Valentine

“How strange it was to be thinking of poems now, when I had not given them so much as a passing thought all these years since I had become a grown woman, a wife and mother, but now I recalled: This is the Hour of Lead—Remember, if outlived.”

The quote from which Mary Rose draws her guidance comes down to that terrifying word “if.” Mary Rose impulsively responds to the presence of the beaten Gloria at her front door with maternal compassion and empathy. She draws on her brief background in school—having left high school when she got pregnant with Aimee—and recalls the devastating emotional moment that Emily Dickinson writes about in Poem 372, when a person has undergone such a trauma that survival itself seems in doubt.

“If you really want to know, Corrine would gladly explain to anybody who cared to ask, I am not a drunk, I’m just drinking all the time. There is a world of difference between the two.”

Corrine begins the novel a newly widowed woman, after her husband’s suicide. Initially her response is to sit quietly in her house and slip into an alcohol-induced haze. She does not have an alcohol addiction—a disease that, she believes, would make her a victim to be pitied and helped. Rather, she drinks to steady herself; she drinks until she’s ready to move forward. It’s her choice.

“When Corrine yells at her not to talk to strangers, D.A. lifts the animal above her head and waggles it in the old woman’s direction. Even from a distance, Corrine could see thin streams of blood leaking from both the [frog’s] eyes, its last and most desperate line of defense.”

The relationship that develops between D.A. and Corrine, a girl just abandoned by her mother and a wife just abandoned by her husband, works on the tension that the girl needs a surrogate mother and the woman needs a surrogate daughter. They’re both trapped emotionally. Here, D.A. and her toad—which she trapped as a pet—suggest the dire situation that the two characters are in: Both are near emotional death from which the only logical escape would be suicide in self-defense.

“Ever since her mama left town, D.A. has been looking for something to do with her weekends. She’s been looking for a project, this man might be it.”

In the broken figure of Jesse Belden, young D.A. sees someone she can help—her project. Although she’s only 10, her heart already yearns to help others. Every woman in the novel searches for a project. In this, the novel argues that the women of West Texas, more than its men, are nurturing, caring, and compassionate.

“The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last forever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year—the days when summer is changing into autumn—the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.”

Here, D.A. reads to Jesse Belden from her favorite book, E. B. White’s classic coming-of-age parable Charlotte’s Web. Its lesson is simple: Even in the face of harrowing choices and the inevitability of morality, compassion is the highest virtue. Caring about others alone gives meaning and purpose to a life otherwise defined by the grim realities of inevitable pain.

“What kind of woman runs out on her husband and her daughter? The kind who understands that the man who shares her bed is, and always will be, just the boy who got her pregnant […] The kind who believes she is coming back just as soon as she finds someplace where she can settle down.”

D.A.’s mother, Ginny, got married and abandoned her goals because, at 17, she got pregnant and did the right thing by West Texas expectations. One morning, insufficiently impressed by the supposed rewards of motherhood and yearning for a world as beautiful as the paintings she sees in library art books, she left. However, she struggles with the guilt she feels for leaving her daughter behind to begin what she hopes will be a journey toward a self-fulfillment larger than the traditional rewards of motherhood.

“When I tried to explain myself to Robert in the days after the crime, when I told him I had sinned against this child, betrayed her in my heart, he said my only sin was opening the door in the first place, not thinking of my own damned kids first.”

To girls growing up in West Texas, husbands don’t always come across as the salvation they’re portrayed to be. Mary Rose helps a viciously beaten girl who arrives on her doorstep. She feels guilty because a 14-year-old girl has endured such a violent act. For her, helping Gloria was too late and the least she could do. Her husband, like other men in the novel, is selfish, self-righteous, and insensitive to any feeling greater than the boundaries of their life and property.

“In the second letter, a fine, upstanding citizen reminded all of us that the alleged victim was a fourteen-year-old Mexican girl who had been hanging around the drive-in by herself on a Saturday night. Witnesses claimed she climbed willingly into that boy’s truck.”

