The Power and Depth of The Caretaker
The Caretaker, Ron Rash’s eighth and what he believes may be his last novel, one that took ten years to write, is, I’m happy to report, among his finest, which, considering the depth and breadth of his body of work, is no small feat.
Like many of Rash’s novels, it is a dramatic and propulsive read, a dark book laced with violence and a betrayal of Shakespearean proportions that makes it hard to read but impossible not to. We can’t look, but we absolutely must. Yet for all that, there is much wonderful humor, and at its heart, a profound and hard-earned tenderness.
Set in 1951, the novel opens with Jacob Hampton, a native of Blowing Rock, recently conscripted to serve in the Korean War where he now finds himself on lonely guard duty on a frigid and harrowing night, a frozen river the only thing separating him from the enemy.
The night was colder than any he’d ever experienced back in Watauga County. This cold did more than seep into his skin. It encased fingers and feet in iron, made teeth rattle like glass about to break… For weeks Jacob had kept waiting for the cold to lift. Now it was March, but this place observed no calendar. The river was still frozen. Jacob envisioned ice all the way to the bottom—no current, fish stalled as if mounted.”
As Jacob contemplates the stealth and deadliness of the North Koreans, one of them having crawled across the ice two nights earlier to decapitate another unit’s sentry, he reminds himself who he has to live for—his new wife, pregnant 16-year-old Naomi, waiting for him back in North Carolina, expecting in two months. It’s for Naomi and the child, he tells himself, he must survive the war.
His ruminating evokes a painful memory back in Blowing Rock, when he’d first learned he’d been conscripted and went to his estranged parents to ask that they look after Naomi while he’s away. Still furious with him for having eloped, dashing their long-held plans for their son to marry another woman, his parents disinherit Jacob and refuse to have anything to do with Naomi. Jacob turns to Blackburn Gant, a lifelong friend and caretaker of a hill-top cemetery. With Jacob as Blackburn’s only real friend, the caretaker accepts the responsibility of looking after his friend’s wife while Jacob is in Korea.
In the second chapter the momentum of the novel shifts to Blowing Rock and its title character, who, to my mind, is one of Rash’s most compelling. The son of sharecroppers, Blackburn was stricken by polio as a child, and while a slight hitch is the only sign of a once paralyzed leg, his face has remained disfigured. “The drooping eye remained, the right side of his mouth pulled upward as if snagged by a fish hook.”
As a result of stares and derision since childhood, when townspeople asked Doctor Egan, who oversaw Blackburn’s care, to have the boy’s face veiled so they wouldn’t have to look at him, Blackburn has grown into a solitary figure, going out of his way to avoid people. When his family decided to move to Florida, Blackburn, who was only sixteen, remained behind and took a job as caretaker, where he’s now been for five years. Preferring the reticent company of the dead, Blackburn feels at home in his job and takes great pride in his work.
Caretaking was a duty to the living and the dead. That was what Wilkie, the previous caretaker, had taught Blackburn. The placement of wreaths and flowers, the mowing of grass and raking of leaves, all must be done the right way… (Blackburn) believed that in some way the dead sensed his actions, and not just the digging and filling of the graves. Small acts of respect mattered—not banging tools or talking loudly, stepping around graves not over them, picking up cigarette butts and matches.
One of the few people Blackburn comes in contact with regularly is Agnes Dillard, a kind and thoughtful woman who owns the florist and delivers flowers to the cemetery. She’d once told him that they were often much alike, both trying to ease people a bit during a hard time. There was always care in how Mrs. Dillard arranged the flowers and the wreaths. Blackburn saw it in details mourners might miss—how well woven the wreaths were or how stems were cut slantwise so flowers kept their color.
In both Blackburn and Agnes Dillard there is an attentiveness to detail, which, when it comes down to it, is a sort of compassion, a way of thinking of others. Doctor Egan has much of that that same quality in the many ways he attends to his patients, inside his office as well as around town, out in the community. Also, on an entirely different level, one might say that the novel itself, with its detailed description, its powerful imagery and its moving and dramatic scenes reflects an artistic commitment to detail, to the hard work of the writer artfully and conscientiously making the world of his imagination accessible to the reader.
The further we read into the novel, the more resonance The Caretaker, as a title, acquires. No longer is Blackburn just tending the cemetery, now he’s tending Naomi, which in a very real way is looking after his friend Jacob. By asking Blackburn to look after Naomi, Jacob, inadvertently perhaps, has pulled Blackburn out of the quiet and calm of the cemetery and into the much more complicated, dramatic world of the living.
