The Valley of Light: A Novel - Softcover

Kay, Terry

 
9780743475952: The Valley of Light: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 074347595X ISBN 13: 9780743475952
Verlag: Washington Square Press, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

From Terry Kay, one of America's most gifted storytellers, comes a poignant novel of love, acceptance, and the wonders of the world in which we live.
In the summer of 1948, Noah Locke arrives in the small North Carolina hamlet of Bowerstown, set deep in the Valley of Light. A quiet, simple man and army veteran, Noah is haunted by the horrors he witnessed when his infantry unit liberated Dachau. Wandering the South, he seeks both to escape the past and to find a place to call home.
Noah is initially treated with amusement by the people of Bowerstown -- until he begins fishing. For Noah possesses an almost magical ability with a rod and reel. He soon becomes the talk of the valley and is urged to stay long enough to participate in the annual school fishing contest. He agrees, finding lodging in an abandoned shack by what is known as the Lake of Grief, which the locals believe holds no fish. Noah knows they are wrong; beneath the water is a warrior bass waiting to test Noah's gift. But above the water, Noah's innocence catches the heart of Eleanor Cunningham, whose husband supposedly killed himself after returning from the war. Over the course of a week, Noah will be led into the private lives of the residents of the Valley of Light, will join them as they mourn a tragedy, and will experience a miracle that will guide him home at last.
Uplifting, memorable, and deeply emotional, The Valley of Light is the finest work to date from a brilliant teller of heartfelt tales.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Terry Kay (1938–2020) was the author of numerous novels, including Taking Lottie Home, Valley of Light, The Runaway, Shadow Song, and the now-classic To Dance with the White Dog, twice nominated for the American Booksellers Book of the Year Award, and winner of the Southeastern Library Association Book of the Year Award.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

CHAPTER ONE

He made his way to the lake watchfully, crossing the bulldozer-built dam that was covered in weed-grass across its ridge and in trash trees growing on the waterside. It was late afternoon. The sun was behind him, his shadow making a long ghost that wobbled over the weed-grass. Grasshoppers sailed away from his footsteps.

At a clearing among the trash trees on the east end of the dam, he stopped and surveyed the ground. The lake had not been fished in a long time, he believed. Weed-grass grew high, with no look of being trampled. Left-behind bait cans were old and rusty. A coil of nylon line dangled like a spider's silk from a limb of one of the nearby trash trees, causing him to smile a smile that did not show on his face, knowing the spit of frustration the miscast had caused in some fisherman. A child's cast most likely. Not easy for a child to make a cast with nylon. Would be better to teach him with braided line.

He thought about the fishermen who had abandoned the lake. Once, they had come to it from the logging road, he reasoned, bringing their families in wagons or trucks, chairs to sit on, fishing early to late with long bamboo poles and cork floats, eating their sausages and sardines and baked sweet potatoes, and at day's end taking home their stringers of bream and bass and catfish, muscle-weary, smelling of fish slime and worms.

The water of the lake was the color of dark tea in the late-day shadows. Acid from trees. He closed his eyes, listened. The water lapped softly against the bank, rolled in, seeped back. The lapping sound was like a slow and lazy pulse beat. A dozing lake. Not much different from an old man sleeping in sunshine. Just enough breathing to keep alive.

A good place. A good place.

He wondered if it was the lake he had heard of. His sense told him it was.

A hundred yards or so up the east side of the lake, he had seen a small frame building that seemed empty from his distant view, though it was hard to tell since it had a screened-in porch, the screen hiding whatever was behind it. Probably a shack used by hunters, he had reasoned, remembering such shacks from his childhood. If somebody lived in it full-time, they did a good job of making it appear deserted.

Whoever it was that owned the lake and the shack had a good place.

He squatted at the lake's edge, placing the fishing rod he carried on the ground, and then he leaned forward and lightly touched the palm of his hand on the surface of the water.

Tell me, he said silently, said inside his mind.

The water was cool. Against his palm it had a ticklish feel of silk.

Yes, a good place.

He pushed his fingers into the water and wiggled them, paused, let his eyes scan the lake.

Forty feet away, against the bank, the water roiled, quivered like a muscle.

