1Though separated in publication dates by only six years, there is a great difference in meaning and narrative art between Ron Rash’s first and second story collections, The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth and Other Stories from Cliffside, North Carolina (1994) and Casualties (2000). Exhibiting a carefully composed short story cycle that serves as a proto-novel with three narrators, Night works as a lightly humorous observation of small-town life. Rash’s first book introduces an accomplished storyteller who has Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County in mind as he writes in the tone of Clyde Edgerton’s deceptively simple prose. Looking back, Rash notes that “those stories were more derivative” (Personal 2010), but Casualties is a groundbreaking work that establishes Rash’s distinctive Appalachian voice, his poetic narrative, and his attention to troubling themes of personal isolation, income/education inequality, and environmental degradation. Even a competent early story like “Badeye” in Night is a mere foreshadowing of a deeply realized story like “Chemistry” in Casualties. What happened? “I had children” is Rash’s simple answer (Personal 2010). The story of his development as a writer between the publications of Night and Casualties is, of course, more complex.
- 1 Among the many interviews and book reviews that delve into Rash’s personal biography, see especiall (...)
- 2 Rash’s youthful exploits in the mountains are often recounted with a Wordsworthian aura. His grandf (...)
2Rash absorbed many of the elements of writing craft—listening, imagining, reading, and discipline—before he ever dreamed of becoming an author. Although he keeps most biographical details out of his writing, many readers of his work often rely on important aspects of his life that have shaped his artistic vision.1 In Conversations with Ron Rash, Rash tells one interviewer about his birth in Chester, South Carolina, in 1953, to parents Sue and James Rash, who worked in the local cotton mill, and recalls that “even as a child, I can remember sensing Chester never being really home” (“Interview” by Marion 3). Although Rash would compose his first book of poetry about his family’s experiences in Eureka Mill, home for Rash is his “spirit country” in the mountains of western North Carolina, where as a youth, he spent summers with his grandmother in the tiny community of Aho, between Blowing Rock and Boone, adjacent to the Blue Ridge Parkway.2 Before his death, Rash’s grandfather had introduced him to fishing and his grandmother told him that the salamanders in the spring house “were like the guardian spirits of the water”; this setting is beautifully rendered in a later, lyrical poem, “The Trout in the Springhouse” (Personal 2010). Mountain folklore and Rash’s fascination with streams led him to an early realization that water is a powerful and mystical force: “I was always drawn to it and I can remember even as a kid being haunted by lakes that I knew were manmade, which I think played a big part later in my work” (Personal 2010). Water, in all its many-layered meanings, recurs in many of Rash’s major works, including One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, Serena, and in many short stories as well, particularly in “Their Ancient, Glittering Eyes,” one of his most accomplished later stories.
- 3 For example, Rash describes reading Crime and Punishment and the scene in which Raskolnikov murders (...)
3Rash’s penchant for careful observation did not end in the woods: “I grew up listening. I think that was valuable as a writer” (“Interview” by Marion 4). The stories he heard fired his imagination, perhaps none as much as the ones told by his grandfather as he pretended to read The Cat in the Hat, as Rash has cited in many interviews. Responding to a question about his developing imagination, Rash remembers “knowing that moment where my grandfather was making up the story because he couldn’t read it . . . that always had an impact on me, just the idea that words could be magical, that the story could transform itself . . . I think that’s essential for a writer to believe that about language” (Personal 2010; see also “Interview” by Marion 6-7). Rash’s interest in language was intensified as he listened to stories and as he struggled to master the words himself: “I had this idea that if I listened hard enough I would be able to speak without the stammer and the failure to enunciate certain words . . . I was trying to gear in intensely” (Personal 2010). His early fascination with language was greatly enhanced by reading: “I just loved being in those imaginary worlds . . . it made me a voracious reader” (Personal 2010).3
- 4 About this time, after receiving his Master’s in English from Clemson University in 1979, Rash went (...)
