Free Scribblers by Stephen Kirk

clarification or, more likely, swiftly delivered packages containing second manuscripts that had been lying in wait, for which I’d feel obliged to send further personal correspondence. I commonly read sixty to a hundred pages when a couple of paragraphs would have sufficed. I carried manuscripts home on the weekends; my reading of published books was nil; my companions instead were “Murder on Mountain Trout Creek,” “NASCAR Days and Nights,” and “Bobbing Red Tulips.” Two stacks of unread manuscripts on my shelves at the office grew to four, six, nine. Writers not part of my expanding circle of pen pals might wait six or seven months for a response.
    They kept rattling the gates. They wore me down. I wasn’t their benefactor, I came to understand. I was a naive boy.
    Meanwhile, my editing—which was mainly what I was employed to do—suffered. Without reprimand—with a touch of mercy, even—the slush pile was taken from me. My company reading was thereafter limited to manuscripts that had already been through some of our readers and stood a chance of publication.
    That’s how I first hear of Charles Price. People aroundthe office start talking about a story in which a woman dies horribly of lockjaw, about a fair-haired, pale-eyed bushwhacker who calls himself Nahum Bellamy the Pilot, about a pair of grimy women riding double on a mule who come to burials to heckle the grieving, about a former slave once called Black Gamaliel. The novel has come to us in the kind of permanent binder made by copy stores, so the pages can’t be divided up and circulated. All of a sudden, our company reading isn’t such a burden. Rather, we’re negotiating over who can have the manuscript, and for how long, and who will get it next.
    Often, what appears to be support for a manuscript lasts only until the first loud contrary opinion comes along. That isn’t a danger here.
    Price calls his story “Held in Equal Honor,” after a line from The Iliad. He lives near Burnsville, in the high mountains north of Asheville, but his novel is set farther west in North Carolina, in the valley of the Hiwassee River. It is the Reconstruction-era story of the Curtis family, former pillars of society brought to a lower station after the Civil War. Nahum Bellamy, the villain, wants vengeance for a wartime act to which one of the Curtis boys was party. Judge Madison Curtis, the patriarch, is incapacitated with guilt over having sacrificed a neighbor family to save his own during the war. His sons are either dead or are pale shadows of their father. It falls to Daniel McFee, the former Black Gamaliel who now rejects his old slave name, to struggle against his bitterness, discover his better nature, and come to the aid of the family that once held him in bondage.
    It is actually a continuation of Price’s first novel, Hiwassee, published by a small house and not widely traveled, though it won high praise from review sources like USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus, the toughest nut in the business. Why the new novel isn’t being done by the same publisher doesn’t much matter to us. We feel that what we have in our hands is superior in every regard to Hiwassee, which we have by now procured and passed around the office along with “Held in Equal Honor.”
    The best thing about working in publishing is that, every day when the postman arrives, there’s a possibility that you’re about to become part of something exciting, significant, and unexpected.
    All of a sudden, we aren’t a dumping ground for bad prose but rather players in an industry of ideas. We feel we have a winner.
    My parents still embody for me many of the virtues: honesty, industriousness, thrift, foresight, perseverance, devotion, selflessness.
    They did not, however, feed the family in particularly high style.
    When I was in junior high, my mother worked nights and my father was