Kentucky Blues by Derek Robinson

 

He sighed, and smiled. ‘You have a worrying way of making everything sound simple,’ he said.

‘Well, it is simple. Either you live to enjoy or you live to regret what you didn’t enjoy while you had the chance.’

This 2002 novel is the only Frontier novel by a British author more noted for his aviation novels of the first and second world wars and…well, that is a crying shame as this novel is simply superlative.

We begin with the founding of a small border town in colonial Kentucky and we stay there through the Civil War, the Post-War Period and on through Prohibition.

This is not one of those “kitchen sink” novels that tries to shoehorn every bit of history into the page count to prove, “Hey, I did my research.” No Edward Rutherford or Michener here.

Mr. Robinson, keeps it small, keeps it human even when working against the backdrop of large events.

The novel is cynical, wise, redolent with flavor and brimming with a wry humor.

He can limn entire characters in a sentence, entire storylines in a paragraph.

‘Jeez, I dunno.’ Ruthie had a good chuckle. Nothing disturbed her. She never complained, never celebrated, never criticized, never praised. Sold from the auctioneer’s block when she was six. Three masters – one cruel, one loud but lazy, one dying and therefore indifferent – before Henry Hudd saw her at a bankruptcy sale, told her to strip, poked and prodded and squeezed her until he was sure she could breed, and got her at a knockdown price of two hundred dollars, with a lame mule that nobody wanted thrown in too. Three good husbands, all dead now. Seven children, all sold south, never seen again. Snakebit once, nearly died but didn’t. All luck, all chance. Nothing agitated Ruthie. What she didn’t understand made her chuckle. She chuckled a lot.

Tell me we don’t know Ruthie from the get-go from that.

The futility of war from the following.

The shots had attracted others from their regiment, and now that the enemy had been found, the two armies drifted into battle. The more they fought, the more they fought. Eventually about 28,000 men were shooting and being shot at. About a quarter of them got hit. At the end, General Bragg pulled his men out and went back to Tennessee, so he lost; but the Unionist army failed to chase him, so it didn’t win. Nobody won, least of all a seventeen-year-old from Spendthrift, who had only joined the army to prove to a neighbour’s daughter how brave he was. How brave was he? About average, it turned out.

Some novels will spend chapters on a downfall; Mr. Robinson spends two lines for a sardonic epitaph.

General Buck T. Masterman went home and concentrated on drinking himself to death. This was something he had a natural talent for, and he achieved it in only one year and forty-seven days, at the time a record for southern Illinois.

The claustrophobia of a small town made “smaller.”

That night the Cameron flooded its banks. By dawn, it was halfway up Main Street. Briefly, the rain turned to hail. Then it went back to rain again. It was too wet to get into trouble. Only place to go was Maggie’s. Only thing to do was drink, play poker, talk. Talk was cheapest, so a lot of it got done, until just about everyone had said just about all they knew to say, and said it so often the others knew what was coming and knew not to listen because it hadn’t been worth the wax in your ears last time around and nothing had happened to improve it since.

A room depicted more redolent than a photograph.

Charles went into the tavern, and found Frankie in her office: a back room that Maggie used for private poker sessions. A thousand bad cigars had lived and died here and their ghosts were in the air to prove it.

A backwoods trial setting that precedes an utterly entertaining episode of frontier jurisprudence.

The barn was full an hour before the trial was due to start. Many had come in from the surrounding countryside, bringing charcoal and barbecue. It was a holiday. The heat of bodies quickly built and all the doors had to be opened and kept open. Dogs and children ran in and out. There was singing, fiddleplaying, card-playing, even a little horse-trading. The barn smelled of sweat and overdone pork chops and the sour drift of cigar smoke and the sweet memory of ancient cow manure; Maggie had never had the floor properly cleaned. The noise was loud. It was one long fight to hear and be heard.

What sums up the many non-heroic souls that people this tale?

Boston found Doc Brightsides. ‘No offence meant,’ he said, ‘but why are you living here?’

‘It’s not so bad.’

‘Not so good, either. You’ve travelled, same as I have. America’s full of nowhere towns like this. I meet these people all the time. ‘Ain’t stayin’ here,’ they say. ‘Just catchin’ our breath. Soon’s we get two dollars to rub together, we’re off to find Happy Valley.’ Twenty years later they’re wearin’ the same overalls and they still haven’t mended that hole in the fence.’

An utter masterpiece for this reader. With no other Westerns in his oeuvre, I shall gladly plunge into his aviation tales.

I repeat, Superlative.