Old Border Road

by Susan Froderberg

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Katherine is 17, living alone in the beautiful, desolate landscape of southern Arizona. Her mother is feckless, her father busy with his new family. Meeting Son, the scion of a local rancher, seems like deliverance. They marry and live as a family in his parents' venerable adobe house, but it soon becomes clear that Son is a man who, as his father says, has a "young heart near withered beneath the breastbone." Katherine must find her own way during a dangerous months-long drought, when everything seems to be disintegrating around her. Susan Froderberg's incantatory language -- and her deep knowledge of both the complexities of a small, deeply-rooted place and the human heart -- make Old Border Road soar.

Release date: December 9, 2010

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 313

Sample

“Old Border Road isn’t a western by any formal definition of the term, but Susan Froderberg builds on those old tropes to tell a mournful story of men and women scraping by on America’s arid frontier…. This is a western transformed by its focus on a young woman…. Katherine has a raw poetic voice that makes the tale an arresting incantation of longing and regret…. The effect is often moving and evocative…. It’s good to be reminded again that this classic American form is no one-trick pony; it’s still evolving, still turning those sepia myths into challenging new fiction.”

—Ron Charles, Washington Post

“This debut novel is like a big-budget western with the set-design Oscar in the bag. Everything looks authentic, dusty. Even the narrator sounds voice-over ready, her accent baked into her words…. Ms. Froderberg isn’t one to let up on the intensity; the weight of her words can feel biblical.”

—Susannah Meadows, New York Times

“Reminiscent of Faulkner and Stegner.”

—Elle

“I especially like the energy and cadences of the sentences in Old Border Road. The book catapults forward in this fearless and honest voice. It’s Katherine’s life story told her way and she is one of the most engaging narrators I’ve come across in a long time…. And Katherine is as good a listener as she is a teller.”

—Peter Orner, Granta Online, “Best Books of 2010”

“Susan Froderberg’s Old Border Road is a woman-finding-her-voice novel, but with none of the treacle or tropes of the genre. Froderberg writes with an elegance and originality that captivate…. The story has heart, perhaps because in Katherine we find a character to rally behind without feeling as if we’ve been manipulated into doing so…. She is spirited but humble, fallible but ultimately triumphant.”

—Emily H. Freeman, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“In Old Border Road, Susan Froderberg’s remarkable feat of literary ventriloquism gives us two inventive and haunting voices to remember. One is that of Katherine, the young ranch bride striving for the language to fit her predicament; the other is the author’s own, a fresh dialect of talent on the fiction scene.”

—Ivan Doig, author of Work Song

“Ms. Froderberg superbly draws on the Sonoran Desert’s singular features to highlight Katherine’s changing emotions. Her joyful honeymoon is set in a mountain lush with ‘blue spruce, dwarf cedar, juniper’; but her marriage deteriorates as the heat wave ‘drives desert rodents and millipedes to hole in the earth, singes wings of monarchs, silences chickadees, sends cacti into dormancy, has every animal panting.’… This stark and convincing portrait of Katherine’s maturing from a ‘love-struck girl’ to a self-reliant woman is captured in a splendor of naturalistic detail. Katherine’s coming-of-age story is given additional dimensions by the background drama of the drought and the need to provide water to an expanding desert population…. The hard lesson of Old Border Road is that there are endless enticements that lead men to dishonor.”

—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“Set against a stifling drought, events take on their own slow-burning heat…. Froderberg’s writing… achieves the sublime.”

—The New Yorker

“This remarkable debut novel, the story of a girl, begins with an adobe house and a road that runs south to north…. Susan Froderberg keeps circling back to beginnings… she starts Katherine’s new life again and again, dashing hopes, revealing the meanness in Son and the difficulty of making a living from the dry earth.”

