by Robert Morgan
1999; 326 pages; published by Simon & Schuster

                

“The hardest work I did on Gap Creek was trying to get the voice right,” says Robert Morgan, who has been called the poet laureate of Appalachia. The voice, as it happens, is of seventeen-year-old Julie Harmon. At seventeen, she’s a good girl, and strong, working as hard as a man alongside her father in this gritty, realistic portrayal of life in late-nineteenth-century North Carolina.

Morgan starts us off with the depiction of a horrifying illness in the very first chapter. When her younger brother dies, followed a bit later by her father, Julie becomes the head of the family, caring for her mother and sisters until a handsome boy passes through the holler. After a few weeks, she and the boy, Hank, marry and move the distance of a day’s walk to Gap Creek. Since homes are few and far between, they rent a room with a stinky, lewd and mean old widower in exchange for Julie’s serving as the maid and housekeeper. While Hank works at a distant mill, Julie cleans, cooks, tends the fields and the farm animals, splits and hauls wood and even butchers a hog, the rendering of whose fat causes disaster. Written in a voice similar to Cold Mountain, Gap Creek tells the story of a can-do kind of young woman who works so hard it hurts your back to read about it.

Morgan portrays the delicate evolution of a marriage, and of a girl trying to define her identity in relation to the union, a timeless theme for sure, but one made more nuanced by the circumstances in which Julie lives. On one level this is a love story, comparable to that of any impoverished but earnest young couple determined to carve out an existence in their world.
It’s just that their world is so Darwinian. Julie’s strength and skills are essential in a time and place where the only food you eat is what you can raise or kill yourself; the only shelter you live in is what you build or maintain alone. Medical care is a matter of family knowledge handed down for better or worse from generation to generation. Superstition carries unquestioned curative or destructive power. She and Hank live at the meanest edge of subsistence, with no electricity or running water, and just one injury, illness, or crop failure between death and survival.

Morgan use simple descriptions to transport us into Julie’s everyday world:
“I stepped out to the back porch and looked in the yard. Like in any backyard, there was a woodshed and a smokehouse, a clothesline, a path to the toilet on the right, and a path to the spring on the left. And further out there was a barn and hogpen. The washpot was on the trail to the spring. And there was a table and a wooden tub on the trail next to the pot. I looked around the porch and found a washboard and a bucket. And by the water bucket was a cake of Octagon soap.

“I grabbed that bucket and carried several gallons of water from the spring and poured them in the pot. And then I got some kindling and wood from the shed and started a fire under the pot…it took me four trips just to carry Mr. Pendergast’s clothes out to the wash table.”
Earnest, loyal and naïve – but not stupid – Julie isn’t daunted by the need to work like a mule. In a metaphor for her resilience, she finds solace in hard work. Hank is weak, a whiner, impulsive, with a bad temper. The two of them weather fire, flood, extortion, swindling, poverty and hunger. She is so much stronger than him, but by the end of the story he changes.

The challenges are endless, the struggle Sisyphean. She works and works, yet the problems never slow down, and her effort seemingly pointless in clawing some security from the soil. What, I wonder, was Morgan trying to tell us? He said the book is based on his grandmother, that he wanted to explore what life was like for women who worked so hard for everybody else. Examples of hard work? How about washing and dressing a dead man? Butering a hog? In that sense the story is a portrait of self-sufficiency, and the kind of strength you don’t see so much anymore.

There is a primitive rawness to the world in which Julie lives, leaving little indication of divine intervention. In two major scenes she seems deflated by the world’s indifference, given over to an existentialist’s sad musings:

“I sat there on the cold ground feeling that human life didn’t mean a thing in this world. People could be born and they could die, and it didn’t mean a thing…little Masenier was dead. There was nothing we could do about it, and nothing cared except Papa and me. The world was exactly like it had been and would always be, going on about its business.”
When Julie “finds religion” it’s more a matter, I think, of finding community with other earnest human beings, and garnering strength from their friendship. She is helped and is grateful, and in this Morgan makes a profound yet subtle affirmation of the essential bond between human beings.

In the end, this book is about innate strength, and the courage to make a life, to enjoy carnal and spiritual love, and to battle hard luck and crushing circumstance. I found it inspiring.

                                                                             --reviewed by Lynn Spreen