I Am One of You Forever

Set in the mountains of western North Carolina during the early 1940s, the novel is narrated by Jess, a boy looking back on his childhood on his grandmother's 100-acre farm. The story unfolds in episodic chapters, each centered on a visiting relative or formative event, blending realistic rural life with moments of lyrical fantasy. At its heart is Jess's relationship with his father, Joe Robert, and with Johnson Gibbs, an 18-year-old orphan who comes to live and work on the farm.

In an opening section called "The Overspill," Jess recalls a period when his family lived in a small house below the farm while his mother, Cora, a schoolteacher, visited her brother in California. Jess and Joe Robert grow closer in her absence, bonding over minor mishaps. Joe Robert builds an ornamental bridge over the creek and clears a fallow half-acre as a garden, buying a red silk ribbon to mark it as a gift. Before Cora returns, the Challenger Paper and Fiber Corporation opens its upstream reservoir, and floodwater batters the bridge from its piers and sweeps it away. Cora arrives by taxi to see them standing helpless, the ribbon dangling from Joe Robert's fingers. In a surreal transformation, a tear on her cheek grows into a luminous globe that envelops all three of them.

In "The Good Time," Jess is ten, living with Joe Robert, Cora, and his tireless grandmother. Johnson Gibbs arrives from an orphanage, a big, easygoing young man. He and Joe Robert fight on their first day and emerge from the brawl as inseparable friends. The three males form a high-spirited conspiracy against the grandmother's authority, streamlining her routines and refusing busywork. Joe Robert leads a prank in which they eat the grandmother's fancy chocolates and replace each piece with a foil-wrapped pullet egg; when visitors squeeze the rotten ones, they burst. Johnson privately confides to Jess that he has enlisted in the army. He also claims great prowess at baseball pitching and fly fishing but proves spectacularly incompetent at both. Sitting by a stream after a failed fishing trip, Johnson tells Jess this is the best time he has ever had and fears the best is now over.

"The Posse" recounts the visit of Uncle Luden, Cora's brother, a generous, hard-drinking ladies' man who left the farm at 16 for California. He arrives with lavish gifts, and the telephone rings constantly with women calling for him. One morning he returns drunk, lines up 12 dimestore dolls on a fence, and shoots each one while reciting the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, a recovery program for alcohol addiction. He leads the family on a predawn picnic up Ember Mountain to watch the sunrise. Joe Robert reveals he has been writing the anonymous threatening letters Uncle Luden has received from jealous husbands, and he and Johnson stage a prank: Johnson impersonates a vengeful husband storming the house during a thunderstorm while Joe Robert convinces Uncle Luden to climb onto the roof. The trick sobers him; he stops drinking and soon departs, uttering his melancholy catchphrase, "Wahoo."

"The Beard" brings Uncle Gurton, a silent old man whose legendary beard, grown for over 40 years, is tucked inside his overalls. Joe Robert slips a sleeping draught into Uncle Gurton's buttermilk and uncovers the beard, which begins to billow fantastically, flooding the room like a silver river from which emerge a birchbark canoe with Cherokee paddlers, a mermaid, and a white whale.

In "The Change of Heart," Joe Robert defends his friend Virgil Campbell, a grocer, from a zealous proselytizer named Canary by pretending to have received a divine vision. Eleven days later, a violent storm strikes while Joe Robert, Johnson, and Jess are in the barn. Through an opening they see iridescent creatures swimming inside a cylinder of lightning, and a bolt lifts all three into the air. They silently agree not to speak of the experience, though months later Joe Robert admits he heard a Voice confirming that Canary is worthless.

"The Furlough" marks Johnson's return on military leave. He spends his days courting Laurie Lee, a glamour-conscious local girl, and confides to Jess that he is considering going AWOL. Joe Robert, worried about a hasty marriage, replaces Johnson's chewing gum with Feenamint, a laxative. Both Johnson and Laurie Lee make constant dashes to the bathroom, and the romance cools. On the Saturday Johnson leaves, each family member hangs back from driving him to the station, unable to bear watching him go. The departure is wordless and tearful.

In an interlude titled "The Telegram," news arrives that Johnson has been killed in a training accident at Fort Bragg, a military base in North Carolina, when a mortar round exploded prematurely. The telegram becomes a supernatural presence, sitting propped against the sugar bowl; no matter how many times the family hides or burns it, it returns. One evening Jess stares at it until it furls into a yellow rose, utters a mournful whimper, and spirals into darkness, disappearing forever.

"The Storytellers" introduces Uncle Zeno, whose flat, inexhaustible tales absorb their subjects so completely that Jess theorizes the characters leave the everyday world and exist only inside the narratives. When Uncle Zeno begins retelling the family's own story at supper, Joe Robert retreats to the porch feeling weak and light-headed. He rises, steps into shadow, and vanishes from Jess's sight just as the story concludes.

"The Maker of One Coffin" brings Uncle Runkin, a death-obsessed old man who arrives with a handmade black walnut coffin and sleeps in it. Joe Robert places a teaching skeleton in the coffin as a prank, but it vanishes overnight; Uncle Runkin has hidden all 206 bones throughout the house, where the family continues finding them for 20 years. Alone, Jess climbs into the coffin and dreams of meeting Death; both scream in mutual fright. The scream is actually Uncle Runkin discovering Jess and crying "Yipes!"

In "Satan Says," Jess and Johnson plot Halloween revenge against Doc McGreavy, the feared local veterinarian, for allegedly poisoning their collie, Queenie. They creep to McGreavy's house and find him eating supper with his stallion, Satan, inside the kitchen. When the horse appears to speak in a terrifying voice, Jess flees in blind terror. Johnson reveals the voice was his own; he had collaborated with McGreavy on a counter-prank.

"The Wish" follows a fishing trip Joe Robert and Jess take after Johnson's death, the first time they have been much alone together. They catch bass on a mountain lake, but rain strands them on the water. In the shack of their boat-rental host, an old man who has endured his own devastating losses, they eat fried fish while rain pounds the walls. Driving home through the drizzle, Joe Robert hits the steering wheel and cries: "Oh Jesus Jesus. I wish Johnson Gibbs hadn't got killed."

"Bright Star of a Summer Evening" recounts the visit of Aunt Samantha Barefoot, the grandmother's cousin and a famous fiddler. Jess learns his grandmother was once a gifted musician forbidden by her stern, religious father from performing at a festival in Scotland; she vowed never to play again. On Aunt Sam's last evening, she coaxes the grandmother onto the battered piano, then stops singing mid-chorus, leaving the grandmother playing alone in hesitant, broken chords.

In the final section, "Helen," Jess, Johnson, Uncle Luden, and Joe Robert are stranded by snow in a hunting cabin near the Tennessee border. After midnight, all three men murmur the name "Helen" in their sleep and sit upright simultaneously, eyes open but sightless. Jess glimpses a face framed by black hair before it vanishes. The next morning, Johnson appears in the doorway silhouetted against the glare of sunlight on snow and asks: "Well, Jess, are you one of us or not?" Because Johnson is dead by the time Jess narrates, the question resonates as an invitation into the world of memory and storytelling that these men inhabit.