—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

“This simple story is beautifully told. It takes place in a distinct landscape, alive with intense color, dense texture, and sharp sound…. Froderberg writes movingly of the haze of happiness that is the honeymoon. ‘It is rapturous and ordinary, detailed and blurry, seeming to go on and on for a long time, and it is too soon over in the way all time can be.’ More moving is her description of how time moves later, after the betrayals. ‘Days and nights go by, regardless. The days are but a form to prop us, a stay to prevent our undoing, the nights but a measure of distance and passing.’ ”

—Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe

“I read Susan Froderberg’s fine and beguiling first novel a little bit, and a little bit more, and suddenly found myself in a beautiful and heartbreaking swirl of story and life and language and could not stop. The world therein is raw and urgent and yet adorned with element: burning and cooling, light and dark, droughty weather, delicate seeds greening, our perilous existence, our enduring sufferance.”

—Robert Olmstead, author of Coal Black Horse

“Told in a vernacular that mixes biblical grandiosity and down-home grit…. A southwest gothic debut that fans of Cormac McCarthy should adore.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Susan Froderberg uses striking, poetic language to convey the parched landscape and internal stagnation… A conjuring of the Old West through the lens of modern times, with uncommon and wonderful landscape and flora terms… sprinkled through the narrative to bring this dreamscape to life.”

—Jenny Shank, New West

“Employing a dreamy stream of consciousness evocative of Virginia Woolf, this debut novel conjures a seventeen-year-old newlywed from Arizona who realizes that her husband doesn’t nearly live up to her expectations.”

—Ms. Magazine

“A sunbaked exploration of love and pain in the American Southwest, charts the turbulent ups and downs of a marriage.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“The rural Arizona landscape echoes in every word of the sparse, beautiful prose…. An exciting new writer to watch.”

—Rebecca Shapiro, BookPage

“Froderberg’s novel is deliciously poetic, surprisingly timeless—though set in the present day—and undeniably western.”

—Julie Hunt, Booklist

“Froderberg’s shimmering debut, set against the dusty, barren backdrop of the American Southwest, explores the joys and consequences of young love.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Froderberg is truly Cormac McCarthy’s literary offspring, echoing his hot, haunting brand of southwest essence, desert landscape, and gothic narrative elixir…. Although set in contemporary times, there is a timeless quality about Old Border Road…. I was exceptionally moved when I came to the last line of the story, a sentence that touched me with its purity, subtlety, and pith.”

—Betsey Van Horn, MostlyFiction.com

“Old Border Road fills some gaps in the Cormac McCarthy school of writing with Froderberg’s plucky young female narrator…. The novel’s artful language is beguiling.”

—Vikas Turakhia, Cleveland Plain Dealer



He has shown me the old adobe house outside and in and he has taken me riding across all the parceled acres of land that surround the house and he has told me the told-again stories born of the place and of his family and of him. And now it is me showing Son what I have come from, going south to north along the coast, from one border town to another one yet, from forests petrified to those old-conifered, from cottonwood to silver fir, diamondback to amanita, erg dune to tidal flat, and sandstone to agate, from what is to what has been, from memory to what might be.

Our start-up is done according to ritual, our send-off as to custom and trend. The town people gather in earnest and attend us bearing gifts, the golden aster is vased upon the altar, the pig turns out on the spit in offering. We say all the words supposed to be said and do all the things supposed to be done and we get all the things that one gets. We get suitcases lent to us and bills tucked into envelopes, and we get stories of people’s own and advice aplenty for living our lives anew. We take all of it as given in the wholeheartedness that it is. We get wishes scribbled across the side of the pickup truck that we leave there as a kind of flourish to our pilgrimage, keeping what’s written through the new moon we are in, as that moon waxes crescent and quarters to full and as it wanes gibbous and fades on toward its end. The words as they were chalked, the sand and the dust, the grime and the duff and the tar and the oil and the mud, and whatever else of the earth we collect up along the way, will all be washed away in the moon after, once we are back to here where we are, to begin another beginning.

LET ME TELL you, then, properly, from the beginning.

Let me tell you about the knocking, the way it came as a start in the hold of the night. It’s a knocking that remains yet inside me—the weight, the cadence, the meter, the stop it put to the breath, the stall it got of the heart, a feeling that will always be, coming as it did at the wrong time, and so far into dark. I can still hear Son calling out to open up, and I’m trying to lie still enough not to be here, with my heartbeat beating so loud I’m afraid of it giving me away, even with him out there and with me in here in the bed. The knocking kept on.

It’s me, he said. He said, I know you know who this is.

His words were slurred, but I knew who this is, was.

