"A game played against time": Life in Bourbonville

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2003 by Anderson, Nancy G

Memory is choking this country to death. Memory is a rag in our throats. And we hand it on when we die. Memory is the principal possession of our estate. That, my young friend, is the supreme injustice. We grub around in the garbage and unroll memory, and we choke on it, but at the instant we expire we manage to jerk the damned thing out of our own mouths and stuff it down the throats of our children, and we die secure in the knowledge that they will choke on the same crazy thing that killed us. (53)

He concludes his advice to Sam with "some memories were best forgotten" (53).

However much they have to forget, some Bourbonvillians do look to the future and hope to have good lives. Brian Ledbetter, a Union veteran and local farmer, and Evelyn Weaver, a widow with six sons, announce their engagement even as Sam is riding away from his past in Bourbonville. This marriage becomes part of the continuing saga of Bourbonville in After the War, just as the stories of Sarah Crittendon Beckwith, her husband and her son and J. W. Campbell become part of its past, stories to be retold again and again through the twentieth century.

At any point in the lives of these people, things might have been different. Sam, Sr. might not have collapsed at the Crittendon farm; Sarah might have been afraid to take in Confederate soldiers walking back home after the lost war; Evelyn Weaver's husband, Dothan, might not have died when he did; Brian Ledbetter might have lost his life at the battle of Cold Harbor instead of just his leg; Sam, Jr. might not have taken refuge from the sudden deluge with Jackson and Beckenridge Bourbon, former slaves who know his mother's secret and decide to tell-but these things did happen the way they did. Sam, after the unexpected arrival of Emilie and her even more unexpected departure, accepts "the blind working of chance" (207), and the principles that Stace later described: "There was no meaning to the universe. Things simply were as they were, and there was no reason for it, and they could be any other way, and there would be no reason for that either" (Coming of Rain 207). Whatever the reasons, or the lack of them, these lives are the way they are.

Sam Beckwith, Jr. leaves Bourbon County to escape the past, perhaps in a youthful, if futile, effort to find a future that might include Emilie. In contrast, Adam Cloud, the protagonist of Bound for the Promised Land leaves the county not so much to escape something but rather to find something, his father. Joel Cloud had struggled to support his family on his land, but caught the Gold Rush fever and left in the middle of the night. After his mother's death, Adam sets out west to find him. Although Adam sells everything and moves away, he takes the memories of his home with him into the wilderness. The more demanding the trip becomes the more fondly he remembers even the hardships of the life he had there with his father and mother-plowing, harvesting, hunting for food. He, on occasion, "spontaneously reached back into his childhood, to a mythology still glowing at the edges, handed down to him at home and in school and in the dusty streets of Bourbonville on languid Saturdays" (279).