The Blue Valleys (review)

Morgan, Robert. The Blue Valleys. Peachtree Publishers, Ltd., 1989. $15.95. Before I discovered The Blue Valleys, the last thing I needed was another collection of stories about loss, the deterioration of the natural landscape, and nostalgia for the past. I'm too much of a cynic to believe that the golden past was ever that golden. I think we need to be honest about the past to keep the present bearable. I think I've found a kindred soul in Soet and now fiction writer Robert !organ, native North Carolinian, winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and professor at Cornell University. In The Blue Valleys, I found a lot of nostalgia, but presented so artfully that the stories drew me in and kept me reading even when the distractions of daily living were pounding at my door. I don't take such storytelling lightly. For example, I didn't think I could bear to read a Civil War prison storyuntil Morgan began spinning "A Brightness New and Welcoming," for which he won the Jacaranda Review fiction prize for 1988. John Powell is a Tar Heel dying of dysentery in a filthy Union prison camp in Chicago. In his delirium he dreams of his young wife, Louise, his home in the North Carolina mountains and the spring that waters his farm. On the hottest days of July the water was cold when he came down from the cornfield. It tasted of quartz rock deep under the mountain. Sometimes when he found a specially brilliant crystal he would place it in the spring to sparkle for all to see. Spring water was touched by all the mineral wealth it had passed through, the gold and rubies, silver and emeralds in the deep veins. The water was a cold rainbow on the tongue. The contrast between the misery of Powell's prison conditions and the rich beauty or his mountain homeplace creates a tension relieved only by his death. I found this story a portentous introduction to other stones with modern settings in which the characters come near achieving a ripe perfection of life only to be disappointed. In "Let No Man," Morgan writes about Josie, a woman in her 30s who's been working at a cotton mill since high school graduation. She stakes her future (and 15 years' worth of savings) on an elaborate wedding to Nathan, a laborer. Overweight at 164 pounds and with weak eyes as a result of a childhood case of poison ivy, Josie can't believe her good luck in finding a husband at last. And such a fine man, too, one who has never even made a pass at her. During their long, hot drive to Myrtle Beach ana a honeymoon suite with a vibra-bed, she congratulates herself on finding a man who won't step out with other women after they're married. I don't want to give away too much of the climax of this tightly constructed, Roignantly comical story but, sadly, iatnan has neglected to tell her about a certain condition he's had since childhood . You'll weep for Josie-and for all women who marry to find heaven and find hell instead. Morgan sets the collection's last story, "Blinding Daylight," in "the haze and. tree-breath of the high mountains," where David, a middle-aged college professor and sometime artist, has gone with the intention of committing suicide. He has returned to his childhood home, now empty for both his parents are long dead, to find his mother's pistol, "a revolver with a delicate embroidery of rust on the barrel." As he walks, he is reminded of an earlier time when he had contemplated taking his own life, only to find his artistic vision reawakened by the familiar woods and pastures of the old homeplace: Above the Briggs Place he stopped at an abandoned field that might at one time have been under polebeans. An old Ford, its windows and headlights broken, rusted on its axles blocking the only access road to the 60 remote clearing. Later he fancied a number had been painted on the door, but he couldn't be certain. The next day...