It was a knock on the door I had wished for. I didn’t answer it. I had an old nightshirt on and pincurls in my hair and school in the morning. Son said he knew I could hear him, and I cupped my hands on my chest to quiet me down. The knocking finally stopped, and there was nothing but the sound of the wind gusting the dust up out in the empty lot. I got up from the bed and made my way in the dark to the door and opened it. He turned around on his way to his pickup when I said to him, Come back and come in.

Son had never been to my place, but I had been in his truck once. That was down in Mexico, and he had offered me a ride back over the border. He lived on this side, our side, down on Old Border Road, and he had shown me the old adobe house on the way to taking me home. That’s where I live, he said, and at this he reached over and pulled the back string of my haltertop free so he could catch a peek. I told him the way to the trailer and to please keep his eyes on the road. This is where I live, I said, and he turned in and stopped the truck and let it idle in neutral. I got out and said maybe I would see him again someday, and he shifted into gear and pulled out of the lot.

IT WAS JUST the one time on the road back from Mexico that I had seen the old adobe house. I had only otherwise heard talk of the place and the family about town, talk that had of late carried a look my way or the drop of my name. Or some remaking of my name.

My name is Katherine, same as my mother’s name, same as my mother’s mother’s name. I’ve never been a Kathy, never been a Kath, not a Katie or a Kate, not a Kat, a Kitty, a Kitten, not a Kit. Katherine I have always been, as Katherine I am today. I’m Katherine to my mother—a Katherine with a given middle name added on when she’s summoning me or angry and needing more span and heft to fill the call out. To my father, I am always Daughter, as maybe my other name unhappily recalls to him my mother. Daughter, he will say when I telephone him. Hello Daughter he will say. He will write it Dotter when he writes to me, thinking the spelling funny or charming in some way, as I do as well.

I am Darlin’ to Son. Darlin’ I always am.

I would be Girl to the old man. Just Girl to him.

Dear Girl, I would hear from the old man’s old wife.

The New Girl is what I was called at school. I heard this name among the murmurs from the other girls sitting behind me during our classroom break out in the shade of the ramada. Their talk settled about in the air with the drift of their cigarettes and the pulsating clack of cicadas. There were also remarks from certain evening regulars at the coffee shop, those who had a tendency as well to keep abreast of my business. My mother was one to bring home common scraps of gabble too, just as she fueled rumors about me with comments of her own.

I tried to shut the talk out.

My mind was made to break away early.

Son would come by in his pickup to get me, as was the plan. I skipped out of astronomy, though astronomy was my favorite class of any, maybe because we lived in the midst of the land of night sky and I could do my homework just by looking upward. More so, I had hopes of one day becoming a scientist, a doctor or a researcher of some kind. Certain ways of thinking were hard for me, but other things came naturally. The body, the earth, the universe—those mysteries unseen, I could somehow most easily see. Not because I was good at finding answers to equations, but because I loved the locked rooms of the questions themselves. I could imagine the workings and the designs of things. Pictures came to me in what seemed layers and boundaries, in what they call surface and expanse, or in drift and intent—or something like this anyway, although I know no better way to explain it. There are laws to hold to as well, laws physical and universal, laws unchangeable as to truth until falsified, laws that make a person feel safe.

Today I would be safe going with Son.

We drove through a grove of groomed fruit trees with the old adobe house out ahead of us commanding attention from the podium of earth it was built on. Son pointed to an empty plot of shade, where he said the sedan was missing from. This meant it was only the old man at home, he said, that his mother, he said, would be gone shopping or to luncheon or to some function or other that she could do her hair and dress up for. I didn’t ask him if our timing was planned or accident, I only wondered it.

The hill was lawned handsomely with Saint Augustine, and today automatic sprinklers sprayed watery rainbows over the slopes. Desert poppy and dusty maiden grew in the beds along the walkway, and a climbing rose laid claim over the portal. A shepherd kind of dog rose up from the welcome mat and sniffed at my fingers and slapped its dust whip of a tail against us in greeting. It leaned into Son’s leg and he whumped the dog on the shoulder a couple of times in a language back. Son was about to open the door, but the old man was there to open it before us. He came out and tipped the hat back on his head and said he was pleased to meet me and he did seem so. He took my hand as if to shake it and he pulled me forward to him to where when he spoke I could feel the prickle of his breath on my face. After an uncomfortable while like this, he chuckled and let me go.

