by hot sun, the landforms rise up in the cool evening, cut by the copper glow of the river itself. John Keeble, who is as intimate with this place as he is with language, brings the landscape to powerful life. Sometimes portrayed with slanting storm-light worthy of Albert Bierstadt, sometimes spattered brutally on the page—a rattlesnake torn in half, a chase across a crumbling cliff—the land is real enough to smell, real enough to fear. It is real enough to care about.
A few people live on the land where the prison will be built. They have made their living for a very long time in the two-pump crossroads towns and the high plains wheat fields. Wallace Stegner wrote, “Tell me where you're from, and I'll tell you who you are.” Indeed, with a few deft strokes—the pitch of a man's hips as he leans against his truck, the glance that lingers on a silo—Keeble draws the people of this place, as sun-hardened as stone. But when the bulldozers break ground, they break the covenant that binds the people and the land. Then Broken Ground takes on a different challenge: “Tell me what has happened to your land, and I will tell what has happened to you.” Keeble brilliantly sculpts the faces of this horror, the fragmentation of families and hopes, the fatal cynicism when the land is cynically misused.
Here, too, Broken Ground is a book of our time. Decades before degradation of land and air became a global ecological catastrophe, Keeble told the story of people displaced from their scratchy fields by the prison project. There are no easy answers in their stories, no strained lessons about sustainability. Rather, Keeble imagines for us the people who silently serve chili in the dusty café. He imagines the bulldozers—the smell of their exhaust and the rumble that shakes the ground, how the levers lower the blade, how the blade scrapes the earth to bedrock, and the rattle of dynamite in the bed of a pickup truck. What is lost, when people lose a close, sustaining connection to a place? What is destroyed, when the land is barricaded and paved? When the prison complex finally falls to dust, what vast time will it take to heal not only the land but the relation of the people to that place?
Ground / n. the area to be won or defended as in or as if in battle.
The re-issue of Broken Ground comes at a challenging time for fiction, and indeed for all art forms. What is the work of a writer in a world gone so dangerously wrong? Maybe writers' loyalty is to their work, and the great and sole obligation of writers is to write as well as they know how. But is there an obligation also to the time, to ask the questions that may have no answers, to challenge wrong-headed or destructive authority, to cry out from the margins in defense of what is beautiful and true? Broken Ground is evidence that a writer can do both, and, indeed, it is testimony to John Keeble's conviction that a writer must write powerfully even as he engages the quandaries of a time.
Literature is to culture as the layered stones of the Owyhee canyons are to time—beautiful, puzzling, sometimes tortured, enduring, revealing. Just as the texture of the stones expresses the workings of time, literature embeds the moral discourse of a culture. In the layers of detail and meaning in the stories writers choose to tell is a record of a culture's struggle with foundational, defining questions: What is a human being? What is the place of humans in the natural world? How, then, shall we live? In a time in which basic values are contested and our five-hundred-year-old Enlightenment understanding of the world is called into question, we need the wild imagination of the novelist, the created worlds, the contests of ideas enacted in an imagined place. As we enter the lives of fictional characters, see the world through their eyes, agonize over their decisions, cheer them, blame them, we feel with the characters, which is compassion, which is insight.
Broken Ground is an exemplar of powerful, attentive story-telling. John Keeble writes his paragraphs the way he might tune the elk-skin head of a drum, tightening, listening, tightening here, listening again, exactly, exquisitely balancing the tones he strikes, until the prose sounds loud and true. In this way he honors his art. Equally, he honors his time, calling out questions about corporate, national, and personal brutality—questions whose importance has grown over the years since the book was first published until they now dominate the headlines that brought the former administration to an ignominious end. So the book is both timeless and deeply, significantly, of this time.
Ground / n. the metal object buried in the earth to make electrical connection with it.
Broken Ground has been widely praised. “A powerful, labyrinthine novel,” the New York Times wrote. “An eerie vision of great intensity,” answered the New York Times Book Review. The Hungry Mind said, “No other serious American novel has confronted so directly and so eerily the slithery power of corporate dominance over humble lives as well as over our changing, dehumanized landscape.” All of this is true today.
Congratulations and gratitude to the University of Washington Press for bringing out Broken Ground at a time of pivotal change and renewed hope. Broken Ground will help us find the courage to change what cannot be allowed to continue, and the moral imagination to create what must come next. It is a high-plains lightning bolt that can help empower once again our sense of justice and human decency.
Corvallis, Oregon, March 2010
1
The line between life and death is as translucent as the sac that bounds the bulging innards of the jackrabbit.
—Hector Zeta, Manifesto for Spirits
THE MIDNIGHT-BLUE PICKUP stopped at the curb in front of Gus and Jewel Lafleur's house. Henry Lafleur slid out of the cab to the pavement. On the pickup door was a plastic stick-on sign that said CUSTOM EXCAVATION. Under the words a phone number had been struck out with a stripe of black paint.
Lafleur stepped up onto the grass and then to the sidewalk, which had been fractured by the root systems of the big maple trees that lined the street. The trees were just leafing out. Evening light slanted against the trunks and spidery limbs and it glinted on the power lines. The neighborhood was an old one in Portland, Oregon, and the years had obscured the geometry of the street, sidewalks, power poles, and of the kit houses set back just so on the lots.
Lafleur turned onto Gus and Jewel's walkway. The stem tips of the almond tree that stood in the center of the yard had swelled, and beneath the tree a webwork of new green peeped through the pale of last year's grass. The plywood ramp that he'd built over the steps thudded softly under his boots. A huge azalea leaned ominously into the porch. Along the rail stood a row of pots in which Jewel had started her geraniums. The deck was dark gray, the wall of the house was a lighter gray, and the trim was white. A swinging divan with blue cushions hung from the ceiling, and for just an instant he saw the apparitions of three children sitting there, swinging. He paused for a moment before the doorway, deeply inhaling the fragrance of cooking food. He pulled back the screen, knocked lightly, and pushed the door open.
Jewel met him just inside, embraced him, and then leaned back, holding firmly onto his arms and smiling. She had a striking face, strong chin and cheeks, sharp eyes, and leathery, profoundly wrinkled skin. Lafleur smiled back, then glanced over her shoulder at Gus, his father, who was asleep in a reclining chair. Jewel moved to the chair and gently raised its back, making the old man fold in the middle. She held one leg against Gus's knees so that he wouldn't slide onto the floor. Gus awakened and stared blankly outward. Jewel bent and straightened him up. “Hank's here,” she said. Slowly, Gus focused on his son, and then executed the half-inch movement of his head that Lafleur knew as the remnant of his father's habitual friendly greeting from the old days. Now the pale skin of the face did not move and the eyes seemed bleached. Lafleur asked his father how he was. Gus nodded again, and grunted softly: “Ugh.”
Lafleur followed Jewel into the kitchen, where the fragrance grew dense—beef, bread, and vegetables. He murmured with pleasure. Jewel smiled at him. Her black hair was lined with silver. She had kept it long and let it hang in a loose rope down her back when she was home. Lafleur admired Jewel. It was not easy to be widowed, then to marry another man and a few years later have him become helpless. As he looked at her and received her warmth, his eyes welled with tears. This had been happening to him lately.
Jewel picked up a pot from the stove, strained