Home Sweet Home

by April Smith

  A party’s going on. There are picnic tables covered with tablecloths. Jo feels nervous—will she remember the names?—but soon she’s enveloped by laughter and welcoming arms and everyone saying it’s a great day. A happy day. Robbie Fletcher is there, along with his wife, Sherry, and their three boys. He never did leave Rapid, still works for the Journal. His parents, Fletch and Stella, are visiting from Arizona. They look tanned and healthy. Stella’s gone gray, and Nelson is sprightly; he’s been working on his second humor book of lawyer jokes. They both are wearing shorts.

  Jo and Warren are pleasantly surprised by the mix of people who show up. Portland does not have a lock on eccentrics. There are old hippies. A country fiddler. A grandma in an electric wheelchair with a parrot on her shoulder. Straight ranching families, churchgoers, liberal types who loved her dad and speak in soft voices of “that terrible time,” a young priest, a biology teacher, hip restaurateurs breaking into Rapid City.

  They’ve taken down the chain link and antennas, leaving a circle of concrete and a shaft that goes three stories down, where the charges will be dropped. Warren, along with another firefighter and some Gulf War veterans, goes over to set the explosives. Jo is proud of how easily he fits in, tossing horseshoes and talking fly-fishing, minding other people’s kids—that rare grounded person who knows what he’s about. Jo and Stell sit on a blanket eating homemade strawberry-rhubarb crumble. Nicole’s made friends and is playing Hula-Hoop. Baby Alice is content in her carrier nearby. Jo looks up at the lofty blue sky filled with gentle white clouds, and smiles. In Portland it is raining all week.

  Scotty comes by and says it’s time. When everyone quiets down, he and Jo make their little speech. “Before we blow this thing up,” they say, “we have an announcement to make.” The two of them, surviving heirs to the Crazy Eights and Lucky Clover, have decided to combine their ranches and buy the land in between. They’re going to put the properties together in order to create a continuous space of more than four thousand acres of open grassland that will become a wildlife sanctuary. They’ll plant switchgrass, bluestem, Indian grass, and woody cover for migrating birds. Wildlife will flourish in its natural habitat. Waterfowl, antelope, painted turtles. Eagles. Badgers. Pheasants. Prairie chickens. Burrowing owls. Wolves, elk, grouse. Scotty will sell off the herd to help finance the deal, and instead of cows, they’ll run native bison.

  Hoots of joy erupt, prayers of exultation. Anyone with anything that can make noise does. Clapping, fiddling, yodeling, pounding on the lids of chili pots. But the biggest noise is to come. The men tell everyone to step back. Nicole clings to Warren’s leg, turning up her elfin face and saying she’s scared. Warren puts his big hands over his daughter’s ears.

  They give Scotty a remote detonator. He yells, “Fire in the hole!” and presses the button. The sharp crack of an explosion booms underground. A geyser of dust shoots up a good thirty feet and everybody cheers. For one brief moment a hole appears. Then the sides collapse, the hole craters, and the earth closes in upon itself.

  On this land, Jo thinks, nature will repair itself. It will grow stronger as seeds are sown and seasons come and go. Animals will mate and birth and suckle and die in the ungroomed wild. There will be no owners. There will be nothing to buy or sell. There will be no ideas. No purpose. There will not be one thing more important than another. There will be only this. Jo can feel her parents and her brother standing close beside her in the long grass. It had been theirs for a while.

  Author’s Note

  When a novelist falls in love with a story there is no letting go—on either side. The story takes root, and soon it is hard to tell if you are writing it, or have merely become the host for a living thing that demands to see the light. That is what happened when I first heard of the Goldmarks, an East Coast family that moved to Okanogan, Washington, in the 1950s to start a new life as cattle ranchers. It was during the height of the McCarthy era, and their liberal views made them the victims of a local smear campaign that cost John Goldmark, a rising political star, his career. In a groundbreaking trial, he sued his attackers and won. But that wasn’t the end of it. The legacy of hate seeped into the next generation, resulting in a sensational multiple murder that was widely covered in the press. As a novelist, I had to write about this, but needed to go deeper, behind the headlines, to create a fictional world in which I could dramatize my own understanding of these extraordinary human events. To start, I radically changed the location, choosing South Dakota for its open plains. I invented a new cast of characters and their stories, but it was the clash of opposing worlds—idealism and fanaticism, city and prairie, sensibility and insanity—that first captured my imagination and remained the inspiration for writing the novel.

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to the Overnell family of Concrete, Washington, for my first contact with cows during my stay at their historic inn. Thanks to Craig Vejraska, owner of the Sunny Okanogan Ranch, who shared his knowledge of raising Angus. In Bucklin, Kansas, I spent long, happy days with Joe and Nancy Moore on the Moore Ranch, riding, branding, sharing chores—and meeting their amazing red heeler, Whiskey, who has a cameo in the book. Marilynn Moses, coordinator of the Okanogan County Historical Society, graciously provided research materials. For legal arguments I relied on The Goldmark Case by William L. Dwyer, and its transcripts of the trial. Much appreciation goes to Evan Levinson for access to the archives of her father, Paul Sherman, who wrote movingly of his experiences in New York during the Depression. For medical expertise, thanks to Kelly Coffey, M.D., and Michelle Abrams, R.N., and gratitude to Jim Arnett and Elaine Kogan for early reads.