4Rash began writing stories in college, where he also excelled at long-distance running for the Gardner-Webb track team. Rash’s event was the 800-meter, and as he tells Joyce Compton Brown, “I believe that writing is something that has to be done day in and day out . . . I learned that from running, particularly distance running” (“A Conversation” 29). Rash has been called one of the hardest working writers in America, and during his long apprenticeship years he labored largely in obscurity until in his late twenties he began to believe his writing was “decent,” as he tells Jack Shuler in an early interview (“An interview” 20). During the 1980s, Rash honed his prose style by writing poetry and short stories, experimenting with various styles which would lead him to a developing aesthetic of spareness, evocation and lyricism built around patterned sound rhythms. By 1994, Rash was ready to create his first book.4
5Rash’s first collection of stories is an important work of apprenticeship. A short story cycle, The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth is organized by place: Cliffside is a fictionalized version of Boiling Springs, North Carolina, where the Rash family had moved from Chester, South Carolina. In composing these stories Rash had in mind “a couple of books that I already loved, one in particular was Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio” (Personal 2018). Night is a solid first book, though in form and execution it feels too consciously constructed, its humorous tone not quite the right fit for the author, and the themes in its stories a bit forced. Rash had Eudora Welty and Lee Smith in mind. While employing “[s]outhern humor . . . [he had learned from] reading people such as Clyde Edgerton” (Personal 2010). For Rash, Night is close to home: “that book is more autobiographical than any of the other fiction I’ve ever done” (Personal 2018). Rash was self-conscious about his portrayals of the characters in the book: “my goal was to show these [people in] more of a comic tone [but] not to condescend to the characters or to the community” (Personal 2018). While he intended to show the “foibles” of his characters, he also aimed to display “the decency of many of those people” (Personal 2018). He incorporated themes concerning Appalachia that would continue to occur in his more mature work: the influx of outsiders, education and class lines that create isolation, and the shuttering of the textile mills and subsequent economic decline. This was a lot of freight for a new writer to carry.
6The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth is told in the distinct voices of three narrators: Tracy, Randy Ledbetter, and Vincent Hampton. After watching Greene’s Café burn to the ground and taking the moonshine-dazed owner, Martin, home to sleep it off, the three old friends go to Randy’s farm to swap tales. Tracy’s narratives, such as the titular story, tend to be mostly humorous, as told by a resilient and witty woman carpenter who looks at her world with bemusement. “Maybe she’s the most admirable character in the whole book,” Rash considered twenty-five years after writing her stories. “I like her strength and that is something that has continued through all my work . . . ; my mother and my sister are strong women and I wanted to depict those people” (Personal 2018). Tracy tells the title story, about her Snopes-like ex-husband, Larry Rudisell (emphasis on sell), who hijacks the church Easter pageant and turns a reenactment of the crucifixion into an advertisement for his used car lot. Told with a light touch, the description of Larry tied to a failing, cheaply constructed cross in a “fallen world” creaks as much as the cross which snaps and sends Rudisell hurtling face-first into the ground (Night 43).
7The stories told by Randy, given his personal struggles and failures, have a sharper tone. The humor is biting, and the themes of lost times and powerful outsiders (Yankees or the Yankee-tainted) are laid out in black and white. In “Between the States,” Randy makes the mistake of going to his 20-year high school reunion, where his failures pile on: his bitter divorce, his ex-wife’s virile new husband, Randy’s own low sperm count, his meager financial situation, his old high school buddies (losers), and even a listing of dead classmates (intoned by an old nemesis who is now a successful BMW-driving MD living in Charlotte). “Southerners aren’t worth a damn when it comes to change,” Randy thinks, “and that’s why God gave us moonshine” (76). Humiliated, Randy drives off to a park by the “Broad River” and contemplates the border between North and South Carolina, between past and future states of his own life, and defies those who think he will commit suicide as he believes he is between “the old good time of my life and the new good time of my life”; maybe the good will come if he can “just hold on for a while” (83).
8While Randy’s stories abound with broad comedy and his brand of self-derisive humor, the comedy is often undercut by narrative in darker tones. In “Love and Pain,” Randy’s impending divorce will force him to leave his and soon-to-be ex-wife Darlene’s house, a place watched by his hateful neighbors, the Blowmeyers, who Randy notes “love my pain” (45). Darlene demands he sign the papers, in a conversation that is absurd and pathetic (Randy swears he will become a completely new person if she will stay with him as she repeatedly says no while reminding him of his failures). Randy goes after her, accidentally walking through a sliding glass door; Darlene observes him on the ground, tells him it’s “‘not enough,’” and drives away (49). The slapstick tone becomes serious as Randy considers his looming dispossession: “I lie down on the grass, close my eyes and feel pain cut through the alcohol and the nest of spiders scrambling around inside my head, that other kind of pain, the worst kind” (49). The words abruptly reveal the poignancy of his situation and, all humor aside, what he feels. Randy’s story, that of a man bordering on disappearing in his home country—he ends up alone but happy enough living with poultry in a refurbished chicken house—foreshadows more serious treatments of dispossession and alienation, such as the plight of old Jesse of “Into the Gorge.”
