BOOK REVIEW: 'Distance Home' a simple story of a complex tale

World War II was over and Yvonne, “Eve,” had big plans at 17. Some grow up on the wrong side of the tracks, but Eve thought she grew up on the wrong side of the river literally and metaphorically. The bright lights of Pierre, South Dakota, beckoned from across the Missouri River to her family’s shack in the dirt and dust of Fort Pierre.

She was going to go there. She was going to go to school. She was going to have a career. She put everything else aside, cast everything else aside, made her plan to escape, and then she suddenly, at 17, decided to marry Al, the son of a cattle buyer and destined for the same. He with the convertible, the white painted house and wrap-around porch on the only paved road in town, and a real mama’s boy. He is a couple of steps up from where she lived under crushing obligations of caring for siblings and a mother incapacitated by loss, a dirt poor life.

Eve and Al marry, have two kids, and eventually move from Al’s mother’s basement in Fort Pierre, to the prairie of southwestern South Dakota, within sight of the Black Hills. René, and her older brother, Leon, are separate fronts for their father, Al, and their mother, Eve; younger sister, Jayne, born much later, is something like Switzerland. Leon came first and was Eve’s joy, and she loved him best. He was gentle. He was good. He was quiet. He was a bit odd with a stammer, but her sun rose and set upon him. René was second born and was everything Eve hated in a child right from the beginning. Al loved René, worshipped her, and she him.

Parents do the best they can. The rest is up to the kid. There’s also the curse that one ends up marrying one’s parent, girls their dad, boys their mom. When Al thought about Leon it wasn’t for long; it was better to pretend Leon didn’t exist. For that, Eve resented Al and René. The differences created a life of recriminations and fighting and yelling until Al would leave again for weeks or months at a time until a beaten Leon finally left home for a life of self-destruction.

Leon is smart, talented on the ball field and as a dancer, but timid. René takes up dance, too, and then both move to ballet, but where René excels and ignores the jibes and insults from classmates, Leon pulls hair from his eyebrows and from a spot on the top of his head creating an odd appearance and further distancing himself from Al and endearing himself even more to Eve.

Paula Saunders is originally from South Dakota, and she creates a vivid picture for any who have been to that part of America: The heat, the small towns, the land, the people. René walking to school would “cut through the backyards to reach the crest of the hill, and follow the lightly worn footpath that ran through the prairie scrub. She carried her books and notebooks, but she never hurried. She’d stop to pick a handful of sage and breathe the deep perfume, just standing, looking out at the sky.” One late spring day, Eve went with Al on a cattle buying trip. They pulled into one of Al’s sellers and “Billy Little Horse was waiting as they pulled up next to his pastel government shack, standing just next to the two old cars in his front yard, one with its windows busted out and its doors hanging open on broken hinges, the other with all its tires missing — one side up on blocks, the other melting into the earth, drowning in mud and icy slush.”

It is a simple story that Saunders tells, as family stories go, and just as complex and complicated. Here are people, a family I think anyone can recognize, going through their lives surprised to discover much later there were choices to be had, decisions of destiny to be made. Each of them ends up where they do, not necessarily because of what they did, but what they ignored, except for René. She learned early on that she was her own fate and ended up crossing, literally and metaphorically, to the other side of that river as her mother once dreamed. René learned in this beautiful tale role to create her own life.

J. Reed Anderson is the general manager of the Devils Lake Journal, Devils Lake, North Dakota. You can reach him at randerson@devilslakejournal.com.