If I said that The River Beyond the World opens in a village in rural Mexico where a young teenage girl gets pregnant during an ancient peyote fertility ritual, you might get the wrong idea about this book. Janet Peery’s novel is neither a paean to elan vital eroticism in the D. H. Lawrence tradition nor a feminist fantasy about the lost age of goddesses. Instead, it embraces both the comedy and tragedy of classes and cultures that do not so much clash as grate against one another in the characters of two women. And above all, this 1996 nominee for a National Book Award is about forgiveness and grace.
Though the story begins in the 1940s, Luisa Cantu’s village of Salsipuedes (the name means “Leave if you can”) has yet to be touched by the Enlightenment. The Mennonite teacher there, a conscientious objector to the war, struggles against the town’s prevailing fatalism to instill literacy and the gospel in its children. Luisa proves his most promising pupil, her eagerness and innocence equally poignant:
Even after [the teacher] stopped reading, his stories went on inside her and it seemed she walked around in them, knowing all the people. Once, on her way back down the hill after school, the story of the three crosses on the hill came back to her, horrible and wrong, and no one had done a thing to stop it. Back along the crooked street she had run to tell him that if she had been there, she would have fought with the soldiers and the king, she would have taken off the crown of thorns and put cool water in the cup, not vinegar, she would not have let it happen.
As Luisa yearns toward the enormous destiny she hears in those stories, she feels called to “do some great, good thing” in the way adolescents often do. She waits during the summer for her vaguely apprehended future to materialize. Before the teacher returns in the fall, however, that fate has been chosen for her–the leading role in the fertility rite. Then her mother dies, and Luisa, pregnant, heads north of the border, where she will spend the rest of her life trying to understand how winding and rocky is the path to that “great, good thing” she longed for.
On the road, Luisa is picked up by Thomas Hatch, an uncommonly kind labor contractor recruiting braceros to work in the fields and orchards strung along Texas’s lower Rio Grande valley. Her son, Tavo, is born in a migrant camp, and a second child is on the way (compliments of a green-eyed soldier on leave) when Thomas rescues her once again by employing her as housekeeper for his wife. Edwina Jane Harmon, former debutante from Lynchburg, Virginia, had found herself “husbandless for no reason she could determine” at 34. Having turned down a series of marriage prospects, she has settled for the mild-mannered Thomas and “turned into plain Eddie Hatch, a farmwife in a cotton housedress.”
The story shifts back and forth between the two women, both immigrants to the Valley, each shaped by her environment but with a singularly strong inner core. Trapped in the backwater town of Martha, Eddie plays poker with “La Girls,” cooks enormous meals out of frustration, puts on weight, and suffers the unrelenting Texas heat. Thomas, though unfailingly kind, is more interested in his horticultural experiments than in making Eddie a mother. When a handsome stranger comes to confer with Thomas on grafts for his family’s California vineyard, Eddie initially resists his charm but ultimately succumbs to her need. As soon as she discovers she’s pregnant, Eddie sends her erstwhile lover on his way while managing to convince Thomas that the child is his.
These then are the two women who live side by side and cheek by jowl for the next four decades, Luisa patiently determined to prove a good and faithful servant to Madama, Eddie growing stingier and more demanding as she waits for a Valley housewife’s fulfillment–a hacienda in Martha’s version of Beverly Hills. They raise their children–or rather Luisa does–and even after Thomas dies under ambiguous circumstances, they carry on together, not as friends or peers, certainly, but as partners in a relationship neither can bring herself to dissolve.
Luisa’s children learn to hate Eddie and resent their mother’s meek compliance in what they see as an oppressive relationship. Tavo, her son, eventually goes off to Vietnam where he is killed. Antonia, her daughter, becomes the star pupil in biology at the Martha high school. Meanwhile, Raleigh, Eddie’s son, becomes sufficiently radicalized as a college freshman to see his mother as a ridiculous bigot–but not enough to recognize his own abuse of Antonia. Nor can Antonia at first resist her own exploitation any more effectively than her mother has.
I forebear at this point to reveal any more for fear of giving away too much of the ingenious plot. Suffice it to say that each woman eventually discovers secret and well-nigh unforgivable damage the other has done her. The central tension of the novel, however, is not sustained by circumstances or events–who knew what when–but by the reader’s keen awareness that two souls are hanging in the balance. Will Eddie ever gain insight into her selfishness, at once monstrous and comically petty? Will she face the consequences of her lies and deceptions? Will she be able to admit how much she owes to a woman she has treated with imperious conceit and miserly parsimony?
As for Luisa, will her longsuffering spirit ever give out? Will it, over the years, finally wear down to nothing but a nubbin of habit? Is there no insult or injury that can cause her to rise up and accuse her tormentor? Has she merely acquiesced in her own oppression? When Antonia gets as angry at her mother for putting up with the injustices as at “Madama” for perpetrating them, Luisa only shrugs and tells her, “I have the gift of forgetting.” But is that the same as forgiving?
The chief beauty of this story (and there are several, including the subtle wit and exquisite prose) resides in Peery’s refusal to treat her characters’ lives as social or cultural or sexual “issues.” Nor is she satisfied, like so many contemporary novelists, simply to pose the hard questions about human life. She doesn’t quit before she’s given us an answer. And even better, the reader doesn’t feel the resolution merely fulfills some metaphysical contract or fleshes out the conclusion to an ideological premise. Peery gives the story of these two women a resounding ending because they deserve it. She cares about them too much to leave them hanging. It would have been easy and obvious to play either one or both of them as hapless, helpless pawns of social strictures; instead, each has real choices to make, choices that determine not only her temporal fate but her eternal destiny.
With neither woman is this an easy task. Getting readers to care about Eddie–vain, selfish, and ultimately silly–takes the kind of compassion one sees in writers like Anne Tyler. But to create a believably good character like Luisa is even more difficult. Historically, writers have resorted to casting their purest fictional figures as mentally deficient in order to assuage our skepticism. But Luisa Cantu is deficient neither in intelligence, imagination, nor courage. And when the worm finally turns, we realize just how delicate will have to be that maneuver if her long sacrifice is not to make, as Yeats predicted in such situations, “a stone of the heart,” but instead fulfill at long last her destiny “to do some great, good thing.”
Virginia Stem Owens is director of the Milton Center at Kansas Newman College. Her most recent novel is Generations (Lion; UK only).
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books and Culture Magazine. May/June, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 16
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