9Two important stories in the collection are narrated by Vincent, likely the voice closest to Rash’s, whose father gave him the middle name “Vincent” for the Dutch painter van Gogh. Like Rash, Vincent is a native who has left his hometown, his college education and his years away, creating a separation from the townsfolk and at the same time a keen appreciation of them. Rash notes that he tried writing in different voices “to enter another very different kind of person and see if I could do it” (Personal 2018). Although these voices, particularly Tracy’s, are effective perspectives in the book, Vincent’s foreshadows Rash’s later works and his voice is the one that tells the two most technically proficient stories: “My Father’s Cadillacs” and “Badeye.”
- 5 Rash’s own father died of cancer in 1979.
10“My Father’s Cadillacs” is the most autobiographical story in the collection. Like Rash as a teenager, Vincent is a high school track star bound for college with the help of an athletic scholarship. Like Rash’s father, Vincent’s teaches art at the local college. Just out from under the burden of student loans, Vincent’s father trades up from the old family Plymouth to a worn-out Cadillac. Much to the embarrassment of Vincent, this car—and a series of others to follow—comes from a funeral home and soon Vincent becomes the butt of jokes. Driving his father’s latest Cadillac to the prom, Vincent is mistaken for a funeral director by locals who pull over for a procession while his prom date cackles. Like other stories in Night, much of the tale is played for the punchline: in this case, a disastrous prom for Vincent. However, the light touch becomes more nostalgic and heartfelt after Vincent has graduated from college and his father has passed away.5
11Now Vincent drives his own old Cadillac and after visiting his father’s grave with his mother and grandmother, he drives all of them to the same spot his father pointed out years before: the old mansion of a mill owner. The site reminds Vincent that his father did not work in the mills but instead landed a professional career as a college instructor, with the mill owner’s daughter in his class. Vincent’s grandmother remarks on the blooming dogwood by the mansion: “‘there is something about a dogwood in the spring that fills a body with hope’” (Night 141). Thinking differently about his father and the Cadillacs, perhaps understanding the promise those cars represented for his father and for himself, Vincent looks at the dogwoods and thinks of “their blossoms blazing, bright as dreams against the darkness” (141). For Rash, this scene was a stylistic breakthrough: “toward the end of that story I wanted to elevate the language. . . . I think that was maybe the first time in a story I had tried to do something that wasn’t within the colloquial language [but instead] a more poetic language” (Personal 2018). Aside from the language at the end—the heightened discourse that tends to end Rash’s most profound stories or novels—“My Father’s Cadillacs” is an early exploration of themes that later would be examined more substantially: income inequality and the power (good and bad) of higher education.
12While “Cadillacs” anchors the book as the last tale, the most accomplished story and the one that most foreshadows Rash’s later achievement is the first one of the book: “Badeye.” The presence of a suspicious individual selling snowcones, complete with an eye patch, is autobiographical: “there actually was a guy like that when I was a child . . . and he almost ran over my sister . . . ; you had this sinister guy keep bringing these sweets to [us and] of course . . . my mother hated it, and distrusted him—for good reason” (Personal 2010). The story begins in the humorous tone of the other stories, as Vincent’s mother comes up with ridiculous tales or schemes to keep her son from buying Badeye Carter’s snowcones in the same summer that Vincent, with help from his father, indulges in an obsession with collecting live snakes. His mother’s protective instincts are triggered because she recognizes, along with the other Southern Baptist women in the neighborhood, that Badeye provides moonshine for the husbands: “these women held him responsible for endangering their husband’s [sic] eternal souls” (Night 8). And from her reading of Genesis, Vincent’s mother “found enough evidence to convince her that snakes had been, since the Garden of Eden, mankind’s worst enemy” (13-14).
