In a Tennessee folk tale from the early twentieth century, a Yankee traveling salesman receives a dose of regional wisdom when his car breaks down in the southern backwoods.

Judging from the last hour of his trip, the salesman decided his best chance of reaching civilization lay in abandoning the road and cutting through the surrounding forest, which he did, only to find himself hopelessly lost minutes later. Luckily a young farm-boy was hunting nearby and offered to guide the salesman to the nearest service station. Grateful for this rescue, the salesman tried to strike up a conversation with the boy along the way. “That's a mighty fine rifle you have,” he told the boy, who shrugged and responded, “It's the same rifle my granddad carried in the Civil War.”

Duly impressed, the salesman asked if he could take a look at it, so the boy stopped and handed him the gun. The salesman turned it over in his hands. “That's a good-looking barrel to have gone through the Civil War,” he said.

“Oh, it's not the same barrel,” the boy rejoined. “Granddad put on a new one not too far back.”

The salesman fingered the gun respectfully. “Well, it's still a fine wood stock to have lasted all these years,” he offered.

“I s'pose,” the boy responded, “but my daddy put that stock on not five years before giving it to me.”

The salesman scratched his head. “I see. Well, it's still a mighty nice trigger to have stayed easy all this time.”

The boy shook his head. “I put that on just last month.”

At this final admission, the salesman returned the firearm, practically beside himself with amusement. “Son, I hate to say this, but that rifle's practically new.”

The boy took it solemnly. “Nosir, it's the same gun my granddad carried in the Civil War.”¹

The story of the gun has always struck me as profound, in particular for the way it seems to inform the process of identity-construction in the regional community. The salesman, the outsider who has no sense of the community or its spirit, reduces his understanding of the rifle to an assessment of its use-value after he has determined that it was not, in fact, carried through the Civil War. For the boy, however, the rifle remains both a figurative and literal intersection of past and present, not so important because it dates his ancestry as far back as the War Between the States, but because it provides him with a tangible link to that ancestry, a link that justifies his present occupation of the land and continually articulates his relationship to it. The gun is not, as the salesman would contend, mere memorabilia, but a symbol of the hunting and fighting, with their implicit emphasis on reading the landscape, in which the boy's ancestors participated and in which the boy now participates in order to survive. History for the boy, then, becomes not only dates and facts, but a genetic tie to the land itself, his inheritance of the gun representing an external affirmation of his passage into manhood and his ascent into this physical, almost life-and-death, relationship.

This kind of understanding, of course, allows the boy to navigate the woods where the salesman cannot, and his clear vision of the forest implies a clarity and rationality about his correspondent sense of history, symbolized by the gun. Nonetheless, there remains a side of me that sympathizes with the salesman; in his world of contracts and premiums, the gun can only be a gun, and its worth is dictated almost solely by the changes that have been made to it, changes which in this case serve only to decrease its value. Moreover, if the gun is symbolic of the land and the people who occupy it, then the salesman's comment strikes even more sinisterly at the changing value of the regional community itself. The various alterations to the rifle correspond to the succession of generations within the community, a succession in which sons and daughters are born and raised only to remain the same as their parents. Given the salesman's reading, we have to wonder if this hereditary transference is representative of the strong sense of historical identity and affection that the boy espouses or a kind of cultural and emotional stasis, the regional character's inability to become other than what he or she is inexorably programmed to be. Obviously the salesman is a perfect contrast to the boy—the representative of progress, the man with an eye to the future—and though we may at first balk at his rejection of the spiritual for a more economically efficient analysis of the community's worth, we cannot refute the validity of this practical side, born out demographically these last 50 or 60 years by the expansion of cities and suburbs and the literal eclipse of many rural cultures.²

In this way, the story of the gun clearly illustrates the kind of terrain, both physical and psychic, which the regional character must comprehend and navigate. Finally, there are two people lost in that Tennessee forest: the salesman trapped by his ignorance of the geography and refusal to recognize in his surroundings the energy and passions of an entire people, and the boy in his inability to look beyond that same sense of history or to prevent the devaluation of the landscape and its residents that the salesman represents. Given the disparate, almost diametric, nature of these two readings, it is not surprising that the fiction of Breece Pancake and Alistair MacLeod—the former from West Virginia, the latter from Nova Scotia—should focus so often and intently on the dilemma of male characters coming of age within the regional community, characters who must make the impossible decision to stay or leave. Admittedly repulsed by their parents' harsh lifestyles as well as the decline of the surrounding landscape, such young men cannot escape their devotion to family and community either, recognizing as they do the components of their own identities that only the region can supply.

