Allen Mendenhall is a veteran Alabama lawyer and university administrator with a number of publications, but this is his debut novel. It is not polished prose but has the energy of a story the author really wants told. It is an Alabama novel through and through, set in the 1980s in a fictional small town, 30 miles east of “the gray and graying city,” perhaps Birmingham. But everywhere else is irrelevant. A major point of this novel is how Andalusia, arguably a splendid place to grow up, is also dangerously provincial and claustrophobic.
The story is told by a grown man, middle-aged, who decided he would not follow in his father’s footsteps and become a lawyer. Our narrator, nicknamed Cephus, we are told after Bocephus, Hank Williams Jr., is an English professor. His narrative is laced with literary allusions. We have “swinger of birches” from Frost, and from Eliot, “Prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet” and “I grow old. I grow old.” More relevant perhaps are repeated allusions to Plato’s myth of the cave. Cephus reminds us that the life we see and hear around us is not in fact Real; rather we are seeing shadows on the wall.
He also reminds us that the key to understanding is story. We cannot derive meaning from events until we organize the seemingly chaotic events into a narrative. Thus Cephus, by telling us this tale, is seeking to understand what happened. He tells of how he and his 12-year-old buddies Michael and Brett and Lump play basketball, go fishing, float on a raft in the pond, observe neighborhood wives sunning themselves: small-town boys’ lives. But of course, into this child’s garden must come evil, or what these naïve, confused boys take to be evil.
Sarah, “flaxen-haired and full of zest,” a beautiful, popular, likeable girl in their circle of friends, becomes inexplicably ill. She is wasting, seems to be dying, and no one seems to know the cause. To their shame, these boys and most others desert Sarah, shun her out of fear of the unknown. The boy who does not, who befriends her, is Tommy. Tommy is an interesting creation. He’s older than the others and physically very large, but “he would never reason beyond the capacity of a child.”
This very odd couple spend time together and probably become intimate. In their immature ignorance and jealousy, the boys think they should tell someone. Tommy is arrested, and just as Tom Robinson is innocent of rape in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Tommy, although chronologically 18, is innocent of statutory rape. Due to his low intelligence, he cannot understand the charges and was incapable of “forming the requisite intent.” But there is no seasoned Atticus Finch to represent him. Tommy’s lawyer is well-meaning but young and incompetent. Tragedy ensues.