13At first, her beliefs are winked at by Vincent (as eight-year-old son and adult narrator) and his father. Yet the tone of the story veers away from humor as Badeye takes an interest in young Vincent, for example showing off the king cobra tattoo on his upper arm: “I moved closer and saw, incredibly, the cobra uncoil slightly, its great head sway back and forth” (21). The next night Badeye offers Vincent a deadly Coral Snake in exchange for running some moonshine; Vincent accepts, secretly samples some of the ‘shine, and in his addled state—as overwhelmed by the beauty of the snake as he is by the sweet taste of a snowcone—he gets bit by the serpent and almost dies. At last, Vincent and his father see the evil long recognized by Vincent’s mother. The reptiles are released to the wild. Badeye, spurned by the neighborhood, slithers away like a snake to “where it’s warmer” (27). At the end of the story, all is well but the temptation of sin remains, even for the adult Vincent, as he recalls in the last lines “the first bite of my first snowcone” and how “[n]othing else has ever tasted so good” (28). The darker tone in this story, and the sudden violence in a world hung in balance between good and evil, portends fiction that is far more sophisticated than the tales told in The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth. As Rash observed about “Badeye,” “I was finding the material, going toward it” (Personal 2010).
14Regarding the part raising children had in his swift development as a writer between 1994 and 2000, Rash elaborates: “I think it changes your view of the world; it makes you more aware of the danger, not for yourself but for your children” (Personal 2018). Other things happened in those six years: Rash’s focus turned from the Piedmont to the mountains; he refined his ability to elevate local dialect to the poetic; and he dove deeper into darker tones and themes. During those years, he notes, “I was going deeper into the human condition, ultimately being truer to myself. . . . I view life as primarily tragic” (Personal 2010).
15In his first two published books, The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth and his first volume of poems, Eureka Mill, Rash drew on Chester and Boiling Springs, and on the fate of these and other towns economically distressed by the disappearance of the cotton mills. Both books therefore tend to be autobiographical, about his extended family, and they have an overt message about the loss of a way of life. While the burning of Greene’s Café, likely to be replaced by a new Shoney’s chain restaurant, symbolizes the end of the old sense of community, the end of the mill economy is largely off-stage in Night. In Eureka Mill, published four years later, the passing of the industry, for which the people paid a dear price as they had left their farms for mill work, is the central theme. Rash’s intention was to portray the “whole mill culture from its beginnings to its end,” but also to personalize an epic economic disruption through the plight of his grandfather: “I worked his death in at the end and it signals the end of that in a personal but also a cultural way . . . a time when mills started to disappear” (Personal 2010). He wanted to convey a tragedy that was getting scant attention in literature: “here and in South Carolina you would see these little towns that were just shut down, they were gone” (Personal 2010). Still, Eureka Mill was a book structured to tell a story and send a message: “I look back on that book and I have mixed feelings about it, because I don’t think the best poetry I’ve written is in it in the sense of just language” (Personal 2010).
16For some writers, often Southern or Native American authors or someone like John Steinbeck when he wrote of California, the strength in the writing voice intertwines with place. When Ron Rash left the foothills of South Carolina or the Piedmont of North Carolina, and in his writing returned to the Appalachian Mountains—ancestral for his father’s family—he found his writing home. For the most part, he did not look back. Casualties and his second collection of poems, Among the Believers, both published in 2000, return to the mountains where he spent so many summers wandering alone. The change in setting changed the landscape of his fiction and poetry as well as his thinking as a writer. “By going in a number of those stories back into the mountains,” Rash says of Casualties, “it was almost like I’m going back, you know, into the deeper recesses of who I am and of the culture that has made me” (Personal 2010). He believes Appalachian culture takes “a very dark, pessimistic view of the world” in part because of the landscape: “I think that the sense of the mountains being so daunting, intimidating, reminding us of our insignificance, I think all those things kind of effect mountain people” (Personal 2010). Adding to this darkening tone was his reading of “all the Russians,” including Chekov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy (Personal 2018). Rash notes that the dark, intense tone of Crime and Punishment, in particular, “hit something inside me that I recognized” (Personal 2019). Dostoevsky’s portrayal of the tortured life of Rodion Raskolnikov and the character’s redemption at the end resonated with Rash’s fascination with “hard won redemption,” a theme that is exemplified by many of his characters (Personal 2019).
17The shift in place intensified his attempt, even back to his first book, to invoke Appalachian dialect that pushed back against Hillbilly/Snuffy Smith stereotypes. His characters speak in dialect that is rich in imagery, simile, and metaphor. He honed his craft, working word by word and line by line in his poetry in Among the Believers or the stories of Casualties, as if the landscape of the mountains made it easier to elevate the language and inspired him to write in a way that both reflects and transcends Appalachia. Robert Morgan describes the poems in Believers as containing “plain yet vivid diction” (blurb), while the stories of Casualties are “[s]pare, yet deep,” according to Lee Smith (blurb). The best of the Appalachian dialect—its natural poetry, its colorful imagery, its directness, and its way of bending nouns or adjectives into verbs (a word like “suspicious” becomes “suspicioned,” for example)—all become part of Rash’s distinctive stylistic voice. Perhaps this transformation of language, more than other aspects, explains Rash’s rise from regional to national and later international reputation.
