Saving Faith (50 page)

Writers are mostly a nostalgic lot. We pine for the past and have an uncanny ability to remember everything we’ve ever seen, heard, loved, hated, or suffered through. We drink up history, be it official or the juicier pieces represented by rumor and innuendo, or sometimes even bald-faced lies. And then we knead, polish, embellish, and cajole these observations, musings, and hyperbole into readable prose that others are willing to plunk down cash to experience. Writers also tend to be an emotional group. We grow unduly teary or cheerful, especially over events from times past, as memories, seen through the storyteller’s skewed prism, take on heightened, even exaggerated, significance. I must confess that I have these “afflictions” in abundance. I treasure memories, both real and imagined, from my youth. I have always been fascinated by the tortured, fiercely divided history of my native Virginia and the South in general. I spend much time exploring the lives of my parents’ families. A lost uncle here, a wandering great-grandfather there, a funny story of the paternal family from the old country, a poignant tale of my maternal family’s struggles in the mountains; I get the shivers each time I unearth such priceless nuggets.

Indeed, this nostalgia appears to be gaining strength, the older I become and the more stories I write. I think that’s chiefly a function of my role as a father (now in its seventh year), and my ever-growing sense of my own mortality. I want my children to know where they came from: what their ancestors were like, how they struggled and persevered through both failures and triumphs. Isn’t that sense of family how the vaunted twin pillars of value and character are built? Whatever the reason or reasons, I have been looking more and more to the past in an attempt to understand why life today is so confusing and troublesome.

We are now in a time of change so dramatic that it rivals, or perhaps surpasses, anything that has come before. It is indeed different this time. At least all the stock-market jocks tell us so, if only to justify billion-dollar capitalizations of companies with no firm plans to earn money in any way other than by selling their own stock. We are in one of the greatest economic booms ever, with unemployment at historic lows, consumer confidence at historic highs, and welfare rolls, rightly or not, being pared down with blazing speed all across the country. We are the single remaining superpower, with only terrorists, both foreign and homegrown, and the occasional “rogue nation” (now considered so harmless that they’re “nations of concern”) to worry about. Serious crime is down across the board. The Internet has, in a mere five years, brought us closer to being a global community than people ever thought possible. We have more information available to us than ever before, at speeds faster than ever before. The world is, arguably, freer than it’s ever been. Technology continues to make our lives more comfortable and more productive. We are living longer and in better health. All in all, it is a very rosy picture.

So why are we so miserable? New horrors inflicted by humans upon each other have become a daily occurrence, and we seem to grow less shocked at each new one. When acts of depravity are committed these days, their details are disseminated with lightning speed. Then, before the ink has even dried on reports of the original event, it is followed by acts of even greater atrocity. Business rocks at the speed of the Web, with machines of all kind going twenty-four hours a day, and the information flow never stops. Employers expect their employees to keep pace and never stop working; at least, that’s how I interpret the weary and tense countenances I see everywhere. We are surrounded by homes with absent parents and children left to grow up without the benefit of mature hands guiding them. Who hasn’t grown weary of the relentless clack of computer keys on planes, or the ubiquitous buzz of cell phone conversations? The failure of companies, ideas, fortunes, and lives occur at astonishing speed. There is no margin of error; there is no room to be merely capable and willing. Either you are the best or you are not. Either you win or you lose. Business leaders boast that American companies have never been leaner, meaner, stronger. But the ironic companion to all this is that there are angry, frustrated, vastly disenchanted people tramping through life at all levels. “Civility is gone,” proclaim major newspapers across the land. These days, folks are often taken aback when someone is actually polite. We’re not so far from the following headline: TWO HUMANS ACTUALLY SEEN SMILING AT EACH OTHER ON STREET TODAY. At certain levels we have all grown immune to this rudeness, if only because we feel powerless against it. Americans today, though they may pass judgment, are disinclined to reprimand even the most boorish behavior. They know that if they do, they could be physically attacked or, perhaps even worse, sued and put at risk of losing everything in courts of justice that more and more have become courts of frivolity, conveyors of lottery-style wealth to the winner.

In case I’m not being entirely clear, I fear that we are coming apart at the seams. No doubt many will argue that American society is routinely in jeopardy of doing just that, only to be followed by a swing of the pendulum the other way. We live in a country of unsettling extremes. However, to me, the rending of social fabric seems more pronounced this time around. Perhaps my awareness of this is another part of being a father; I have two small children whom at some point I will be leaving behind to deal with this mess. And as a parent I find myself ill-equipped to advise them on how to do so, because I don’t have a clue how to deal with it myself. But it seems to me that we are caring less and less about each other; people in pain have become objects chiefly to ignore. Perhaps that response is partly a bunker mentality about a world that, if not completely mad, is at least markedly less sane than any in recent memory. In essence, having given up trying to understand how we can commit acts of ingenious depravity against one another and then write songs, books, and movies about them, how the resentment and sheer hatred among the have-nots, the have-somethings, and the people who have too much are building to explosive levels, we pull the wagons in a tight circle and dare anyone to come hurt us and our very select clan of loved ones. That reaction, while understandable, leaves little opportunity to reach out to others.

