Review
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Title: The History of Honey Spring
Author: Darin Cozzens
Publisher: Zarahemla Books
Genre: Novel
Year Published: 2022
Number of pages: 294
Binding: Trade paperback
ISBN13: 978-0-9993472-6-3
Price: $14.95 (Amazon’s price)
Reviewed by Dennis Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters
I started writing this review before I finished reading the book. That is so that I can share my discoveries with you. Don’t worry — there won’t be any spoilers. It’s not that kind of book.
Darin Cozzens has written two other books set in the fictional town of Balford, Wyoming: The Last Blessing of J. Guyman LeGrand, and other stories and Light of the New Day, and Other Stories, both also published by Zarahemla Books. When my review copy arrived, my wife, Valerie, picked it up and started reading it. I didn’t get it back, except by stealth to sample the first few pages, for three days. By then, she had devoured it and then started in on my copy of Light of the New Day and Other Stories. She says that this book is better because it has the room for Cozzens to narrate a history of two families in conflict and unfold at leisure the ways in which their fates have been tangled.
That has been my experience reading it, too. This is the first sentence in the book: “When Lance Corporal Jim Ray came home from the war in mid-April of 1966, the only people in the world waiting for him were two strangers — the lawyer Rickett, whose letter had found him one month earlier in a sandbag bunker somewhere in Chu Lai, and a distant and dying cousin named Goss Harvey.” Notice how carefully this sentence raises the questions the novel sets out to answer: why was no one else waiting for Jim Ray; who is Rickett; where is Chu Lai; who is Goss Harvey; why is he dying; why are these men strangers to Jim? And in the second sentence, Cozzens only deepens the mystery, rather than explaining any of that: “And they were waiting, not in Jim Ray’s hometown of Mapleton, Utah, but five hundred miles away, in a nursing home in Cody, Wyoming.” This sentence nails down two facts, the towns of Mapleton and Cody, neither of which is Honey Spring. At this time, the reader doesn’t know what Honey Spring is, or where it is, but it would seem to be the name of a town because it has a history.
The other people in the story, on the other side of the conflict, the Vanderfisk family, are introduced with the same skill and generosity, as are the people that mediate between the two families, including a wonderful small-town bishop named Sebright. And central to the conflict, and to its resolution, is a bull belonging to the Vanderfisks that lives on both sides of the fence between the two family’s farms and runs with a herd of deer resident on the Harvey farm.
This fullness of characters is the wind-up of the story, and it proceeds to unfold from the questions posed in those first two sentences in surprising and satisfying ways. There are no jump shocks, no sudden shootings, no gory moments — except those incidents to ranching, like branding and castrating — as there would be if this were a current history of our times. Those things are not needed. The war in Viet Nam was bloody enough for its time, and Jim Ray acts like someone suffering from PTSD, but the suspicion of that stress only opens bit by bit, like a flower opening under the influence of a warm spring breeze.
As it opens, we learn, well past the midpoint of the book, why the lawyer Rickett is involved at all, and why he is able to coach Jim in the operation of Goss Harvey’s run-down ranch, which is literally held together by baling wire — at times, bailing twine — and desperation. As the story advances, that desperation begins to give way to hope. And it does so by insisting on involving the reader’s memory, as in this passage:
“And on certain days marked by fair breezes and blue skies, Jim could almost accept that profile of their arrangement. But on other days — and this first day of September was one of them — he knew better. Rickett’s insistence on his own need was a tacit and generous downplaying of Jim’s. Need on Jim’s part included help with the work, of course, but even more important, it included teaching, correction, support, encouragement, confidence, companionship.”
To understand that, you need to recall Rickett’s “profile of their arrangement” because Cozzens won’t repeat it. This is how his confidence in you is manifest.
A little later on that workday, Jim is preparing his equipment for the task of harvesting the pinto beans that are his primary cash crop. This is how Cozzens describes some of the work:
“He saved for the last the two chores that required compressed air because compressed air on this farm was an ordeal. Even more than most air compressors, this machine was brutal on eardrums. It clattered and hissed, clacked and snuffed. From moment to moment, the whole apparatus sounded as if it were about to fly apart. It occurred to Jim that, against such a racket, a whole platoon of poachers could fire M60s, and he would never hear a thing.”
The poachers are people killing that resident herd of deer for their antlers and certain internal organs, which they pass on to middlemen who sell them in Asia as aphrodisiacs and for traditional medicine. But what I like about that description is two things: the precise description of the sounds the compressor makes, and the way Jim’s mind is drawn back to Vietnam, with the words “platoon” and “M60s” (which are machine guns). His healing may be underway, but his experience of stress has disordered so much of his person, the healing may well require a lifetime.
It is only five pages after those opening sentences that we meet the other family in this tangle of motives, the Vanderfisks, represented by Bernene Maxwell and her husband, the town banker, Big Frett Maxwell. Bernene’s father, Enoch Vanderfisk, is still alive, but she represents the family in the narration. Since the novel is written from Jim Ray’s point-of-view, we only gradually learn of Bernene’s wishes and how they conflicted with Goss Harvey’s. But in this encounter, they try to buy the farm, for thirty, then thirty-five, thousand dollars, and Enoch the next day ups the offer to forty thousand, but Jim refuses — coached by Rickett, who tells him it’s a bullcrap offer. The picture of Enoch and his daughter that emerges, however, makes a solid foundation for the story to unspool. And like a tangle of barbed wire that can serve to top a wall dividing two hostile camps, or, untangled and stretched out, serve as a fence to make good neighbors, this narrative sets to work to do the latter.
It does that beautifully. This narrative is a joy to read and a treasure, and I will gladly recommend The History of Honey Spring to all my friends and acquaintances, as well as to you, for if you have read this far, you, too, will treasure this story and its telling.