He said lunch was just about ready. We went into the old adobe house and he led us through the many cool dark rooms of it and then we moved on into the kitchen. We sat at a table in a nook next to a window where we could look out at a grove of old lemon trees, their trunks all whitewashed white and their leaves all trimmed to globes, the fruit on them hanging like holiday ornaments. The old man set aluminum plates of frozen dinners out as a lunch for us—frozen green beans and frozen fried chicken and frozen mashed potatoes all steamed with heat now, and biscuits just unwrapped from their own aluminum blanketing.

I readied it all up myself, the old man said. You kids, dig in.

He put cold bottles of cola out to drink, asking me what about a glass and ice with that or why not a nip of whiskey? and I said I would pass on the whiskey, as I had homework to do after. He passed napkins around and he took a seat and we set to eating, the old man talking the whole time in story as Son and I gnawed on our wings and sucked down our cold cola drinks.

My old man came west to these borderlands, said the old man, when he was but a young man. He came out and bought him all the acres around us you see. And he hired many men and planted many trees, the trees of which bore the fruit to be sold towns and counties and states away. Thence my father’s wallet got fat mighty durned fast, as you can imagine. And so he bought more land. And with his profits from all the land, he told the men to build him a hummock in the middle of all his acres. Then he had the men collect the gumbo from just over the border to mix the adobe mud up with. And he had them build the adobe house atop the hummock we sit upon. He told them to cement in the borrow pit, and so they did, and they painted a turquoise color inside it as he had said to, and they filled it in with water to the brim. He told the men to clear the land south of the old adobe house and to build him a corral there, and stables there, an arena and cow chutes and a tackhouse there as well. And lo, my father decided that fruit had been a fruitful living for him and so he would make it a bigger venture yet. He told the men to build him a melon shed out behind the old adobe house. Then all the acres around the melon shed were cleared and the soil made ready and the seed was sown in with the seed drill. And during this time he built the waterways—the mother ditches and the acequias and the regaderas. He put in the presitas, the floodgates and the watergates. And the water was pumped through the fields in these manmade capillaries of his, these valves and these shunts of his.

And so be it my father did indeed become a rich man, he said. And he became a favored man in town. And the people made him the town mayor. He had many friends and patrons and many functions and parties to attend to. He had all this but he had not a woman to share it with. Then it was at one of the many socials he did come to meet a woman from the county east. And they were married and soon after they begat me and we lived the three of us, a happy family as ever there was one, under the roof of this here adobe house. Even during the driest of spells in the heat of the days we were happy. There were nights, I remember, when it was fiercely hot and we would go to bed with wet sheets and the fans blowing on us to get through the night and the weather.

Whoo-ee, he said. And still we did all right.

And then my mother died and my father mourned her for the rest of his years. And the town people had empathy for him and elected themselves a new mayor. And I took over running the working of the land for him when he could not sleep nor could he get out of bed either.

All of this when I was yet a young man.

And so indeed, I too would need a wife. And good fortune was soon bestowed upon me when a new family came into town from back east. They were nesters who had come as many others had come, and that was to better their health and thereby their lives in this dryland habitat. They bought property just north of our land and they built themselves a fine house upon it. They planted acres of bermuda and alfalfa and pastureland, and we paid them to let our horses and cattle graze on those acres. And lo and behold they should have a lovely daughter with the prettiest yellow hair a man might have ever seen. Anyone might have ever seen. And soon the howdy-do’s were made, and yes, I was lucky indeed.

Speaking of which, the old man said. He lifted his hip an inch off the bench and took his wallet out and from his wallet he brought a dollar bill out.

How about a bit of gambling? he said.

You know this game of liar’s poker?