18Compare these opening lines from the title story of Night to those in “Last Rite,” the first story in Casualties:
The day after it happened, and Cliffside’s new Jesus and my old husband was in the county hospital in fair but stable condition, Preacher Thompson, claiming it was all his fault, offered his resignation to the board of deacons. But he wasn’t to blame. He’d only been here a couple of months, fresh out of preacher’s college, and had probably never had to deal with a snake like Larry Rudisell before. A man or a woman, as I’ve found out the hard way, usually has to get bit by a snake before they start watching out for them. (Night 29; emphasis added)
19The lines above are interesting and wry, but stylistically contain a lot of bland state-of-being phrases and some generic informal language (the hard way, usually has to, deal with). Below is the opening of “Last Rite”:
As he had almost every night for months, this Saturday night Sarah’s dead son Elijah was calling her. It was a child’s voice Sarah heard in the laurel slick. She stumbled again and again, the branches welting her face and arms and legs as she thrashed deeper into the slick, her legs growing wearier with each blind step, the voice that called her never closer or farther away. (Casualties 3; emphasis added)
20The lines here are much tighter and much more rhythmic. It was is laid in intentionally to tease out the poetic rhythm from one sentence to the next (almost Biblical, playing off the name Elijah). Much more is conveyed in fewer words. The local dialect employed brings more color to the prose, using laurel slick or bending a noun into a verb (welt becomes welting). The voice of “Last Rite” and other stories in Casualties is unique and artful in an understated way; this is the voice Rash was going toward after Night. The poetry of the language underscores the deeper, darker meanings of Rash’s rapidly developing fiction and poetry.
21Casualties expands on themes hinted at in Night. Stories such as “The Way Things Are,” “Summer Work,” “Honesty,” and “My Father Like a River” examine the divides created by income inequality and, in the latter three stories, the gulf created between those with a higher education and those without. The most devastating of these is “Honesty,” in which Richard, a failing writer on leave from his college teaching job, is goaded by his administrator wife to pretend to be interested in a local woman who has, out of desperation, posted a personal ad for companionship. His wife thinks the affair would be a hoot (the joke would be on the hapless Richard) and of interest to a regional magazine. At the date, he discovers the woman, LeAnn, needs a man to rescue her from her ex-husband, who plans to murder her after his release from prison. At the restaurant, Richard discovers his wife is watching the date with amusement from the bar, forcing him to tell LeAnn he is married. When he takes LeAnn back to her trailer, she tells him that he is a good man despite the deception and he assures her that he is not. LeAnn, likely doomed, is for one night a pawn of a wealthy dean and her directionless but well-educated husband.
- 6 Those are themes Rash would examine in The World Made Straight.
22“Cold Harbor” is another touchstone story in the collection, a foreshadowing of themes arising out of Rash’s Southern and Baptist roots: the Faulknerian notion that the past is inescapable and Rash’s own, oft repeated idea that the road to redemption is hard or sometimes impossible.6 Anna is a veteran nurse from the Korean War who suffers from PTSD; unable to recover, her desire not to bring children into a violent world has destroyed her marriage. In a desperate attempt to be restored somehow, she seeks out Josh Triplett, a battered soldier she helped save during the war. Leaving her home in Washington, DC, driving down to the Aho community near Boone, she passes through major killing fields of the Civil War, including Cold Harbor. She finds Josh in a trailer; he is a man physically disfigured and mentally overwhelmed—a fellow sufferer of PTSD, unsure he wishes to be alive and unable to help Anna in any way. The story leaves Anna with no answers or relief, and on the way home she stops at a motel somewhere between Manassas and Appomattox in “a hamlet with a name drenched in history” where she will go to bed and “lay down again with the dead” (Casualties 55).