The novel is a stinging indictment of the mentality of West Texas that finds the logic of racism and xenophobia appealing. Glory endures a vicious sexual assault because, bored and angry at her mother, she accepts a ride from a stranger, a kid not much older than she is. The town, however, turns against her and churns up vicious rumors—which the worst stereotypes sustain—to destroy Glory’s name. That these rumors appear in the local newspaper as news and are repeated in church as gospel reveals the town’s hypocrisy.

“Listen, she says, people know what that little girl is saying happened out there. We just don’t need to be reminded of it all the time. And that word is so ugly. I turn off the water and stand up straight to her face. You mean rape?”

The Ladies Guild, whose members should be especially sympathetic to Glory’s experience, refuse to respond to her on any level except that of their menfolk. They don’t even want to hear the word “rape,” and that ostrich-in-the-sand mentality marks these Christian women as hypocrites.

“In every dream, the desert is alive. She walks carefully, but the moon disappears behind a cloud and she doesn’t see the pile of rocks, or the nest of snakes on the other side of it. When she falls and rises shrieking from the ground, they are already on her.”

At the dark heart of Glory’s character is the struggle of a 14-year-old child to understand the ramifications of being beaten and raped. She’s not interested in the criminal prosecution of her assailant; West Texas would never rise to that level of outrage or justice. She struggles alone because her mother—as a kind of warning to her not to make trouble—is deported to Mexico. In the hotel, she finds her dreams haunted by disturbing images that suggest her loss of innocence. The darkness suggests her helplessness, and the snakes suggest the danger and threat of predatory sex.

“Someday Suzanne is going to die, and when she does, what will people say about her? [...] They are going to say that Suzanne Ledbetter was a good woman, a clever businesswoman, that she toed the line. She was an angel here on earth, they will say, and our town is poorer for her loss.”

Suzanne Ledbetter accepted the West Texas mentality that tells its women to get married, raise kids, kowtow to a husband, and keep a tidy house. She is what she sells: She is Tupperware; she is Avon. Suzanne is without irony. She embraces the identity that West Texas has given her. Here, she writes her own obituary, hoping to be remembered as the perfect woman and mother. 

“Stories can save your life. This, Corrine still believes, even if she hasn’t been able to focus on a book since Potter died […] Nights, she sits on the front porch and lets those stories keep her alive for a little while longer.”

As the novel’s rich with stories and backstories testify, we are the stories we tell about ourselves; we are not what happens to us but rather control the story about what happens. Glory empowers herself to be her own storyteller. Here, Corrine, a retired English teacher, testifies to the power of storytelling and foreshadows Glory’s final redemption as teller of her own story.

“They are so tired that Potter develops a tic in his left eye and starts hearing things that aren’t there. Corrine cries and then hates herself for crying because until she became a mother she never cried, never, never, never.”

The novel centers on the dynamic between parents and children—or, more specifically, why fathers but not mothers can resist the bonds of parenting. (although Potter’s tic is more about not sleeping than about his identity as a father). Corrine loves her new baby but also wants her own life, her own identity as a person, a teacher, a woman. Motherhood isn’t sufficient. The repetition of “never” underscores her emotional anguish.

“I’m going to tell you something, Potter. The only thing I hate more than being home with Alice all day long is feeling guilty about not wanting to do it […] She is trying not to cry and this makes her even angrier.”

In Corrine, the novel explores a woman, accomplished in her profession, educated in the ideas of her culture, and ready to provide a much-needed service to her community, who struggles against the assumption that somehow being a mother should suffice. She wrestles with the guilt she feels, torn between her responsibility to (and love for) her new baby and her need to find herself and define her identity. She undergoes a similar test in the wake of her husband’s suicide—who is she now that she’s no longer Potter’s wife?

“But what a garden she had! The boy had never seen anything like it […] after a while he noticed a deep trench running between her garden and the Pecos River. All by herself, the woman had changed the course of the river.”

The tall tale that D.A. shares with Jesse in his drainpipe home is an assertion of an empowered woman. The story of a woman who not only survives but thrives after the unexpected deaths of her husband and children affirms the figure of the earth mother. The woman tends a garden, and its growth is amazing, despite a drought. However, the nearby town, in the control of men, has no vocabulary for such a powerful woman except to accuse her of witchcraft.