WE LEAVE WITH the music playing, with the guests out on the dance floor in two-step and atwirl, with some filling their punch cups up from the spout of the fish mouth, with others at tables working seriously at their cake. We leave behind the bouquets of desert flowers and the decorations of papier-mâché, the piles of ribboned merchandise, all the bright and many-colored lights. We step outside the rented tent into the greater tent of a tinseled, starlit night. Above our heads is a spread of lost heroes and creatures of make-believe, a spiral of spiraling galaxies, a curtaining glow of aurora, a soffit of planets and stars. In skies to come, there will be more and different views and still but a speck of all there is, wombed inside this universe as we are, with our vision so hindered. Yet I look outward and am filled with pictures of the more and the what-there-might-be for us. What can be for me and Son. Now is only the beginning.

Hold it while ye may, yet happy pair.

We freeze in the click of the shutter.

And time is burned in, in a rupture of light.

The scene is a clumsy one, with Son in the lead and staggering on to the pickup and me behind, trying to make my way through a maze of suns that veer about and kilter off before my eyes. I gather my veil and train, hitched to a great weight of dress as I am, and climb up and in and slide over to the middle of the benchseat, pushing aside the cumulus mass of satin and tulle and organza, letting it all pillow onto the floor and pile up over the seat and spill out through the window. Son gets in beside me, halo’d as he is yet by the ghost of the flash. He is light and mass and heat and smile, and I am alive in the high spirit of him, of us, and of all that is tonight. I wish not to forget, but it is too much, this present is, all too much for the senses—like the blaze of the sun that can’t be looked at too long. That potent the moment is.

We are caught in the blind spots of one last picture. We blink and rub at our eyes and wait for the world to right itself again. Then Son turns the key and starts us up, and we give our good-byes and take our good-lucks, and everyone waves, as everyone does.

There is space and time and color and sound.

How else might I tell you?

WE ARE TOO young to be thinking of doing it. But Son told me his mother told him he ought to be doing it. He said she said it is not correct to be spending nights in the same girl’s bed when you are not yet wedded to her. Son’s mother was hushed after our promises were made. She said no more about Son’s leaving after roundup and supper each evening, and his not coming back until morning feed and watering time. When nothing was different but for this ring I’ve got on my finger. The ring, that too you could say is thanks to his mother, as she told the old man to give Son the sum he needed to go into town to see Mr. Gomez at the jewelry shop with. Now look at me, here at my age, wearing a diamond ring on my finger. A bright solitaire to be joined with a thin gold band meant to fit right with it.

The two of us, we too fit together perfectly.

My legs are hitched up around the crest of Son’s hips and he rocks us into the bed like this, moving us as one in this way, the whole bed awave in the rhythm of us. I cinch my arms around the roll and the breadth of his shoulders. His breath and his words are buried in my hair. We move and we move without missing a beat, and we’re roused and soothed by the cadence we make. I keep my eyes on the stone, the whitehot sparkle of star inside, hoping to take some kind of meaning or power in the spell of it. I let myself be carried off in watching it, in a thought that becomes no thought at all.

By the law, I am a child. I’m not legal age to be married. My mother told us she is happy to go down to the courthouse and sign for me for the license. She told us she is happy to have Son for a son. When he is around her, her movements quicken and her lashes flutter and her voice turns sweet as her cakes and her drinks can be. She will tongue the icing off the knife blade and fill tall glasses with ice cubes and iced tea for us. We will sit out in her patio of shade, and she will flush and bat a napkin at her face, as she talks about who has taken ill in the hot spell or what succulents in the beds have succumbed to it, as she talks about the modern coolness of the new stucco church at the plaza and the kinds of flowers that will hold up inside it. Styled in the Spanish style, she will say, and, inside, a fancy archway beneath which the baptisms are given and the matrimonial vows exchanged.

Son will make jokes about robbing cradles.

She will slice another slice of cake for him and lick the knife another time. He will say how nice my mother’s legs are, and this gets her to throw her head back and laugh the way a young girl laughs.

I would ask her about her wedding dress.

Now you would ask me. You would say, Why go and do a thing such as getting married when you are too young to be thinking of doing it? I can only explain it like this—that whatever you believe it is that is supposed to come true for you, well, one day you think it has. Though if you were to ask me now, I couldn’t tell you what the truth I believed in was, or is.

I WEAR MY mother’s wedding dress and don’t notice the stain on it until it’s too late. Just try to smile, someone says, and carry your bo. . .