With tension running high between Naomi and Jacob’s parents, and the town’s general disapproval of the couple, Blackburn works to keep Naomi out of town by running her errands, doing her shopping and paying the bills. He does chores around the house, plays cards with her and keeps her company. But one day, Naomi begs him to take her to a matinee downtown. And against his better judgement he does. As she’s getting out of the car, he tries to put her overcoat on but she refuses, showing her belly to the town. This enrages Jacob’s father, Daniel Hampton, who confronts them, causing a crowd to gather, leading to Naomi falling. It’s after this harrowing scene that Blackburn moves Naomi to live with her father in Tennessee.
With Jacob still in Korea, Blackburn continues to visit Naomi at her father’s house, finding himself thinking about her, feeling more comfortable around her and more physically aware of her. In one visit she feels the baby moving and asks Blackburn if he’d like to feel her belly and, at first, he hesitates:
Blackburn’s eyes were on the coffee cup. He stared at the cup a few more moments, then got up and stood beside Naomi. She placed his palm on her belly. Her hand remained on his. Through the muslin, Blackburn felt the warmth of her skin. How long since he’d last touched another person? Pete Sorrells had thanked him in February after his mother’s funeral. Before that, Jacob’s handshake. Blackburn started to withdraw his hand.
“Wait,” Naomi said.
He felt it then, a bump, soon after another one.
The reader is struck by what an isolated soul Blackburn is. Here’s a man who can count on one hand the number of times in the past many months he’s touched someone. And because of that, we sense that this moment of feeling the baby’s movement will be something he’ll never forget. Neither will the reader.
Among the many unforgettable characters in The Caretaker, two of the most prominent are Jacob’s controlling parents, Cora and Daniel Hampton, who have already lived through the deaths of two daughters. Cora especially is incensed to have now lost their son to a 16-year-old girl, so it’s Cora, an intelligent, no nonsense, business savvy, some might say heartless, mother, who hatches a desperately cruel plan to sabotage her son’s marriage. And it’s Daniel, a successful businessman and a bully when he needs to be, who is the one to carry out his wife’s plan.
Besides Blackburn, my favorite character is Doctor Egan, who has been doctoring 39 years and knows the town and those who live there and what illnesses they survived and losses they’ve endured, giving him a greater frame of reference than most anyone in town and, because of that, a generous point of view. In this way, he has a kind of omniscient presence reminding me of the Stage Manager in Our Town. The doctor also has a philosophical bent and reads poetry. When asked why he doesn’t read novels, he replies, “I spend my life immersed in stories.”
A story he’s presently immersed in is Naomi’s, which includes Blackburn, since it’s he who brings her in for her checkups. The doctor and Ruthie, his longtime assistant, painfully observe how Blackburn, who is cripplingly self-conscious, won’t come into the waiting room, even on the coldest days, but walks her to the front door, then waits attentively in the truck. “Dr. Egan had seen him out there, eyes watching for her to emerge.”
As the doctor ponders Blackburn and the challenges he’s faced since childhood, he remembers a revealing moment the day in town when Daniel Hampton pulled up in his car and physically confronted Naomi and Blackburn.
Afflicted, that was the word country folks used to describe those damaged in mind and body. There were harsher words, sometimes used unthinkingly, other times not. Afflicted was gentler, even in its pronunciation, and those who spoke it also believed such individuals were gifted in some singular way. It might be playing a guitar, like Arthel Watson in Deep Gap, or calming stubborn horses, or simply a beautiful smile. Egan remembered Blackburn standing guard in front of the soda shop, not moving as Daniel Hampton railed at him. Few men in town would have stood up to Daniel like that. Steadfastness, was that Blackburn’s great gift?
Many years ago, Rash wrote a short piece titled The Importance of Place and in it he talks about how he has always set his stories in South and North Carolina, places he knows best. “The best regional writers are like farmer’s drilling for water; if they bore deep and true enough into that particular place, beyond the surface of local color, they tap into universal correspondences, what Jung called the collective unconscious. Thus Faulkner’s Mississippi, Munro’s Ontario, and Marquez’s Columbia are both exotic and familiar.” So as we consider the power and depth of The Caretaker and of all the novels and stories and poems that now shape the author’s profound body of work, there’s no question that Ron Rash and his Carolina mountains have earned a place in this august list.