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ALSO BY JOHN KEEBLE
FICTION
Crab Canon
Mine (with Ransom Jeffery)
Yellowfish
NONFICTION
Out of the Channel: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound
SHORT STORIES
Nocturnal America
BROKEN GROUND
JOHN KEEBLE
Foreword by Kathleen Dean Moore
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS
Seattle & London
Excerpts from this work have appeared in Willow Springs 16 (1985), Cheney, Wash., and in Rolling Stock 11 (1986), Boulder, Colo. Certain material has been drawn from Colonel John C. Frémont's Exploring Expeditions in the Rocky Mountains (1849), originally published by George Derby and Company, Buffalo, N.Y.; Captain James Colnett's The Journal of Captain James Colnett Aboard the Argonaut from April 16, 1789 to November 3, 1791, The Champlain Society, Toronto, Ont.; and from Dr. Loon's “Tusk Shell, Gold Dollar, Pulp Note, and Weed: Four Principles of Economy in the Six Rivers/Humboldt Bay Region,” which appeared in Reinhabiting a Separate Country: A Bioregional Anthology of Northern California, edited by Peter Berg (1978), Planet Drum Foundation, San Francisco. Passages from Hector Zeta's Manifesto for Spirits are quoted from manuscript with the permission of the author.
© 1987, 2010 by John Keeble
Printed in the United States of America
Design by Thomas Eykemans
14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1
The book was originally published in 1987 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. It is reprinted here by arrangement with the author. This new paperback edition, with a Foreword by Kathleen Dean Moore, was published by the University of Washington Press in 2010.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS
PO Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98145 USA
www.washington.edu/uwpress
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Keeble, John, 1944–
Broken ground / John Keeble ; foreword by Kathleen Dean Moore.—New pbk. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-295-99048-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Veterans—Fiction. 2. Prisons—Design and construction—Fiction. 3. Oregon—Fiction. I. Moore, Kathleen Dean. II. Title.
PS3561.E3B7 2010
813′.54—dc22
2010007792
The paper used in this publication is acid-free and 90 percent recycled from at least 50 percent post-consumer waste. It meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.∞
ISBN-13: 978-0-295-80546-7 (electronic)
FOR THE REFUGEE IN RETREAT…
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and to Eastern Washington University for support given as the book was composed. I owe also an inexpressible debt to my brother, Paul, for sharing with me his knowledge of architecture and construction, for taking me into the “field,” and for putting me in touch with his friends and associates in the construction trade. These, in turn, and especially Chris Green, gave freely of their knowledge. For their advice and counsel with the manuscript, I wish to thank my wife, Claire; my late and esteemed editor at Harper and Row, Ted Solotaroff; and my friends Michelle Huneven and Fred Newberry. For making this new edition possible, thanks to Keith Liggett; Denise Shannon; the acquiring editor at the University of Washington Press, Marianne Keddington Lang; and all of the Press staff who ably guided the production.
FOREWORD
Kathleen Dean Moore
BROKEN GROUND is the story of Hank Lafleur, a man who tries to redeem his marriage, his lost child, his dying father's foundering business, and maybe his own hapless life by signing on to oversee a massive construction project in the high desert of eastern Oregon. Gradually, he comes to understand that the project is a prison to be built by a private consortium, and that an extra conduit will serve as an underground torture and interrogation cell for political prisoners. There is a creepy malice in the project, heightened by the fact that the reader knows—what author John Keeble imagined with uncanny prescience but could not have known decades ago—that horrors of this sort will in fact take place under American control and that they will take place with the tacit consent or unknowing silence of us all.
Lafleur knows his business. He is adept at the practice of bulldozing, an artist in the medium of broken ground, carving precise holes in the cheat-grass desert, piling rubble beside the river, coolly obliterating the hollows, even as his heart opens to their sublime steep shadows and dusky light. To do a job and to do it well, to do it beautifully—maybe there is redemption in good work. Or maybe there is only the squirming purgatory of those who do good work in the service of evil. To the extent that we are all Lafleur, the question matters.
Ground / n. the foundation or basis on which knowledge, belief, or conviction rests.
Today, twenty-three years after the publication of John Keeble's moving and disturbing novel, 193 men are still held at Guantanamo Bay, never convicted, tried, or even charged with a crime. The U.S. Department of Justice had ruled that some forms of torture are permissible, and, indeed, at Abu Ghraib, U.S. soldiers tied Iraqi prisoners' heads in bags, stripped them naked, burned them with electric cattle prods, and, in some cases, left them to die. Our prison system has become a Prison Industrial Complex—a corporate takeover of the criminal justice system, with profits rising as numbers of prisoners increase. More than 2.3 million of us, one in every one hundred Americans, are in prison. We have been told that this is all part of free enterprise or the war on terror or the war on crime—enacted by well-intentioned people doing what's best for America. Then we feel the ground shift under our feet. What we had thought was solid begins to shimmy like volcanic mud.
How does a person do what he thinks is right, inside a structure that is fundamentally wrong? How can a person know what's right, when even the most well-intentioned acts cause harm and when sometimes one does have to do something terrible to accomplish some good? And who can know in advance what will happen, what will justify a decision or reveal its stupid tragedy? Is it enough to mean well? Is it excusable to just not know? To look away? To look away while a child is lost in a river, while a nun is raped, while a ranch house is bulldozed—is that different from drowning or raping or destroying, and in what particular way? To know the good is to do the good, Socrates said, but what if you don't know the good? And what a crock of lies that is, anyway: of course you can know what's right and do what's wrong. Where in this sliding, seismic world can we find solid ground, something to stand on, a morality we can be sure of? And where, in the end, will we find forgiveness?
This is the desert land that John Keeble explores in his brilliant Broken Ground.
Ground / n. the surface on which man stands, moves, and dwells; the surface of the earth.
Lafleur's business takes him from the damp night-time streets of Portland, across the Cascade Mountains, through juniper breaks and sage flats to the far eastern edge of Oregon. Here are