  Benjamin Brayfield, former photojournalist for the Rapid City Journal and coincidentally our son, was my guide to the ins and outs of that town, and Emma Brayfield, our daughter, was the expert on animals who kept things real. Each of them accompanied me on field research.

  Fashioning these experiences into a cohesive narrative was solely due to the genius of my editor, Carole Baron. Thank you also to her talented assistant, Ruthie Reisner, as well as the brilliant staff at Knopf. None of this would have come to fruition without the continuing support of Sonny Mehta; my wonderful agent, Molly Friedrich; and my ever-encouraging husband, Douglas Brayfield.

  For more information on the research visit www.aprilsmith.net.

  An Alfred A. Knopf Reading Guide

  Home Sweet Home by April Smith

  The introduction, author biography, discussion questions, and suggested reading that follow are designed to enhance your group’s discussion of Home Sweet Home, the provocative new novel by April Smith.

  Discussion Questions

  1. Why did the Kuseks decide to leave Manhattan and move to the American heartland? Do you think it served their needs at the time? What kinds of situations motivate people to change their lives so radically?

  2. Betsy’s membership in the Communist Party is crucial to the plot. When she first meets Cal it is a problem in their relationship. How is that resolved?

  3. Betsy and Cal must adapt to a completely different way of life in rural South Dakota. What are some of the values they learn to embrace?

  4. Dutch and the other ranchers feel they get no help from the government, which fosters fierce individualism. What is the appeal of supporting McCarthy? How does this relate to politics around the world today?

  5. Cal and Scotty start out as war buddies but their relationship changes when Cal moves west. What goes wrong—and right—between them? Why does Scotty leave town?

  6. Betsy faces major challenges as a mother and a working wife. Do you think she is a strong character? What role does her friend, Stelal Fletcher, play in the book? Would you have let your daughter ride off on a horse with Doris Roy?

  7. Betsy’s sister, Marja, was blind as a child. Howdid that affect the choices Betsy made? Who dominates and does it shift over the years? How does Betsy reconcile her love for her sister with her brother-in-law’s personality?

  8. When Cal f
irst runs for office, how does he convince people to vote for him even though he is a Democrat and the majority of his neighbors are Republicans? What role does the banker, Verna Bismark, play as the lone woman in the politics of Pennington County?

  9. What methods did Senator Joe McCarthy use to create the atmosphere of suspicion and mass hysteria that affected so many Americans? Some readers have responded to this book with memories of family members who were impacted by the Red Scare of the 1950s. Do you have a story to tell?

  10. Did you notice a motif of fatherhood in the novel? What responsibilities do the fathers share and what obstacles do they face?

  11. There are laws that prevent public officials from being sued for slander. Why is the Kusek case different? Considering the risk of more hostility toward his family, why did Cal go forward with the lawsuit?

  12. Jo and Lance are very close. What makes them band together? Do you think growing up on a ranch had an effect, or would they have been as close growing up in New York? On a scale of one to ten, how rebellious was Jo as a teenager?

  13. Was the principle of the high school, Mr. Emry, justified in secretly recording Betsy’s conversation?

  14. How is the FBI portrayed differently in Home Sweet Home as compared to the author’s FBI Special Agent Ana Grey mysteries?

  15. How is Jo treated when she returns to Rapid City as an adult to visit her family members in the hospital? How do the townspeople respond to the violent crime? How does their behavior compare to their treatment of her family as she was growing up? Is their reaction surprising? Why or why not?

  16. Why did Derek LaSalle attack Lance Kusek and his family years after Cal and Betsy were gone? What did he think he could accomplish? What role does Honeybee Jones play in the outcome? Who or what is the villain in this saga?

  17. At the end of the story, Jo believes that “nature will repair itself” (this page). What does she mean, and why do you think the author chose to conclude the book on this note? Would you say the prairie is another character in the book?

  18. The novel was inspired by real events that took place in Washington State. The author moved the story to South Dakota and reimagined the characters. Do you think by writing this as fiction she was able to provide the reader with a more intimate sense of what they experienced? In what ways does fiction have more or less power than nonfiction?

  Thank you for considering some of the ideas raised in this compelling work. If you have questions for April Smith, please visit www.aprilsmith.net and click Contact.

  Suggested Reading

  Abbott, Megan. The Fever

  Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood

  Doctorow, E. L. The Book of Daniel

  Hallberg, Garth Risk. City on Fire

  Hill, Nathan. The Nix

  Kingsolver, Barbara. The Lacuna

  Kushner, Rachel. The Flamethrowers

  Lawrence, Jerome, and Robert Edwin Lee. Inherit the Wind

  Miller, Arthur. The Crucible

  Russo, Richard. Empire Falls

  Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath

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