It’s funny how authors invest the very act of writing with a kind of sweet magic, whether to exorcise demons, or merely to kink history by telling the way it should have been.
Now Jim Fergus, one of the West’s premier literary storytellers, has undertaken the resurrection of a long-dead Indian child, and given her the history he wishes she’d had – not the painful truth of her existence.
“The Wild Girl” is, in every respect, a historical novel, inspired by several true stories. Fergus embroiders his tale with enough threads of truth (and a healthy bibliography) that it resonates with authenticity, but the heart and soul of the story are equal parts of Fergus’ hope and imagination. And it’s a little prayer that somehow the truth can truly be rewritten.
In “The Wild Girl” – Fergus’ first novel since his award-winning “One Thousand White Women” (1998) – a 17-year-old Chicago kid who dreams of being a photographer, Ned Giles, lights out for the still-wild territories of the American Southwest. The rest of America is swamped by the Depression, but the wilderness of the Mexican borderlands is locked in a more desperate life-and-death dance between civilization and old ways.
Devoted to his journal, Giles heads West to join an expedition of blue-blooded adventurers ostensibly recruited to rescue a little boy kidnapped by renegade Apaches. In fact, while there is truly a child missing, it’s also a ploy by the Douglas, Ariz., town fathers to promote the area to rich investors.
When a government tracker gets on the trail of a frightened Apache girl in the Sierra Madre mountains in 1932, young Giles’ world is about to collide with the adventure he sought – and heartbreak he never imagined.
When Giles and a small band of comrades take the girl into the mountains, they encounter brutality, eroticism and their own unexpected changes of heart.
“She is still shy with us,” Giles writes in his diary. “By us, I mean white people … unable even to look us in the eye, though I have the oddest sense that she recognizes me, for she seems even shyer in my presence, and I catch her watching me furtively from time to time. I think she remembers that I washed her in the jail cell, and is ashamed of such an intimate act being performed by a stranger, a man and a White Eyes at that.”
Time warps as the story hurtles toward a provocative ending in 1932, and a conclusion in 1999, when a much older Giles is exploring his memory like he explored the Sierra Madre with his camera.
The story of the rescue expedition is essentially true. The 1883 kidnapping of little Charlie McComas near Silver City, N.M., which provides a fascinating speculative theme to this novel, truly happened too.
And so did the capture of a young Apache girl by a government trapper in 1932. While traveling in Mexico in 1998, Fergus met an old man who told him about how the feral, frightened girl was brought to town in chains and thrown in a jail cell for gawkers to see – just as Fergus portrays in the novel.
What happened to the real wild child? Fergus knows, but he won’t tell.
“It is an unsatisfactory story,” is all he’ll say. “Almost everything about that girl’s life was painful and tragic. I wrote this book largely as a way to try to save her. Of course, finally, this is a goal well beyond the capabilities of a novel, but that never stops us from trying.”
Fergus is a poetic writer, but not a florid one. His gift is in simple prose, vivid action and human stories. Like other literary writers of the West, the landscape and climate loom large as distinct characters that color the hearts, minds and actions of the human players. For the money and genre, Fergus is as good a storyteller as Kent Haruf, William Kittredge, Ivan Doig and Thomas McGuane, and with Mark Spragg and others, represents the next wave of gifted regional authors.
(And for those fans of Fergus’ columns and nonfiction, a sad note: His faithful yellow Labrador Sweetzer, a fixture in Fergus’ 1999 road-essay book, “The Sporting Road,” died in 2003.)
This new novel’s journal structure, punctuated by third-person segments from other points of view, is an authorial minefield, but Fergus tiptoes through it skillfully. While telling his story in the journal structure might have been safer, it also would have mirrored the structure of “One Thousand White Women.” The current commercialism of publishing notwithstanding, who can blame an author for not wanting to repeat himself?
Moreover, who can blame an author for wanting to rewrite an unpleasant history? “The Wild Child” is a tragic life seen through a prism of time, heartbreak and distance, and the light has been refracted into something poignant and spiritual.
Newspaperman and novelist Ron Franscell is the author of “Angel Fire” and “The Deadline.”
The Wild Girl: The Notebooks of Ned Giles, 1932
By Jim Fergus
Hyperion, 368 pages, $23.95
