The Bones of Paradise by Jonis Agee (review)

"It was midmorning in early May when J.B. Bennett crested the hill, stopped, and surveyed the little Sand Hills meadow where the windmill was slowly clanking in a wobbly circle" (3). This sentence opens Jonis Agee's novel, The Bones of Paradise, signaling that place, the landscape, will be an important element in this story.

By the end of the first chapter J. B. Bennett is murdered, his body next to that of an Indian girl named Star. Powerful cattlemen control the lives of everyone around them. It is only ten years after the massacre of Indian men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, on the reservation, a few miles north of the Sand Hills ranches. Agee traces the tension among the Bennett ranches of J.B. and his father Drum, J.B.'s estranged wife Dulcinea, her friends the Indian Rose and Rose's husband Jerome Some Horses, and Graver, a wandering homesteader.

When he is murdered, J.B. is on his way to reclaim his son Cullen, who has been raised by his irascible grandfather Drum Bennett, following a family tradition of surrendering the oldest son to his grandfather to be raised as a tough-as-nails rancher. Dulcinea returns to her husband's ranch determined to claim her place in the Bennett family, only to learn of J.B.'s death. She has been sent away by her husband, an act that puzzles her until she discovers much later that her exile was the price her husband agreed to in exchange for 20,000 acres. Although the men assume that the widowed Dulcinea will abandon the Sand Hills, she proves instead to be a force to be reckoned with.

Agee weaves together the stories of the two Bennett ranches, the greedy oil men determined to force Dulcinea to reward them with leases on her land, and the massacre at Wounded Knee. The Bennetts have always been drawn to the Indian reservation. As a boy Cullen regarded the reservation as a place to harass boys and young women. J.B. takes his second son, Hayward, there to witness (and be disgusted by) the escalating tensions that culminate in the soldiers' slaughter of the Indian encampment. The opportunistic lawyer Chance regards the killing field as a source of plunder.

The horrific acts at Wounded Knee, the murder of J.B. and the Indian girl Star, and the subsequent violent deaths of Cullen, Drum, and the lawyer Chance, and the fate of certain items of value to Chance and to Star and her sister Rose result in a saga as bloody as Mari Sandoz's Slogum House. But Dulcinea is no Gulla Slogum: instead of Sandoz's grim conclusion that women are complicit in the cruel life of the Sand Hills, Agee's women persevere as forces for good. Dulcinea loves the Sand Hills. With the support of the homesteader Graver, Rose, Some Horses, and her ranch hands, she buries the bones of manifest destiny. The imagined masculine paradise in the West is dead. It is Dulcinea who resurrects the ranches that would have failed while J.B. and his father fought for control over their domains.

Agee's prose is strong in the tradition of Great Plains writings—controlled, direct, and attuned to the natural world that is an important element in the story. The novel closes:

Dulcinea could not leave this land. She finally understood how the wind out here made a place for itself in your ear, in your mind, and in your heart, stilling your thoughts, making everything you see one vast wholeness: the swan gliding across the silent marsh, the mossy turtles climbing like ancient men out of the water, their claws gripping the soil with great effort to drag themselves despite the tangled water plants that dragged their yellow-scaled legs back, their ragged beaks parted with effort. She couldn't think without the Sand Hills wind hushing the great world around her as she pushed...