This sense of futility is captured succinctly by Colly, the narrator of Pancake's story, “Trilobites,” when he says of farming: “It just don't do to work your ass off at something you're no good at” (Pancake 25). In the story, Colly is left to run the family farm after his father's death, but, unable to produce the same amount of crops as his father did and confronted by increasingly desperate finances, he is ultimately forced to acquiesce to the wishes of his mother who wants to sell the farm and move to Akron. Nevertheless, despite his failure, Colly acknowledges intuitive ties to the region and to history. As he begins his tale, he looks out across the Teays River valley and focuses on the foothills in the distance, saying of one particularly:

It took over a million years to make that smooth little hill, and I've looked all over it for trilobites. I think how it has always been there and always will be, at least for as long as it matters. The air is smoky with summertime. A bunch of starlings swim over me. I was born in this country and I have never much wanted to leave.

(21)

The rest of the story finds him wavering in self-doubt, because, though he wants profoundly to remain, he can neither articulate the reason behind his desire nor substantiate—to his mother or to himself—his hereditary claim upon the land. His search for a trilobite, which frames the entire narrative, points to his need for a specific piece of the past that will inform his present, somehow justifying his sense of historical determinism, but his failure to find even one causes him to perceive history as a kind of generality to which, finally, he can articulate no rational connection. The trilobites—fossilized insects, displaced, absent—stand in for the dead father, whose place Colly can assume no more effectively than he can retrieve the past. Slowly the lines between prehistory and history dim as both seem equally distant and powerless to inform his quest for identity.

Nonetheless, Colly can never fully disconnect his belief in the importance of the past and continues to seek within history a kind of redemption to his life. He agrees, for instance, to go out with Ginny, his high school sweetheart who now lives in Florida, in the hope of rekindling their former passion, a passion that moved him long ago to inscribe her yearbook with the message, “We will live on mangoes and love.” But Ginny offers him no more satisfaction than his search for the trilobites, and his inability either to re-establish a relationship with her or to let her go completely only reiterates his relationship to the region and to history, his desire for escape combated by his intense determination to locate some promise of renewal within the land itself. When he asks her if she ever looks in her yearbook, she responds with a laugh that she does not remember where she put it. The yearbook is Colly's link to his own history and to his once satisfying relationship with Ginny; in asking her if she ever looks at it, he again seeks a validation of that past, a reciprocation of the simultaneous agony and love that would justify his staying in the region.

But Ginny does not recognize his request or, if she does, refuses to offer him this connection. For her, to recognize her former feelings would be to question her own rejection of the land and to undermine the newfound freedom that she associates with her life in Florida. And though Colly finds this response cowardly, in confronting Ginny he is finally forced to acknowledge that aspect of himself that is also frightened, that desperately requires escape. Thus he responds to Ginny and to his own feelings with an inarticulate yet meaningful act of violence,³ an act that represents his will both to resist and to submit: “I slide her to the floor,” he says. “Her scent rises to me, and I shove crates aside to make room. I don't wait. She isn't making love, she's getting laid. All right, I think, all right. Get laid” (35). With his internal struggle offered external expression, Colly can at last admit that he was wrong, as his father was wrong, to return to the land, and his story ends with an assertion of identity finally independent from the history that has constrained him all along: “I'll spend tonight at home. I've got eyes to shut in Michigan—maybe even Germany or China, I don't know yet. I walk, but I'm not scared. I feel my fear moving away in rings of time for a million years” (37).

Like Colly, the narrator of Alistair MacLeod's “The Boat” finds himself caught between his wish to heed his ancestral calling—in this case to become a fisherman—and his fear of the physical dangers and emotional desolation that would result from the fulfillment of this wish. His tale is constructed mostly from boyhood memories as, early on, he reveals that he “teaches at a great Midwestern university” (MacLeod 105). Unlike “Trilobites,” then, “The Boat” does not require us to wait until the end for his declaration of escape; nor must we hypothesize about his eventual fate, which appears, if not satisfying, at least successful. Nonetheless, his insistence on reinvoking the past and its implicit sense of guilt suggests that he has left behind only the physical aspects of the regional community, not the psychological ones. In the opening lines of the story, he claims,

There are times even now, when I awake at four o'clock in the morning with the terrible fear that I have overslept; when I imagine that my father is waiting for me in the room below the darkened stairs or that the shorebound men are tossing pebbles against my window while blowing their hands and stomping their feet against the frozen steadfast earth.

(105)

He is not, in other words, just recounting history but confessing the way his past is continually revisited upon his present, a past that is constructed wholly through his relationships to his family and to the landscape on which it depends for survival, a past in which the earth remains “steadfast” though frozen while he appears uncertain and unreliable.