So, in response to what I had observed over the last few years of dizzying social and economic change, I fell back on the only thing I am halfway proficient at: I wrote a story. Not just any story, but a story set in the past (1940 to be precise), and set in a place my family and I know very well: the mountains of southwest Virginia.
Wish You Well
is a tale of tragedy, hope, and survival, failure, prejudice, hatred, justice and injustice, faith, love, and the tender art of living, spread among generations of family. That it’s about family means it is about life, in all its swell of good and endearing moments, and in all its challenging sadness, in all its mean-spirited ways. I have no delusions that this book will, in any way, affect the problems I have discussed above. Unfortunately, not that many people read books anymore. A lousy movie will capture a far larger audience than the greatest novel ever written. In fact, a recent news story in a prominent East Coast newspaper even suggested that with the new technologies available, we might not even need authors anymore. We will have books with sound and video chips, and the reader will rewrite a canned work any way he wants, or even create it himself, however unskilled he may be at crafting tales. Thus, the novel, as we know it, will go the way of the horse and buggy, to be replaced with something snazzier, with more bells and whistles, if not more heart and substance. Yet the power of a book lies in the power of the story, which can never be underestimated; the strength and resiliency of any writing comes from the themes dealt with in the pages and the fire sparked by its characters.

Wish You Well
is by far the most personal story I’ve ever written. At the heart of it lies a connection between generations that represents a pipeline of information, knowledge, and experience that I feel dwarfs anything delivered via high-speed modem or Cisco router. An important part of what makes us human, I believe, is a sense, both large and small, of where we come from, and that means a connection to the lives of other people, and to their pasts. This intimacy used to be delivered in many ways. For some, it was as simple as a grandfather’s tales on the front porch after Sunday dinner. Or the discovery of that box in the attic filled with the treasures of lives lived long ago, lives that had a direct and lasting path to the finder. While writing
Wish You Well
, I surrounded myself with photographs, yellowed and curled with age, of my ancestors. I drew on these pictures for inspiration, working from the outside in. I would start with the surroundings, the jagged, tree-covered Appalachian rock, the rolling Virginia valleys, the farm buildings, the animals, and then I would finally arrive at the people,
my
people, and my eyes would wander over their shoes and their worn clothing and their sensible hats. I would trace their leathered hands, their lean but mountain-strong torsos, and finally reach their faces. I spent much time there, searching each feature, and then finally my eyes would come to rest on theirs. I would stare at them, and they seemed to stare back, over the span of a hundred years or so, and I wondered if they ever could have imagined me as I am today, see me as sharply defined before them, just as I saw them. Some lived long enough for me to actually know them. Many did not. Thus, I am left with old letters, stories handed down from aged relatives, and family bibles filled with loopy old-fashioned script documenting births, marriages and deaths. All these personal possessions have survived much to reach my hands and fill in the gaps that mortality inflicts. To keep this chain of lives going is a responsibility that I find daunting yet also critical to what we refer to as our humanity. Understanding how others have suffered helps us deal with our own suffering. The fact that it’s our flesh and blood makes the lesson even more forceful. The same is true in happier times. When we learn of compassionate acts rendered long ago it helps us understand why we seek to help others, and makes us more apt to do the same. When we understand that a mother or great-grandfather overcame hurdles that dwarf the problems confronting folks today, it helps us get by. It is all there, it has all been done before. Pain and suffering, happiness and wonder, dreams realized through hard work, passionate outcries against injustice, one person reaching out to take and hold and comfort another: these acts and desires have all been around since the first humans took their first breaths. Understanding this means that even in the worst of possible times, even when we feel most alone, we have the strong backs of family supporting us. However long ago their physical forms vanished from this earth, they are still helping us to get by.

Wish You Well
is a novel that I look forward to reading to my children when they are older. It will tell them how members of their family were born, grew up, worked, loved, cried, suffered, persevered, and then passed on. I will show them childhood photographs of family members, long since grown and now dead, and start them wondering about these ancestors—their lives, their dreams, their fears—until they understand that the people in the photos are
their
people. Even that is only a start. The most it can do is whet my kids’ appetites for more knowledge of their family; there is no guarantee that their appetites will be so whetted by a single book, or by old photographs. That may be too easy an answer to the complex question of how we understand family. Still, all I can do is gently but
consistently
point them in that direction and then let them form their own decisions. The process is one that really never ends. It is an innately human endeavor, to pass down memories and experiences, creating a chain wherein the events of today become the history of tomorrow. When we do pass on our cherished links to the past, we do it well. The problem is that we are doing so less often. And once the chain is truly broken, repair may be impossible.

Thus it is up to each of us to take our own journey to yesterday to make sense of today. I refuse to believe that our future is so different that the past no longer has value as a guidepost, as a touchstone. In fact, we may need the lessons and strength garnered from the past more today than ever before. A fast computer connection never made anyone more human or more socially responsible. A tech-laden stock portfolio alone never made anyone a pleasure to be around. The next deal, the next combination of powerhouse companies, the next technological breakthrough—even if it has us vacationing on Mars—will never make us more decent, or caring, or compassionate. There are, undoubtedly, numerous treasures lying ahead of us. I hope they never dissuade us from looking behind, to the path that is strewn with an older, more abiding wealth.

Read on for an excerpt from
Wish You Well
by David Baldacci

 

CHAPTER ONE

The air was moist, the coming rain telegraphed by plump, gray clouds, and the blue sky fast fading. The 1936 four-door Lincoln Zephyr sedan moved down the winding road at a decent, if unhurried, pace. The car’s interior was filled with the inviting aromas of warm sourdough bread, baked chicken, and peach and cinnamon pie from the picnic basket that sat so temptingly between the two children in the backseat.