Goshen Road
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Goshen Road is an elegiac, unvarnished, and empathetic portrait of one working-class family over two decades in rural West Virginia, with sisters Dessie and Billie Price as its urgently beating heart. Bonnie Proudfoot captures them, their husbands, and their children as they balance on the divide between Appalachia old and new, struggling for survival and reconciling themselves with past hurts and future uncertainties as the economy and culture shift around them. The story opens in 1967 with a logging accident and the teenaged Lux Cranfield’s headlong plunge into the courtship of Dessie—a leap he takes not only in the wake of his near-death experience but to exchange his bitter home life for a future with the Prices, a family that appears to have the stability and peace that his own lacks. Within the year Lux and Dessie marry. Meanwhile, Dessie’s rebellious younger sister, Billie, fights her way through adolescence with an eye toward an escape of her own, only to land with Lux’s friend Alan Ray Munn and settle into a life of hardship. Ultimately, the voices and passions of Dessie, Billie, Lux, Alan Ray, and the Cranfield children build on one another to create an unforgettable chorus about the promises and betrayals of love—and what it takes to preserve a family when everything else is uncertain.
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Praise for GOSHEN ROAD
by Bonnie Proudfoot
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The Jeep’s tires skirted the flinty creek bed and climbed toward the ridge. Whenever the road leveled, through stands of sumac and flowering dogwood that had not yet leafed out, he could see fields set back against steep hillsides, homesteads in the full flush of springtime, a few cows or a draft horse or two, pale lilac bushes, a barn, a home, a chimney with smoke trailing upward. The gravel lane crested the wooded hilltop and dropped into a steeper, narrower valley. Further out from town, the road was rougher, folks had moved on. Hand-hewn log cabins and small barns stood empty in fields, siding boards curling away from the framing. Some homes had burned, and some had rotted once the roofs had begun to leak. All that remained were stone chimneys or the barest glimpses of flower-lined paths to sheds or outhouses that had long since sagged into hillsides.
Driving the county back roads, taking it slow, opening another beer, Lux thought about what it took to hold a homeplace together. Some folks seemed to know more than others about making their way on the land. His dad’s elder brother, Uncle Ron, pushing sixty now, his sons and their kin, they knew. They could cut lumber, mill boards, put up hay. They had it all, right there, a flock of chickens, a cow for milk, they could butcher their own hogs, set out traps or hunt for meat, even a pond for bluegill and bass. If a man wasn’t scared of a little hard work, Lux thought, that man could find himself a piece of land set back on some quiet country lane and have just about everything he needed.
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