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Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins |
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This is a story of an American couple and their adopted son, and how a very innocent knowledge and fascination of 'things that glow' lead to a loss of faith and their lives being ripped apart as the Hiroshima bomb is dropped. 'Wiggins fits her lyrical prose to a distinctly rural, Southern cadence, easily blending the vernacular with luminous imagery, adding bits of poetry, passages explaining scientific phenomena, interpolations about the Scopes trial and even references to 'Moby-Dick,' which serves as a leitmotif.'--'Publisher's Weekly.' This poetic novel, by the acclaimed author of John Dollar, describes America at the brink of the Atomic Age. In the years between the two world wars, the future held more promise than peril, but there was evidence of things unseen that would transfigure our unquestioned trust in a safe future. Fos has returned to Tennessee from the trenches of France. Intrigued with electricity, bioluminescence, and especially x-rays, he believes in science and the future of technology. On a trip to the Outer Banks to study the Perseid meteor shower, he falls in love with Opal, whose father is a glassblower who can spin color out of light. Fos brings his new wife back to Knoxville where he runs a photography studio with his former Army buddy Flash. A witty rogue and a staunch disbeliever in Prohibition, Flash brings tragedy to the couple when his appetite for pleasure runs up against both the law and the Ku Klux Klan. Fos and Opal are forced to move to Opal's mother's farm on the Clinch River, and soon they have a son, Lightfoot. But when the New Deal claims their farm for the TVA, Fos seeks work at the Oak Ridge Laboratory -- Site X in the government's race to build the bomb. And it is there, when Opal falls ill with radiation poisoning, that Fos's great faith in science deserts him. Their lives have traveled with touching inevitability from their innocence and fascination with 'things that glow' to the new world of manmade suns. Hypnotic and powerful,Evidence of Things Unseenconstructs a heartbreaking arc through twentieth-century American life and belief. Chapter One:Radiance On the night that they found Lightfoot, the stars were falling down. All along the pirate coast the lighthouse keepers cast their practiced eyes into the night, raking dark infinity with expectant scrutiny the way the lighthouse beams combed cones of light over the tillered sea. Over the Outer Banks, from the eastern constellation Perseus, shooting stars like packet seeds spilled across the sky, tracing transits of escape above the fourteen lighthouses from Kitty Hawk and Bodie Light to Hatteras and Lookout. It was the yearly August meteor shower and Fos had driven out from Tennessee across the Smokies to the brink of the Atlantic for the celestial show as he'd done each August for the last fifteen years ever since he'd shipped home from France in '19, once the War was over. He and fifteen other sons from Dare County had been among the first recruits to go across the North Atlantic in '18 for valor, decency, and hell like they'd never known. Not one among them who survived was proud of it in any way that didn't cast a shadow back across his pride. Fos himself, by accident, had been a sparker in the field, an incendiary artist, and he'd been brilliant at it. He'd always had an interest in what made things light up, made things radiate, but he never knew he had a latent genius like a fuse, a flare for fireworks, until they handed him a uniform and stood him up in front of a regimental officer and asked him what, if anything, he was good at doing. I'm good at making things light up, Fos said. Looking at the open file on the camp table between them, Fos watched the R.O.'s pen stall where Fos's name was written on the page. You mean explosives? the R.O. said. -- um no sir. The pen still stalled. -- chemicals? the R.O. pressed. --radiance,Fos explained. They put him in Artillery and shipped him over with the rest of the First Army and on the fifth day in their training camp in France two British officers with more brass than a church organ between them in-terrupted gun assembly in his barracks. Who's the chap here who's the chemist? the one with more brass asked. When no one volunteered, the one with less brass held his clipboard up and read out, Private First Class Foster? Fos felt the heat rise to his cheeks and took a weak step forward. -- that would be me, sir. Come with us. They led Fos past rows of wooden barracks to the quartermaster's depot into the munition stores. Next to a stepped-temple of stacked diesel drums there was a brick hut with a flat roof, buttressed by sandbags. Inside there were four men in blue smocks and gauze surgical masks in a makeshift laboratory. An astringent tinge of sulfur in the air was the first thing that Fos noticed. Speak any French? the British officer asked before he left him there. -- no sir. -- learn to. -- yes sir. Four pairs of dark wide eyes stared at Fos above the surgical masks. Then one of the men, the short one in the foreground, spoke. A patch of moisture appeared on his mask from where the words emanated and Fos stared at it, uncomprehending, as if a translation would materialize there as well. The tallest of the four untied his own mask and, with a heavy accent, said, He wants to know are you the candlemaker Uncle Sam has sent? --candlemaker? Fos stared at the material around them. There were shelves of chemicals in jars, sieves and grinders, meshes, funnels, fuses of all sorts, crates of French F 1 pineapple grenade casings. As best as Fos could reckon from the things that he could recognize, the men in the blue smocks were making firecrackers. The short man gave an impatient shrug and seemed to ask the same question again, only this time with more force so his mask made little jumps, in and out, like a pumping artery. Fos nodded, mutely, and then there wereoosandahsall around and then the short one asked him something else in a nicer way with what appeared to |
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