He smiled again, held his fingers in the water, watched the roiling ripple toward him in perfect circles. Soon, the first ring touched him. He pulled his hand from the water and lifted it to his face and inhaled slowly, taking in the scents of the lake. Algae. The decay of trees pushed over by wind storms and dropped into the water. Hickory, oak, beechnut, sweet gum. Silt of leaves and wash-off of wood dirt. Frog and snake and turtle. And fish. The sharp, almost metallic scent of fish.

He rubbed his hand across the front of his shirt.

A very good place.

He stood and slipped the army knapsack he wore off his shoulder, then picked up the rod and pulled loose the line on the bait-casting reel, letting the lure dangle before him. It was an old lure, turned like a small minnow with silver flecks on its sides. He had caught many fish with it before snipping off the hook with a pair of wire cutters. It was now a lure for holding his line on the rod and for teasing.

One cast, he thought.

One cast to let Mr. Fish know he was there.

Enough to anger Mr. Fish, to make him restless.

Make him coil and leap at anything moving near him.

He tilted his rod to the water, dipped the lure, wetting it. Then he made his cast near the bank where the fish -- a bass, a largemouth, he believed -- had rolled. He watched the lure slap the water, dive and disappear, and then he began his slow reeling-in of the line. He could feel the lure drag through algae and he flicked his wrist twice, giving the line a jerking motion.

A cloud skimmed the July sun, dimmed it. He felt a puff of air against his face and stood motionless to let the air pause on his skin. A sense of peace settled over him as though he had marked the place he stood on a map and, after a long journey, had arrived at his destination. He wondered what day of the week it was and the date marking the day. Thought: What does it matter?

For more than two years, he had walked into days and weeks and months without knowing them by calendar, only by season. The season he read in trees -- lime-green buds in spring, full-leaf in summer, colors of hot embers in autumn, the dark limbs of winter. He had walked and fished, leaving behind war and the burial ground of his parents and the sadness of his brother and the open and the secret experiences of his boyhood. Walked far enough to stop looking over his shoulder to see if his history tagged after him like a scolded yard dog. Now it was only memory, and memory had a way of rubbing down most of the rough edges.

Still, he had always believed there would be a place to stop the walking, to stay, to become his own forest, show his own seasons.

And there, with the air on his skin, he wondered if he had found that place.

Three weeks earlier -- in Kentucky, he believed -- he had come upon an old, white-haired man with bowed shoulders fishing from a bridge over a wide, slow-moving river. They had made nods to one another and he had gone below the bridge to the riverbank and made his touch of the water, and then had joined the old man on the bridge and unreeled his own line over the bridge's railing and they had fished together for a long while, paying more attention to the talking that went on between them than to the fish that swam in the water below them.

The man, who offered his name as Hoke Moore, had put him on the path to the valley. Had said it was a good place to find fish and rest if a person could avoid certain elements of the population. "It's called the Valley of Light by some, Bowerstown by others. Where I was born," he had added in a voice that had the sound of longing. "They's some good people there, and some you'd just as soon not get caught with. Mostly good, though. Mostly good. You need a hand, they'll give it."

And then Hoke Moore had begun telling of a great lake called the Chatuge, built some years earlier as part of a government project called the Tennessee Valley Authority. Said word of the lake gave it good enough marks for fishing, though there were still too few fish for all the water pooled up behind the dam. "Takes time for fish to find out where they want to be when they's so many places to go," he had speculated.

He had never fished the Chatuge himself, Hoke Moore had admitted. Liked smaller places, something he could walk around and not lose sight of where he'd started the trip. "They's another little lake over there -- twenty or twenty-five acres, I'd guess -- that's got the biggest fish I ever seen in it. A bass, it was. Must have been fifteen pounds. Maybe more. Used to try and catch him, but all he'd do was spit water on me. He'd jump up out of the water, like he was trying to swim through the air, mad as a wet hen. Never seen a bass do that. Not one that big. Not coming out of the water high as he did. It was like he was telling me I weren't good enough to catch him."

Hoke Moore had paused and turned to look in the direction of the far-off mountains in the southeast -- the direction he had...

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Verlag
Washington Square Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
074347595X
ISBN 13 
9780743475952
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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