West

by Carys Davies

Genres: Family Life; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

When widowed mule breeder Cy Bellman reads in the newspaper that colossal ancient bones have been discovered in the salty Kentucky mud, he sets out from his small Pennsylvania farm to see for himself if the rumors are true: that the giant monsters are still alive and roam the uncharted wilderness beyond the Mississippi River. Promising to write and to return in two years, he leaves behind his daughter, Bess, to the tender mercies of his taciturn sister and heads west.

With only a barnyard full of miserable animals and her dead mother's gold ring to call her own, Bess, unprotected and approaching womanhood, fills lonely days tracing her father's route on maps at the subscription library and waiting for his letters to arrive. Bellman, meanwhile, wanders farther and farther from home, across harsh and alien landscapes in reckless pursuit of the unknown. From Frank O'Connor Award winner Carys Davies, West is a spellbinding and timeless epic-in-miniature, an eerie parable of the American frontier, and an electric monument to possibility.

Release date: April 24, 2018

Publisher: Scribner

Print pages: 160

Sample

West
From what she could see he had two guns, a hatchet, a knife, his rolled blanket, the big tin chest, various bags and bundles, one of which, she supposed, contained her mother’s things.

“How far must you go?”

“That depends.”

“On where they are?”

“Yes.”

“So how far? A thousand miles? More than a thousand miles?”

“More than a thousand miles, I think so, Bess, yes.”

Bellman’s daughter was twirling a loose thread that hung down from his blanket, which until this morning had lain upon his bed. She looked up at him. “And then the same back.”

“The same back, yes.”

She was quiet a moment, and there was a serious, effortful look about her, as if she was trying to imagine a journey of such magnitude. “That’s a long way.”

“Yes, it is.”

“But worth it if you find them.”

“I think so, Bess. Yes.”

He saw her looking at his bundles and his bags and the big tin chest, and wondered if she was thinking about Elsie’s things. He hadn’t meant her to see him packing them.

She was drawing a circle in the muddy ground with the toe of her boot. “So how long will you be gone? A month? More than a month?”

Bellman shook his head and took her hand. “Oh, Bess, yes, more than a month. A year at least. Maybe two.”

Bess nodded. Her eyes smarted. This was much longer than she’d expected, much longer than she’d hoped.

“In two years I will be twelve.”

“Twelve, yes.” He lifted her up then and kissed her forehead and told her goodbye, and in another moment he was aloft on his horse in his brown wool coat and his high black hat, and then he was off down the stony track that led away from the house, already heading in a westerly direction.

“Look you long and hard, Bess, at the departing figure of your father,” said her aunt Julie from the porch in a loud voice like a proclamation.

“Regard him, Bess, this person, this fool, my brother, John Cyrus Bellman, for you will not clap eyes upon a greater one. From today I am numbering him among the lost and the mad. Do not expect that you will see him again, and do not wave, it will only encourage him and make him think he deserves your good wishes. Come inside now, child, close the door, and forget him.”

For a long time Bess stood, ignoring the words of her aunt Julie, watching her father ride away.

In her opinion he did not resemble any kind of fool.

In her opinion he looked grand and purposeful and brave. In her opinion he looked intelligent and romantic and adventurous. He looked like someone with a mission that made him different from other people, and for as long as he was gone she would hold this picture of him in her mind: up there on his horse with his bags and his bundles and his weapons—up there in his long coat and his stovepipe hat, heading off into the west.

She did not ever doubt that she would see him again.