that was built ten years ago languishes in weeds and wild flowers, crabgrass and dandelions; it's shut down and boarded, with postings advertising commercial space. The postings are wearing away in the weather.

Beyond the strip mall is a small used-book shop called The Heart's Ease.

Take a look at it now: this charmingly derelict-looking place, its windows stacked with the sun-faded spines of volumes, one on top of another as if they had all been arrested in the act of crowding to the openings to breathe. The paint is peeling on the porch, and the color of the trim is the exact shade of old paper. If you were to characterize the store or make a simile out of it, you might say it's like an elderly man nodding off to sleep. It faces into the sunny lot across the way, the gravel road veering to the left, toward the century-old brick-making factory, with its five house-sized stacks of new red bricks, and its weirdly attendant-seeming next-door neighbor, the ancient clapboard relic of a church, white-steepled Saint Augustine's. This church is a historic landmark, and is flanked by a shady lawn dotted with gravestones, carved dates and inscriptions going back to the eighteenth century. beloved mother; with the angels; lost to us.

It was once said that two people could leave at the same time from main street, one heading for the wildest hollow in the Blue Ridge and the other for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, and both would arrive at their destination at about the same time.

Now, one travels only minutes to be in what feels like the tatters of the city, and the thin blue roads that wind up into the mountains are lined with apartment complexes.

The Shenandoah River runs along the town's western edge, and on some hot summer days, after a little rain, it's muddy and so slow-running as to seem calm. Because of the willows dipping their filamental branches at the edge, you can stand on the highway bridge that crosses there and swear, from the look of it, that there is nothing but woods all around. Signs along the bank warn against swimming or fishing.

On Main Street, just now, the sharp shadows make pretty angles. You feel, gazing upon the scene, that you saw it somewhere in a painting, if only you could remember which one. It's three o'clock in the afternoon. The end of August. Stillness. Not even an airplane in the sky. Some celestial creature landing here might think the whole world a quiet place, deserted or abandoned.

But now a little wind stirs; a scrap of paper rises in the street, and a camp bus full of altar boys from Saint Augustine's comes rumbling along, followed by an old Ford pickup, covered with dust, which turns off onto a side street. The radio is on loud in the truck, an evangelistic rant, a frantic baritone crying the terrors of a thousand years.

It's the dog days of summer nineteen ninety-nine. And God is coming.

At an angle from the corner of the only intersecting street of this part of town is a small, white house, with a little porch, flanked by other houses of the same stripe, all of them built in nineteen fifty-nine and nineteen-sixty, when the country was not even ten years out of one undeclared war and already at the beginning of a new one. In the small window of the east-facing bedroom, an elderly woman sits turning the pages of a magazine with a sharp, swiping motion, as if each page contributes to a growing sense of an affront to her sensibilities. Behind her, another woman, also elderly, stands and folds laundry that she absently lifts from a basket in a chair. She puts the laundry on the bed. There's something about her apparent nonchalance that seems studied, done for effect—now and again, she monitors the page-turning of the other. She's dressed to go out. The other wears a blue bathrobe.

These two are surrounded by emblems of religion that seem to exist in an atmosphere of neglect, like bric-a-brac: Christ praying in the garden on one wall, and facing out, with radiating heart . . .

Thanksgiving Night. Copyright © by Richard Bausch. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

---

Excerpted from Thanksgiving Night by Richard Bausch
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.