“THE PLOUGHMEN”: A Review
It’s a classic truism that jailbirds and their jail guards are much alike in their psychologies and socialization. “The Ploughmen” is an exploration of what is the same and what is different. Both must stay in a miserable place with no future and little relief. It’s almost a version of the office slavery of the men in gray flannel suits living in cubicles that we have all run from ever since.
But the difference that justifies the incarceration of anyone is illustrated here by a man with no empathy, a sociopath. His crimes are lethal, atrocious, secret, and demonstrate that even those who amuse him with their usefulness are not safe.
The “crime” of the jailor is lack of empathy, failure to engage in life. Somehow this interests the murderer, maybe the narcissism of it.
The misery would be intolerable for the reader if it were not for the glorious accounts of the world around the jail and obliviously containing the ghastly offenses against human flesh. Descriptions of homes are mixed and dependent on the work of woman. A key is the apple, either in the innocent orchard or being bitten in the hands of a man.
In what is becoming a tradition, Zupan the author includes antique words we are not likely to know. His are not the long 19th century multisyllabic mock-Latin ones, but the roots included in later words. I didn’t look them up since it would require either going to the computer or hauling out my unabridged dictionary. Cormac McCarthy seems to have indulged in these sort of inclusions, but lately in England there has been an interest in local words related to jargon that comes from agriculture and similar pursuits that create a need to have a term for them. James Rebanks, who raises sheep in England, teaches us what to call things about them. The Reader’s Digest used to always include a page for vocabulary that taught roots, prefixes and suffixes. Nowadays kids invent their own.
The glory of the land and the antique words create a background for constrained and distorted lives. In the end the sociopath is reduced to ashes in a hole dug with a spud bar in what was his orchard. The protector who failed to protect either himself or his special charge, the murderer, becomes the inheritor of the home and orchard. This is the end of the story but not the end of the question. What must we do to be saved?
Under this novel there is Christianity — antique Christianity, not the hectoring over appearances and success we know today — that is just beneath the surface after the identities are gone, removed like the heads and hands of victims. Kindness and trust are worthy, but everyone dies.
The relationship between these two men is forced by their — well, one hesitates to call murder a vocation — “jobs”, which one loses and the other only escapes for a short interval. Other characters want into the work without any understanding of what it is or what it will do to them.
The jailor cannot sleep. If he cannot sleep, he cannot dream. And yet there are short episodes of sleep in places that are gates in convention, like the friendship with the sociopath, but also in awkward places. His second job is trying to find lost people in time to save their lives and his dog, a partner more faithful than any wife, helps him without betraying him. But the last example is an old man who dies on a wander in search of his dead wife, wanting to join her, not caring about being alive. He has completed his life — he doesn’t need it anymore. There are no questions about whether there is a next thing after death.
So this is socioeconomic entrapment seeking a soteriology.
“Christology is the biblical teaching concerning Christ, the Saviour and Soteriology is the teaching regarding salvation (redemption) and its personal appropriation.”
There is no church or savior in this story. Just the apple. But the story of the old man includes the snake, which he seizes as his salvation.
The intensely detailed environment that includes moments of relief sitting on a park bench tells us not to blame the land for human hardship. The trees sing and the bright birds shuttle through them no matter what people do.
I’ve known two ploughmen. One was an old man in this town who came to me for help in bidding on a small model of the kind of tractor he used to drive up and down the local wheat fields. He had been alerted to a website that sold such things, but the price of the little tractor kept going up. I did help him, he bought the toy for a dear price, and it turned out that he had been bidding against a local person he had thought was a friend. That person thought the whole thing was a great joke. He didn’t want the mini-tractor.
That old man is dead now. He tried marriage but she left in weeks. He built a house with small windows because he didn’t want to know anything but the confined straight lines of ploughing.
The second ploughman was supposed to be raising cattle, but he had nothing but contempt for them. He fed them immature grain so their calves all died, even though he reached inside the cows and dragged the calves out. What he liked was a bulldozer, the only one of his massive machines that still worked, but it did the job — very slowly. He tried to interest me in marrying him but staying in town to teach — just sending him the money. I laughed and said I would put him in a story, but I never did until now.
In Fort Benton they are shooting a movie of “The Ploughmen.” If anyone can bring these men alive in a way we’re willing to watch, then Ed Harris and Robert Duvall can do it. But the men who need to understand it never will. They’ll never see it.