From the beginning of the tale, history is figured in terms of the landscape, particularly the sea, through which both sides of the narrator's family gauge their lives. His mother, he says, “was of the sea as were all of her people, and her horizons were the very literal ones she scanned with her dark and fearless eyes” (108-09), while his father had always been a fisherman, “just like [his] uncles and all of the men that formed [his] past” (124). In effect, the sea becomes a blood relation as well as the vehicle that transcends the family's temporal moment and links its members to past and future. The boat of the story's title, then, is important both in the physical bond it offers the family to the sea and in its larger role as signifier of historical identity.⁴ Its name, for instance, is the same as the mother's maiden name, and the narrator notes that it was “called after her as another link in the chain of tradition” (107). By extension, this close association of boat and mother makes the fisherman's daily chore of entering and handling the boat a very sexual one and suggests that the passage of the boat and an understanding of the sea from father to son is as important to the survival of the family, at least relative to their historic notions of identity, as the act of procreation itself.⁵ As a result, the narrator's rejection of the sea becomes not merely a break with tradition but a rupture in the generational infrastructure; by disowning the sea, he disowns his family as well.

Such a disjunction, of course, is not wholly his fault, but reciprocated by the community he leaves behind. Within the story, the narrator's mother in particular will not accept her son's desire for escape and continues even after he is gone to anticipate his return, holding fast to her faith that the sea will ultimately provide. As the narrator explains, “it is not an easy thing to know that your mother looks on the sea with love and on you with bitterness because the one has been so constant and the other so untrue” (124). The mother's feelings stem from her larger desire to maintain order as her world, in many ways, deteriorates about her. She “runs her house as her brothers ran their boats, everything … clean and spotless,” and her compulsive neatness suggests her general belief that everything has its place, that her place and the place of her family are, and will always remain, the region of her birth. For her, the sea becomes the consummate gauge of safety and stability, preventing her from seeing, as do both her husband and son, its highly treacherous and physically chaotic nature. Though we sympathize with her desperate attempts to hold onto the Gaelic culture of her past, we realize these attempts to be no more successful than if she would order the sea itself. We realize finally that her horizons—“those very literal ones” that physically seem quite broad—are really somewhat narrow and, as reflected by the dying landscape, emotionally stifling.

Juxtaposed against the mother's insistence on order is the father's embrace of chaos, symbolized by his bedroom, a room of “disorder and disarray” that seems in contrast to the rest of the house “like a rock of opposition in the sparkling waters of a clear deep harbour” (111). Naturally, the mother despises this room, yet she does so mostly because the room is also the home's library and because the books threaten the simplistic world vision that unites her idea of family indelibly with a maritime existence. Indeed, all of her children discover the room, and all later go on to discover a world outside the confines of her limited imagination, their small movements in and out of the library punctuated finally by a larger movement from the region. Unlike the children, however, the father cannot make this last movement, even though his philosophical horizons are much broader than his wife's. In his room there is only one small window, which looks out over the sea, suggesting that somehow his literal horizons—his job, his boat, his family—have been forced over his figurative ones.

The Gaelic culture that to this point has seemed exclusively endangered suddenly becomes sinister and constrictive, as does the sea itself, framing the second half of the narrator's dilemma to stay or go. While looking at a photograph of his father taken on a beach, for instance, the narrator says of the sea that “it seemed very far away from him or else he was so much in the foreground that he seemed too big for it” (117), and only then does he realize that his father had possessed greater aspirations than he had ever guessed, that his father's covertly expressed desire to attend university had not been an idle one, that part of his father's life had been irrevocably stolen by the sea. This cycle is made complete by the story's end, when the father drowns, finally giving to the water in body what has been required all along in spirit. Yet this final demand is also the one that the narrator cannot tolerate, which he refuses to let the sea make of him. Of this moment he concludes, “it is not easy to know that your father was found on November twenty-eighth, ten miles to the north and wedged between two boulders at the base of the rock-strewn cliffs where he had been hurled and slammed so many many times” (125). With this vision, he offers his final rejection, despite his mother's pleas, of the regional community.

To me, however, such an ending seems a bit too tidy. Ultimately we understand the narrator to reject tradition for greater self-direction and volition—that is, to give up his old identity in order to form a new and independent one. But how free is this decision in reality? Throughout the story, the father has encouraged his son to give up the sea life for an education, and, at one moment when the narrator promises to return to school only when his father no longer needs help on the boat, the old man replies, “I hope you will remember what you've said” (122). As MacLeod himself has noted, this brief but resonant admonition suggests the possibility of the father's suicide, in which case the son's final decision would not be self-directed at all but forged again by the will of his ancestors.⁶ And even if the father's death is accidental, the narrator's continual meditation upon his past within the present and his reluctance to give history shape except when contextualized by the familiar confines of the sea suggest that he has never truly left the regional community, that he yet stands motionless in his Cape Breton house perched in the doorway of his father's bedroom, unable to accept the notions of either chaos or order and the articulations of his own identity, which that place represents.