“You sure love w*******, don’t you, Mrs. Whitehead? Know what happens to race traitors, Mary Rose? Maybe I’ll drive over there and rape you myself.”

Racism defines the patriarchy of Odessa. Here, Mary Rose who did nothing but help a beaten child, pays dearly for her compassion. After enduring veiled threats and crank calls, she’s on her way into the courtroom—where, theoretically, justice is racially impartial—when her own neighbors taunt her, mocking her concern, ostracizing her for speaking out, and, most disturbingly, threatening her.

“Did Gloria Ramírez say she had been raped?”

The nadir of the trial, its lowest point, is the logic of racism and hypocrisy in the defense’s argument. Because Gloria didn’t say the word “rape,” the defense holds, the ugly episode was little more than a date gone bad.

“Well come on over, I tell him, I will look forward to blowing your fucking head off.”

At her most assertive yet most vulnerable point, Mary Rose utters these words at Dale Strickland after her testimony reveals the anger simmering in her. A lifetime of enduring male authority (metaphorical if not physical raping) leads her to think like those who made her second-class. The assertion of violence is what Mary Rose, in the showdown in Penwell, must in the end give up. The words are as ugly in her mouth as they would be in a man’s.

“Dale Strickland can still go anywhere he pleases, he can eat ice cream whenever he wants, and go see a football game. What about Glory Ramírez? What happens to her?”

Mary Rose articulates her outrage over the inadequacies of the West Texas criminal justice system. The survivor is dismissed because she’s a child, a girl, a foreigner, redefined as a “loose” girl and a willing participant in her own debasement. The justice system frees the criminal and punishes the victim.

“Hers is the voice of someone whose mind is made up. All her life Corrine has watched this poison move through her students and their parents, through men sitting at the bar or in the bleachers, through churchgoers and neighbors and the town’s fathers and mothers.”

An innocent man is about to be shot because of certainty. Certainty is what Corrine hears in Mary Rose’s rhetoric as she heads out to get Jesse Belden. Certainty is the hobgoblin of little minds and justifies ignoring other views, different perspectives. Certainty, the retired schoolteacher knows, destroys things, and then justifies that destruction. Mary Rose is wrong about Jesse Belden but doesn’t see that.

“Let her go, Strickland. Mary Rose’s voice is a steel rod, and it pierces Corrine to the core. That’s not him, Mary Rose, she yells. It’s not the same man.”

Finally, the assertion of justice and clear thinking emerges—not in an Odessa church (where, ironically, the rhetoric is full of hate), not in a courtroom (where the rhetoric is full of misogyny and xenophobia) but in the wastes of Penwell, asserted by a woman who offers what’s plain to everyone but Mary Rose: Jesse Belden is not Dale Strickland, and killing him would be an egregious offense. He’d be shot in cold blood not for who he is but rather for what he is, a man.

“Thank you for the kindness you showed me, when I was in your hometown. I won’t ever forget it. Love, Jesse Belden.”

Jesse’s simple thank-you to D.A. for helping him get home illustrates what guides the novel away from a pessimistic closing: Even within the claustrophobic culture of West Texas is the possibility of kindness despite—not because of—West Texas, always from a woman whose heart is stirred to help others by circumstances not entirely understood. Jesse’s note is one that Glory could have sent Tina, Mary Rose could have sent Corrine, or Corrine could have sent D.A.

“The cops and the lawyers and the teachers and the churches, the judge and jury, the people who raised that boy and then sent him out into the world, to this town—every one of them is guilty.”

Had the story ended with this angry denunciation of West Texas, the novel would stand as an indictment of author Wetmore’s childhood home, its hypocrisy, its good-old-boy patriarchal structure, its lack of a moral compass not defined by race or gender. Anger isn’t enough. Anger cools into paranoia, fear, and hopelessness. However, although everyone in white male West Texas produced what Dale Strickland is and, in turn, is guilty of the violation of Gloria, the choice is how to respond. Here, Victor expresses free-floating anger—but it’s not the end of Glory’s story.