Sweet Cane by Bruce McGinnis (review)

Reviews 181 Sweet Cane. By Bruce McGinnis. (New York: Vanguard Press, 1981. 251 pages, $11.95.) “What is fallen cannot be raised. It is finished. Is perished. Forever.” So thinks Wacker Sedley in Bruce McGinnis’s second novel, Sweet Cane. Wacker is never so articulate when he speaks, but this son of a downtrodden Texas farmer, Amos Sedley, thinks elegant and perceptive thoughts. What Wacker has seen falling is the sweet cane he cuts for the syrup mill. What he perceives to be symbolized by the rows of cut cane are the waste and futility in the lives of Amos Sedley’ssons. That Wacker Sedley thinks in academic English and poetic metaphors and speaks a country vernacular isone of two inconsistencies in this work. The other is in point of view. Intermittent chapters record the conversation of Judge Henry Loudermilk and L. B. McGinnis as the two sit in McGinnis’s general store eating cheese and crackers. What the judge reveals to L. B. McGinnis little by painfully little is the scandalous history of Amos’s degen­ erate and tragic family. L. B.’scuriosity isinsatiable since he has just witnessed the jailing of Wacker Sedley. Before the food and beer run out, the judge traces from Amos’sorigins the sordid chronicle of Sedley stupidity, hate, greed, and incest, which doom them all to tragic endings. Wacker, the one aware Sedley, perceives what the judge cannot know — that he and his two brothers are enslaved by a father’sobsession with the desire to own property but the unwillingness to work for it himself. His sons are his possessions, his chattels. It is through Wacker’s stream-of-consciousness meanderings , often repetitive, that the reader learns the events which lead to Wacker’s arrest. In McGinnis’s first novel, The Fence, he relates the story of a nineteenth-century farmer’s obsession with building the rock fence which Amos Sedley is later to tear down. The Fence is successfully narrated from points of view of several characters in the novel. Not so in McGinnis’s second fictional offering. Not only does point of view switch abruptly in Sweet Cane, but the reader must back his imagination up when the narrator changes, and find his place in the chronology of the particular story each narrator is so slowly disclosing. McGinnis obviously admires Faulkner. A central Texas farm near Comanche, not Mississippi delta land, nourishes Amos Sedley’s perfidy, but when Amos arrives in Comanche County, he boasts of proud southern begin­ nings and vows to regain through land ownership what he lost to brothers when his father suddenly died. But Amos lies — maybe even to himself. In truth, he isthe son of a prostitute. AsAmosliesdying, finally, from a deliberate ax blow to his foot, the sordid consequences of his greed and dishonesty become clear. Amos has traded his wife’s body to banker Vernon Farley for his num­ erous extensions of Amos’s mortgage. Son Buck, dying of tuberculosis and yearning for his father’s love, is Farley’s, not Amos’s, son. Wacker’s love affair with cousin Carrie is more incestuous than he believes. Carrie is in fact his 182 Western American Literature twin sister, a relationship concealed by Amos, once again because of greed. Amos’s only loved son, Ranse, escapes his father’s possessiveness through sui­ cide. And retarded sister Lily Mae haunts them all. The grim story ends with Amos dead, Ranse dead, Buck dying, and Wacker headed for prison after going berserk when Farley attempts to repossess the farm. Carrie is pregnant. Mammie rocks and grieves, her only comfort a sepiatinted photograph of Amos with his three smiling sons around the syrup mill. Wacker knows what liesbehind those smiles. The town now knows the rest. Author McGinnis has been a careful observer in those formative years he spent in Comanche County, Texas. His ear is fine-tuned to the nuances of West Central Texas talk. His creative imagination constructs a grim but plausible plot. What he did not have for this novel, however, was an editor who would insist on elimination of boring repetition and tedious revelation. The tightly-structured work resulting might have been an admirable...