The Living

In the fall of 1855, Ada and Rooney Fishburn arrive with their five-year-old son Clare and infant son Glee at the settlement of Whatcom on Bellingham Bay, in what is now northwestern Washington State. They carry everything they own, including a feather-bed hauled 2,000 miles from Illinois, a journey that cost them their three-year-old son Charley, crushed under their wagon's wheels on the overland trail. The Lummi chief Chowitzit greets them and becomes a vital ally, providing seed potatoes and salmon, while the settlers build a stockade against raiding northern tribes. Rooney clears enormous Douglas firs by lantern light, and the family puts down roots in a raw, forested wilderness at the continent's edge.

The novel follows several generations of settlers and their Lummi and Nooksack neighbors across four decades, tracing cycles of boom and bust, sudden death and stubborn endurance. In 1858, the Fraser River gold rush briefly turns Whatcom into a tent city of thousands, but when British Columbia requires mining licenses purchased in Victoria, the miners vanish and the town collapses back to 60 families. Chowitzit dies, believing himself cursed. The Fishburns' daughter Nettie dies of an earache at four. In 1872, Rooney inhales poison gas while digging a well and dies; his neighbor George Judd jumps in to save him and also dies. Clare and Glee haul both bodies out with a gaff hook.

A parallel story follows thirteen-year-old John Ireland Sharp, who in 1872 accompanies his father and a survey party up the Skagit River to map a possible railroad route through the Cascade Mountains. On a mountain trail, they discover a young Skagit man named Wakashak who has been staked to the ground through his body by enemy Thompson Indians, still alive but dying. The sight permanently marks John Ireland. When his entire family drowns in a boating accident near Madrone Island, the orphaned boy is taken in by the Obenchain family. His foster brother, twelve-year-old Beal Obenchain, is a troubled boy who beats John Ireland savagely on the beach. John Ireland later witnesses Beal strangle a calf in the barn, an act that seems to relieve Beal of a crushing depression. The island schoolteacher, Miss Arvilla Pulver, an Oberlin College graduate, recognizes John Ireland's intellect and prepares him for college.

In 1874, Minta Randall, a kindhearted daughter of a Baltimore senator, marries the resolute Eustace Honer, and the couple emigrates to farm 320 acres of bottomland in Goshen, a settlement twelve miles from Whatcom. Clare Fishburn, who has moved to Goshen with his mother Ada, becomes Eustace's close friend. The hop ranch prospers under the stewardship of Nooksack foreman Kulshan Jim. Some years later, Eustace drowns when he slips into a logjam the community has spent all summer clearing on the Nooksack River. His nine-year-old son Hugh watches his father vanish beneath the water.

Minta's parents and her younger sister June travel from Baltimore to comfort her, arriving on the very evening Minta's house catches fire. Her six-year-old son Bert and three-year-old daughter Lulu both perish in the blaze. Nooksack neighbors perform healing rituals for the grieving Minta. Senator Randall urges her to return east, but she refuses: "I am at home. This is my own place" (162). June stays behind and begins a courtship with Clare Fishburn. A widowed miner later asks Minta to rear his three children after their mother dies, and Minta agrees eagerly. June marries Clare, and they settle in Whatcom, where Clare teaches high school.

John Ireland Sharp, meanwhile, returns from Oberlin College and a stint teaching in New York's Lower East Side, where he witnessed children sleeping in hay barges while the Vanderbilt family built a $3 million mansion nearby. He marries Pearl Rush, the first white girl born in the settlement, and becomes Whatcom's high school principal. In 1885, his own People's Party leads the expulsion of Chinese workers from the region. When John Ireland witnesses mobs in Seattle forcing 350 Chinese men onto a steamer, he abandons socialism: "God help me, I was wrong" (88). He hires two Chinese brothers, Johnny Lee and Lee Chin, for his household and withdraws from political life.

The novel's central dramatic thread begins in March 1891, when Beal Obenchain, now a thirty-one-year-old hermit living in a hollow cedar stump, murders Lee Chin by lashing him to a wharf piling at low tide and leaving him to drown. Obenchain concludes that killing directly fails to capture a person's life force and conceives a new experiment: He will tell a man he intends to kill him, then do nothing, possessing the man's mind through fear. He draws Clare Fishburn's name from a bucket of paper strips and, late one December night in 1892, enters Clare's parlor to announce, "I am going to kill you, shortly ... for my own reasons ... with which you need not concern yourself" (206). Clare begins the slow process of believing him.

Clare takes out a life insurance policy and acquires a sidearm, but also finds himself examining his life with new intensity. He tells June, who proposes shooting Obenchain or fleeing to Portland. Clare refuses, and June argues passionately that she prefers "any degree of disgrace" to losing him (231). Walking the winter beach alone, Clare confronts the knowledge that his footprints will end somewhere without warning.

The town booms in anticipation of Jim Hill's Great Northern Railway terminus. On the day the community gathers to launch a neighbor's racing yacht, Wall Street panics: The U.S. Treasury's gold reserves fall below the danger limit, and banks begin failing across the country. Hill locates his terminus in Seattle, not Whatcom, and real estate values collapse. Clare loses virtually all of June's legacy and splits cedar shakes in his backyard for scrip. Ada Fishburn Tawes, Clare's mother, dies in his parlor, calling out to her long-dead oxen from the overland trail: "Up, Maude. Up, Bright. Up now, up. Up!" (375-76).

Obenchain, increasingly tormented by his own emptiness, intercepts Clare on the railroad trestle over the bay and tells him he is not going to kill him after all. Looking out over the Nooksack plain, Clare sees a farmer pulling his own plow and perceives that "the earth was plowing the men under, and the horses under, and the plows" (396). Johnny Lee discovers in Obenchain's stump house a porcelain figurine that had been cut from his murdered brother's neck. Both Johnny Lee and John Ireland Sharp seek Obenchain that morning, John Ireland intending to share an inheritance from their foster mother. Obenchain's body is found in the tidewater under the trestle by Hugh Honer and Vinnie, a younger Fishburn relation. The death is never resolved.

Hard times persist for four years. Clare wins election to the state legislature. John Ireland retreats to Madrone Island, where he becomes a solitary who records wind speed and studies mosses. In July 1897, Clare and his family sail to the island to visit him. That evening, the Seattle newspaper reports rich gold strikes in the Klondike. Pearl Sharp declares, "Hard times is over" (443). That night, Hugh Honer swings out on a rope over a forest pond, sees stars reflected in the black water below, and lets go, flinging himself loose into the stars.