Community, Virtue, Family, Love

It’s the fall of 1984 and Ronald Reagan is president. In the small community of Oak Island, North Carolina, all hell is breaking loose.

Wiley Cash’s new novel, When Ghosts Come Home opens with a plane making an emergency nighttime landing at the tiny Oak Island airport. At the same time and on the same airstrip a young prominent black man, Rodney Bellamy, is murdered. Immediately, Sheriff Winston Barnes, his staff, and his family find themselves up to their necks in a scandal and a flurry of suppositions based on racism and ugly hatred.

And those aren’t the sheriff’s only problems. His wife Marie is fighting cancer, his emotionally estranged daughter Colleen has just lost a baby boy at birth and is wondering if her marriage is at an end as well, and Barnes himself is facing a tough reelection campaign against a corrupt rich bigot. We soon learn, too, that there are problems of insubordination in the sheriff’s department, and then the FBI shows up and assumes control of the case of the crashed aircraft, though Sheriff Barnes stays as involved as he can.

Meanwhile, 14-year-old Jay in Dekalb County, Georgia, is caught red-handed trying to shoplift two bottles of MD 20/20 from a convenience store. Mr. Wright, the store’s owner, is a friend of Jay’s father and turns the boy over to the custody of his dad instead of calling the police. Jay is then sent north to Oak Island, to live with his sister Janelle, her husband Rodney, and their newborn. It is her husband Winston Barnes had found shot to death at the airport.

As When Ghosts Come Home progresses, we follow an increasingly frustrated Jay as he tries to fit into the community and high school. He feels estranged from most of his classmates, including the blacks, and when he befriends a white classmate Cody, Jay becomes the target of a band of racists.

Eventually, circumstances bind together all these different people in some surprising twists and turns of the story.

Here is a novel in which there are plenty of good people, heroes even, trying to do the right thing, to practice old-time virtues, no matter what the obstacles. Winston Barnes, for example, is a lawman who truly believes in justice and is trying to ensure it is fairly applied to all in his jurisdiction. His wife Marie, the love of his life, is the embodiment of loyalty, trying to help her husband win his campaign despite her illness and watching out for the safety and comfort of her daughter, despite their differences of personality.

Ed Bellamy, the father of the deceased Rodney and a high school history teacher, is broken by the news of his son’s murder, but brings his strength and compassion to his daughter-in-law. After her house is attacked at night in an attempt to intimidate Jay, Bellamy, who served as a Marine Corps sniper in Vietnam, vows to the sheriff that he will bring those skills into play to protect his family. Here, too, we see a man practicing courage and justice.

Wiley Cash calls our attention to these virtues by juxtaposing portraits of Barnes and Bellamy:

“Winston agreed with the stances Bellamy had taken over the years. But he also knew the importance, particularly in a place like Brunswick County, of walking that fine line of legal authority and cultural memory. Ed Bellamy understood it too, meaning he understood that what people like Winston believed in private and what they were willing to say in public were not always the same thing. Ed Bellamy was bold and outspoken because he believed he had to be to get things done. Winston was deliberate and careful for the exact same reasons.”

Community is also a theme of this novel. Those who grew up in small towns or who live in one now will find much familiar about Oak Island. When something happens, word of the event spreads around town like some early non-electronic form of Facebook. The men and women of the town know their fellow citizens, their strengths and foibles, their past, their family background. Reputations have a long shelf life in such places.

Of course, not everyone is honorable in When Ghosts Come Home. Some in the sheriff’s department are corrupt or possess evil intentions. Even worse is Bradley Frye, Winston’s opponent in the sheriff’s race, who spent his twenties “furthering his name by showing up drunk and looking for girls at high school parties.” Frye is an amoral manipulator and racist who gives new meaning to the phrase, “Looking Out for Number One.” He’s a villain who will do anything to gain power and wealth.

One quibble with this fine tale: On page 146, when an FBI agent asks Barnes if he’d ever served in the military, Barnes replies “Navy in Korea.” Later on page 178, when Bellamy asks him the same question, Winston Barnes answers, “Army. I worked a supply station out of Busan,” a large port city also located in Korea. As there’s no reason for Barnes to mislead either man, we’ll assume this is simply a mistake.

When Ghosts Come Home offers its audience a great story and finely-drawn characters. And in spite of today’s headlines, we might read it, too, to remember how far our nation has progressed in race relations during the last 40 years.

Author Wiley Cash teaches fiction writing and literature at the University of North Carolina-Asheville.