In the Wild Light

Delaney Doyle is the daughter of someone who has an addiction to opioids. Although she tosses off inquiries about her mother with casual indifference, her identity is bound up in the slow-motion trauma of having a mother who is unable, unwilling, and uninterested in bonding with her child. In an outward manifestation of her resulting anxiety, Delaney chews on the cuticles of her thumbs to the point that the habit alarms Cash. For all her scientific perspicacity and her unnerving command of a library of factoids that she shares with “pure joy” (9), for all her confidence in the classroom and in the lab, and despite (or perhaps because) of how easily she handles the international uproar stirred by her discovery of a potentially entirely new strain of penicillin, Delaney remains a young woman shadowed by the darkness in her own past.

Thus her pursuit of science and specifically her faith in the natural world’s ability to provide cures for the worst maladies reflects her character: she believes in redemption. She believes no cause is hopeless. Her tragicomic invasion of Papaw’s hospital room in the last few hours before his death as she waves about a mason jar of her miracle cure reveals her unwillingness to surrender to a despair that, given her upbringing, would be understandable. The only concession Delaney makes to her internal conflicts, her lacerating self-doubts, and her fear of intimacy is her gnawing on her thumbs. That is pain she controls, damage she directs. When she finally brings herself to tell Cash how much she needs him, how much she loves him, and how Middleford, really any experience, would be lost without sharing it with Cash, Delaney overcomes her own character. She risks the love that everyone in her life has taught her to avoid. That is the miracle cure she will never find growing on a cave wall or developed in a lab.

Cash must watch his grandfather die slowly from emphysema. Throughout this long and difficult goodbye, Papaw teaches his grandson the truth of the world that will, in the end, help Cash’s transition not merely into adulthood but into the work (and reward) of being a poet. The world, Papaw tells him, is worth investigating, worth seeing, worth experiencing. Papaw’s simple and unprepossessing life has yielded to him a constant sense of enchantment and wonder. He is a man of unflappable principle because he believes every person has value and worth—he is outcast from his own church because of his refusal to condemn gay culture and a pariah in Sawyer because of his outspoken rejection of racism.

Just before he dies, Papaw shares with Cash his earliest memory of Cash as a baby. When his mother was too distracted by her drug use, Cash would stay with his grandparents. Papaw would rock Cash on the front porch and one by one introduce his grandson to the readily available miracles of a world not limited by his mother’s toxic actions. This, he told the child peering out of his baby blanket, is called the wind. That, he said as he tilted Cash’s face to the sky, is the sun. Without ignoring the darker realities of the world (he is fond of telling his grandson the world is full of swans and wolves) and without minimizing the tragedies of his own life (his daughter’s self-destruction, the grinding routine of life below the poverty line, his own failing lungs), he never loses his capacity to wonder, his deep respect and love for his wife of more than 50 years, his spiritual bond with the river and hills around Sawyer, or his impish faith in the power of love.

Mostly, however, Papaw finds his greatest strength in his grandson. As he writes in the letter Cash reads on the way back to school after Papaw’s death, “Sometimes when you weren’t looking, I would stare at you and thank God in my heart that I got to be your papaw” (336).