Published: July 01. 2010 2:00AM
Reviewed by Ashley Warlick
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Michael Cogdill delivers the news for WYFF. We can find him on our televisions every weeknight at 6 p.m. and 11 p.m., reporting the darker mysteries of the day: shootings and robberies, house fires, fugitives, good things gone wrong and bad people getting their due. It is perhaps not surprising that he's also written a novel full of this kind of stuff, albeit of a richer, more gothic literary strain.
Cogdill’s “She-Rain” opens in 1921 in the Appalachian mill town of Marshal, with the narrator, Frankie, watching his inebriated father scrabble fried okra into his mouth with his fingers. It is a scene of disdain, disconnection; in many ways, the book is about Frankie finding a way to forgive his father for all his shortcomings, to forgive himself for the ways these shortcomings take root in himself. In this moment, Frankie's mother comes to the table, words are said, the wrong words, and the beatings ensue. Frankie ends up under the table with a crack to the skull; his mother not so lucky, bloodied and terrified until the heavens break open in a sudden burst of rain, sending Frank Sr. running for his kit stashed in the woods.
She doesn't actually leave.
But she leaves for a time, and Frankie's hatred of his father grows in inverse proportion to the man's power. A WWI veteran of the trenches and mustard gas, Frank Sr. gets by on bootleg opiates and homespun injectables. As the book unfolds, he pales by the page, a ghost of the monster he seems at the opening, but Frankie continues to bear him hatred. Cogdill's prose is lined with lush descriptions, beautiful even when not about beauty; for example, Frank Sr., after a fight: “blood crusted under his nose, and a cut swelled his lower lip. The red of it seemed out of place, for he appeared more apt to ooze a liquid the color of ashes.”
Cogdill has a powerful grasp of the period and place — Frankie's mother's fresh bath scent of quinine and the angels of lint that float in the air of the millworker's home — and his storytelling is dense with grit and history. The title of the book comes from an Appalachian folk saying, given here to Frankie's grandmother:
She'd often speak of how a little scrap of fog tears from a rain cloud. Floats on the waves of blue ridge as if a wisp off a bride. Granny and others called it she-rain, I suppose for its womanly drape, white as wedding gown. Common legend, though Granny took the vision further. Said she-rain was like us all — little scraps torn off into the world, given to the wind, and meant to find a paradise. As she saw things, no human scrap of this life is made for the trash.”
Frankie's story is really a two-hearted thing, as much about his vengeful feelings toward his father as this feminine presence of love and healing and place. Frankie develops a romance with a wild girl, Mary Lizabeth, that culminates just as forces beyond his control lead him to run away from Marshal and the crime he didn't commit. In his flight, he is rescued by Sophia, the adopted (and black) daughter of the wealthy mill owners, the Proctors, and taken to live in their rarified cloister, introduced to books and the ways of a gentleman. Both Mary L. and Sophia hold sway with Frankie; both urge him to make his own free way in the world, and finally both provide him with a means to succeed in that end. “She-Rain” is a lovely novel about the power of redemption, and the need to find the value in the darkness as well as the light. It makes for a strong debut from a writer we hear this thinking from every day.