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A Novel
by Ron Rash
Book Reviewed by:Told against the backdrop of the Korean War as a small Appalachian town sends its sons to battle, The Caretaker by award-winning author Ron Rash ("One of the great American authors at work today" —The New York Times) is a breathtaking love story and a searing examination of the acts we seek to justify in the name of duty, family, honor, and love.
It's 1951 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn Gant, his life irrevocably altered by a childhood case of polio, seems condemned to spend his life among the dead as the sole caretaker of a hilltop cemetery. It suits his withdrawn personality, and the inexplicable occurrences that happen from time to time rattle him less than interaction with the living. But when his best and only friend, the kind but impulsive Jacob Hampton, is conscripted to serve overseas, Blackburn is charged with caring for Jacob's wife, Naomi, as well.
Sixteen-year-old Naomi Clarke is an outcast in Blowing Rock, an outsider, poor and uneducated, who works as a seasonal maid in the town's most elegant hotel. When Naomi eloped with Jacob a few months after her arrival, the marriage scandalized the community, most of all his wealthy parents who disinherited him. Shunned by the townsfolk for their differences and equally fearful that Jacob may never come home, Blackburn and Naomi grow closer and closer until a shattering development derails numerous lives.
A tender examination of male friendship and rivalry as well as a riveting, page-turning novel of familial devotion, The Caretaker brilliantly depicts the human capacity for delusion and destruction all too often justified as acts of love.
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Jacob was on guard duty, posted beside a river that separated the two armies. The night was colder than any he'd experienced back in Watauga County. This cold did more than seep into his skin. It encased fingers and feet in iron, made teeth rattle like glass about to break. No layering of wool and cotton beneath the pile-lined parka allayed it. For weeks Jacob had kept waiting for the cold to lift. Now it was March, but this place observed no calendar. The river was still frozen. Jacob envisioned ice all the way to the bottom—no current, fish stalled as if mounted. The river had a name but Jacob didn't allow it to lodge in his memory. Since stepping onto the pier in Pusan, his goal had been to forget, not remember.
At Fort Polk he'd heard all manner of stories about what awaited him in Korea. Much of it was horsecrap: the NK ate rats and snakes raw, could see in the dark like cats. But some stories were true, including how they would crawl into an outpost, slit a soldier's ...
Rash fills in each character's backstory and psychological motivations so that readers, too, understand why they act this way. In the Hamptons' case, the early loss of two daughters made Jacob their precious only child. They want what they think is best for him – taking over the store and marrying Veronica Weaver of the local hardware dynasty – and see his new postwar life as a second chance to engineer that. As the title indicates, this drama plays out under the watchful eyes of Blackburn, who became Jacob's "blood brother" when they were boys and has been his best friend ever since. There is a peaceful, relaxed pace to the narrative as it drifts back in time to show Jacob and Naomi's courtship and short months of marriage in their own cottage. However, Rash also creates underlying suspense as to whether the Hamptons' lies will be exposed...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
In Ron Rash's The Caretaker, characters claim to have seen unexplained lights in Blowing Rock's cemetery and its environs: The previous graveyard caretaker, Wilkie, told Blackburn, the current caretaker, about a mysterious light that led a man to find his brother's grave after searching in vain in six other county burial grounds; and Jacob Hampton took his wife Naomi to see the Brown Mountain Lights from the lookout point where he later proposed to her.
Brown Mountain is in Pisgah National Forest, in western North Carolina. Its "ghost lights," rumored to have been noticed by Native Americans and Civil War soldiers, are first known to have been recorded in writing in, of all places, Jules Verne's late novel The Master of the World (...
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