Maud's Line by Margaret Verble

Maud began to feel a growing hatred for who she was and where she lived. She was sick to death of dirt, sick of chickens, sick of guns and snakes, and, most of all, sick of dead bodies gnawed by animals. Her only chance for escape had been that bright blue canvas rocking her way. She cursed Booker out loud. She stormed at his character until she remembered he'd left her a letter. She just didn't know what it said. But that didn't really matter. He hadn't come back for their wedding. That told the words.

Maud Nail is a Cherokee woman living in Oklahoma during the Great Depression. She's just turned eighteen, and several of the local boys have their eye on her, but she's drawn to Booker, a traveling salesman whose bright blue wagon tokens a wider world. Booker is drawn to Maud in turn, but he has entered her life at a moment when many changes come in to complicate things. First, her father disappears, implicating himself in the murder of a pair of white farmers who have been known to have designs on the Nail allotment. Her brother Lovely has become what my relatives would call "touched," seeing visions of the dead, and Maud fears that the culprit might be a case of rabies, brought on by the carcass of a dead dog deposited in the house by the aforementioned farmers. One by one, the men in Maud's life leave, first her father, then Lovely, and then finally Booker, leaving her alone on her allotment to fend for herself, and to face the prospect of an unexpected pregnancy.

One interesting thing about Maud's Line is that it tells a story about Native life that is adjacent to a more familiar one, the killing of the Osage that's depicted in Killers of the Flower Moon. Verble makes a single off-hand reference to the Osage driving around in Cadillacs. Maud is Cherokee, not Osage, and her allotment holds no oil, and yet it is the target of white mischief all the same. The machinations of the white farmers are a backdrop to a much deeper story about individual determination, and--since, after all, they are quickly murdered--less integral to the story than I was first expecting. But the novel also presents a lot of interesting and subtle suggestions about the way that early 20th century Cherokee did and did not fit into the larger systems of white society that surrounded them. The disappearance of Maud's father and brother, for instance, seem to take place in a context in which itinerancy is more expected, and where her uncles are always "laying out," that is, shacking up at the house of their current love interest. There's a kind of fluidity and freedom in Maud's life that I suspect would seem unacceptable in white households of the time. When Booker leaves, it's because (he says) he struggles morally with the way she lies to protect her father from the sheriff, but I get the sense, too, that he is reacting to something in her way of life that is to him both unfamiliar and difficult to put into words.

Maud's Line is competently, briskly written; it is bracingly forward about violence and sex. There's a hardbitten realism to it--I expected, for example, that the murder of the white farmers would turn out to be a deeper mystery, but we learn in the end that Maud's father really was involved. Later (spoiler alert spoiler alert), Lovely commits suicide, forestalling any idea that the novel will be about pat reconciliations or restitutions. Still, in the end, Booker does come back, though perhaps a little dimmer in our eyes, and a little less the worldly traveler that we once saw him as. In the end, Maud leaves with Booker, headed to a life of motherhood in Oklahoma's version of the city, and to do this she must abandon her allotment, that portion of land afforded to her by her citizenship in the Cherokee nation. It's a moment of great ambiguity, and only possibly a happy ending.