23“Not Waving but Drowning,” with its intertwining of infertility and environmental degradation, foreshadows Rash’s first novel, One Foot in Eden. The world is not right in this story, with a couple facing another miscarriage, sitting in the ER with a wife beater and his broken wife (holding her teeth in her hand) during an unusually warm night in February—a false spring. The husband and narrator, Mr. Triplett, waits while his wife, Mary, is with the doctor. He recalls the day they conceived during a picnic by Lake Jocassee, where they had taken a boat across the water and observed the remnants of the town smothered by the artificial lake. Triplett is haunted by the idea that there might still be people down in the dead town, the suffocated land: “people who didn’t know they were buried under eighty feet of water” (79). Rash’s character is then called to meet with the doctor, likely to hear about another miscarriage that could destroy his marriage, and he feels as if underwater, walking slowly down the corridor “as the dead might walk across the cold and silent floor of Lake Jocassee” (82).
24As accomplished as many of the stories are in Casualties, the culmination of all that developed and changed in Rash’s writing is most evident in “Chemistry.” The stories in Casualties were not planned or structured as the stories in Night were; by the time of the second collection, the stories were led by Rash’s imagination. Rather than force them, he did as Steinbeck suggested in Cannery Row and “let the stories crawl in by themselves” (Personal 2018). Since “Chemistry,” Rash has almost always begun thinking about a story (or novel) as an image at first. He notes that “Chemistry” was likely the first story he conceived as an image; in this case, a picture of a father, son, and third man in which “something is being connected” (Personal 2018). The moment is autobiographical. His father, James Rash, suffered from severe depression and was hospitalized several times at Broughton Hospital, where he received shock treatments that unfortunately did not help (Personal 2019). Rash notes that after one of the hospitalizations, his father “started going to an evangelistic church, something like Church of God, and I remember we didn’t know it . . . ; one day I was with him and we went to see a mechanic, this country guy; [and] out in the middle of nowhere he said, ‘I’ll see you at the service Brother Rash’” (Personal 2018). Rash discovered that his father was going to this other church to be anointed, “searching for something to help him with his depression” (Personal 2018). Another image that came to mind was of a man diving, something of no relationship to his real father. As he thought about his father, the images, and where these things might lead, Rash wrote “Chemistry”: “I think [in] that story . . . the diving almost became the metaphor for what I was doing in writing” (Personal 2010).
25As it was for Rash, the narrator of “Chemistry,” Joel, is a teenager confronted with his father’s stays at Broughton hospital and turn to an evangelical church in search of answers. Joel’s father had given up his Appalachian roots, including the Pentecostal church, to marry a woman above his station and “his Pentecostal reconversion had been a betrayal of her and the social class his marriage had allowed him to enter” (Casualties 29). Joel’s father, having gone into higher education, changing his religious practice, and moving down from the mountain (to Cliffside), ultimately, fatally fractured himself. The story is a deeper exploration of Rash’s themes regarding divides caused by economic class and educational attainment. His recurring concept of water, as a medium of rebirth, obliteration, or both at once, manifests in the father’s deep scuba dives into yet another smothering artificial lake. Joel tries to follow his father into Southern Mountain Reservoir but in its depths he witnesses horror scenes of monstrous nature (giant catfish, crawfish, turtles) and environmental degradation: old fishing tackle, dead fish on snapped lines, “a refrigerator yawned open like an unsprung trap” (19). While his father is excited by “water’s other side,” Joel decides to stay on shore: “I watched my father disappear off the dock toward mysteries I no longer wished to fathom” (19, 20). When Joel’s father does not come up again, the coroner explains he has suffered from nitrogen narcosis, but Joel knows better. He goes back to the lake, knowing from the divers that his father had removed his scuba mask before he died, and Joel imagines his tortured old man do so at the moment he was “astonished at what he drifted toward” (29). The last line suggests an ambiguity at death, something alluring about what the other side of water or this life has to offer, and it strongly foreshadows the death of the young girl that opens the novel, Saints at the River.
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26As an important story in a pivotal collection in Rash’s development as a writer, it is not surprising that “Chemistry,” lightly revised, became the title story of his third collection of short stories, published in 2007. After his first novel, One Foot in Eden, was picked up by Picador, Rash was on his way to wide renown and the awards would follow (including the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award for his fourth collection in 2010, Burning Bright). As Rash has proven with his work ethic, his poetic attention to language, his willingness to plumb depth, and his passion to depict the Appalachia of his ancestors for the world, he is a self-made writer of unique discipline who has risen to international acclaim, demonstrating that the rise to artistry is hard won and only for those authors who can hold their breath a long time.