The same thing, to go back for a moment, might be said of Colly's decision as well. Though he ends his story with a decision to discover the external world, we know from what we have seen in Ginny or his mother's vision of Akron that the external world is hardly the promised land for which he searches. Moreover, the places Colly vows to go—Michigan, Germany, China—are the same places to which his father had gone in World War II, places where his father experienced a violence at least comparable to that of West Virginia, places that he swore he'd never leave but did, places that ultimately caused his death (in the form of an undetected shell fragment that later passed to his brain). In this light, Colly's comprehensive rejection of the landscape remains somewhat dubious because, like his father, it seems he will return to it continuously, if only in his mind.

Finally, the process of navigating physical space, like the process of history, becomes a circular one, and both Colly and the narrator of “The Boat” seem to be drawn unavoidably back to that point from which their quest for identity began. Their emphasis is placed on the external landscape because it mirrors so closely the internal one, giving—in its landmarks, its rivers, plowed fields, machines, and even graves—physical definition to the deep sense of time and heritage, self and permanence, felt by its residents. The land ultimately is the common denominator of the community, to which all can relate, into which many identities are invested and circulated and made one. It exacts the blood and sweat of those who work it and gives back a kind of yield, thus simulating the process of human life itself as well as the passage of historical identity from generation to generation. In short, it is a point of common reference, a place to come to, an acknowledgment of a kinship and friendship made possible by the earth itself. But when that landscape deteriorates, when it is dying, when it becomes overwhelmingly capricious and savage, or even when it is changed by the waves of progress, the correspondent landscape of the mind is left suspended and isolated. Ultimately, and put simply again, the problem of the displaced regional character is not so much building a new life as building a new home, a much more soulful project that takes considerably longer and that can never fully escape the intense sense of loss and destruction from which it proceeds.

Notes

1. The tale of the “same old gun” pervades Southern folk history, having first been told in its present form at the beginning of the nineteenth century and handed down to the present (like the gun itself) with only minor variations. The story as I have recorded it is a variant of the probable original in which the gun dates back to the Revolutionary—not the Civil—War and the salesman is more a generic traveler (Botkin 6). Other versions of the tale change its subject slightly, as in “my grandfather's axe” or “the cane-bottomed chair,” which Wright Morris employs in The Home Place. Whatever the version, though, I would argue that both the endurance of the story and its widespread usage suggest its fundamental importance (at least metaphorically) in the way that regional characters define themselves and the world around them. In this sense, the boy's connection to his grandfather through the gun is not only a matter of personal history but a signifier of communal, national/political, and mythic identity as well.

2. For a clear introduction to the tradition of rural-urban tension in literature in English, see Raymond Williams's The Country and the City.

3. Ellesa Clay High, in particular, addresses the method by which male characters in Pancake's fiction almost always resort to symbolic violence against other people or animals in order to express their rage both at the literal decline of the regional community and at their own impotence to prevent such a decline.

4. The close connection of “family” and “land” in regional writing cannot be overstated. MacLeod, in several interviews, has pointed to the importance of heredity in the regional community, but the heredity of which he speaks is not merely the passing of family name and rite from father to son. Heredity means a kind of genetic transference of historical identity beyond the confines of family relations, through the landscape itself. As one of the characters in MacLeod's “The Vastness of the Dark” tells his son during the boy's first trip to a coal mine: “Once you start it takes a hold of you, once you drink underground water, you will always come back to drink some more. The water gets in your blood. It is in all our blood. We have been working in the mines here since 1873.”

5. Interestingly, in both writers, the figure of landscape as mother—in its guise as provider and its relationship to the father—is reinforced by an actual mother in the text, dissatisfied with her son's uncertainties and continually mindful of his responsibility to assume his father's role, if only to satisfy her. Naturally, the son desperately wishes to fulfill her desire but recognizes this fulfillment to be, at least for him, largely taboo.

6. For a more detailed analysis, see Colin Nicholson, “Alistair MacLeod” or “Signatures of Time: Alistair MacLeod and his Short Stories.”

Works Cited

Botkin, B. A. A Treasury of Southern Folklore. New York: American Legacy, 1949.

High, Ellesa Clay. “A Lost Generation: The Appalachia of Breece D'J Pancake.” Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review 13 (1985): 144-28.

MacLeod, Alistair. The Lost Salt Gift of Blood. Toronto: McClelland, 1989.

Nicholson, Colin. “Signatures of Time: Alistair MacLeod and his Short Stories.” Canadian Literature 107 (1985): 90-101.

———. “Alistair MacLeod.” Journal of Commonwealth Studies 21 (1986): 188-200.

Pancake, Breece. The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake. New York: Holt, 1977.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.