Once in a while you begin reading a novel and it strikes you: this writer has created a really good situation—the right setting, characters and historical moment. This will work! So it was with Scott Gould’s seventh novel, “Beneath a Fallen Sky.” Set mostly in Fort Payne, Alabama and on Sand Mountain, there are references to Fyffe, Clyde, Ider, Ten Broek, Geraldine and Buck’s Pocket. Not much literature has been set in these spots.
The novel opens on Tuesday, May 17, 1910, three days before Halley’s Comet will, one hopes, pass close by but not hit, the earth. These North Alabamians are plenty worried. Will the comet strike them or will they be killed by what they believe to be poison gases in the comet’s tail? Different folk prepare for this event, long prophesied by their preachers, in different ways.
Some go down to the creek and get baptized by Aunt Zona. For her, it’s business. She’s not a real preacher, but so what. Zona McCracken has enhanced her religious credentials by prodigious quoting of scripture, which she makes up to suit the occasion. This day she “quotes” “‘Leviticus twelve, verse twenty- two—‘In the final days of the comet, man’s earthly desires will become as dust before the needs of the true Lord and Savior and cease to hold any earthly value.’” Nevertheless, she still charges 25 cents.
Some, men of course, visit Elva Shugart’s brothel, a clean, well-lighted place, on what they believe may be their last chance. Out in the country, a huge tent meeting takes place, congregants coming forward to test their faith by handling rattlesnakes. Down the road, an entrepreneurial fellow is selling Army surplus gas masks he has bought for pennies. Maybe they will work against the comet’s gases. Rumor Johnson, the local bootlegger, is giving away moonshine to anyone who asks. This last-minute generosity, he hopes, will help at The Judgment.
There is also some serious business. At the edge of Fort Payne is the “stockade,” with a cabin in the middle, in which Cherokees had been kept before being sent on the Trail of Tears. This piece of the past is, as they say, not past. Some feel the guilt still and there is in fact a Cherokee woman, then a child, now elderly, living in a cave on the mountain. Charlie, Zona’s nephew, a rural mailman, helps her out in what he knows is a family tradition. The sheriff, Tyus Wetly, is a good man, honest and fair, whose wife has become mentally ill, giving him more to worry about in addition to the Barron boys, hillbillies who are just no darned good.
Rich in historical details, action including murders and revenge, and, comet or no comet, humor, “Fallen Sky” is a wonderful, complicated story of these presumably simple North Alabama people.
