"A game played against time": Life in Bourbonville

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2003 by Anderson, Nancy G

Unaware of the truth of his mother's past, Sarah's son, Sam Beckwith, Jr., has quietly, and uncomplainingly, played his role in his mother's "story" as the dutiful, hard-working son-until Emilie, the daughter of the German clockmaker, enters his life. The appearance of such foreigners in the quiet community of Bourbonville is one of the random and disruptive acts that can take place in a meaningless universe. Her family moves first from Flensburg, Germany, to New York City and now is heading to California. On their way west they happen to pass through Bourbonville and stay for a time because her father sees the courthouse clock, "gleaming out of the cupola like a cyclopean eye" (60). As Emilie describes him, "He has spent too much time with his clocks. . . . he thinks about time too much" (60). She jokes with Sam that time is so much her father's "passion" that she believes he was "trying to make a clock to make the universe slow down" (60). But the family stays just long enough to disrupt Sam's life and then moves on, leaving without explanations or goodbyes, shaking Sam's view of his world.

During their brief courtship, Sam tries to explain to Emilie his family's heritage and its importance to his mother. Emilie, however, responds with her belief that everyone is going to die and that life has no meaning so they need to enjoy it while they can; after all, as she says, "it all ends" (104). In his own effort to enjoy this happy present in his life with her, Sam divides each day into parts because "this solid present was passing away and . . . it would be gone and . . . perhaps he would yearn all the rest of his life for the return of this careless moment" (102). After Emilie's departure and his loss of those shared "careless" times with her, Sam sadly muses at his father's grave:

Well, like so many other things, that [a memory of his father] was not so important any more. If his father had loved him, where was that love now? Into what part of the dust had fallen that collection of cells which, when knit together by life, had made up this bizarre substance called love? And a hundred years from now, where would be the feeling that Emilie had had for him or that he had had for her? What did it really matter if the combination had been love or hate? In the grave they all sank alike into the base of an emptying skull and lay inert and beyond redemption, and soon the skull itself was gone, and nothing mattered about the feelings that dust had known. (51) He even confesses to J. W. Campbell, the Bourbonville lawyer who was his father's friend, that "I swear I'm worn out with his [his father's] memory" (17). Finally, in desperation, he runs away to the West, where he might escape the past, even if he does not find Emilie. As Mr. Campbell has told him about the untamed West, "it [your fate] doesn't matter. You've got Now. That's the only thing that counts, and there's a freedom in that. . . . History doesn't smother you to death the way it does here" (318, 319). At another time, Campbell tells Sam: