“The Night Journal,” by Elizabeth Cook (Viking, 320 pages, $24.95)
They were known as Harvey Girls. Young women of good character needing to earn a living and eager for a little adventure, they worked as waitresses in the Fred Harvey Houses along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad line.
In “The Night Journal,” Hannah Troy Bass is such a girl and the night journal is hers. In the first entry, dated July 22, 1891, she describes the train wreck she survived on her way to the famed Montezuma resort outside Las Vegas, N.M., where she was to work. Later she tells of her feelings for the legendary railroad engineer she marries and seldom sees, of her friendship with the powerful Morales family, and the birth of her daughter.
Yet the story opens as Meg Mabry, Hannah’s great granddaughter and a successful medical engineer in Austin, Texas, is trying to put her life together. Her love life is in shambles and to make matters worse, she cannot seem to shake loose of her domineering grandmother, Claudia Bass, known as Bassie, who has made an illustrious career out of editing Hannah’s journals.
When Bassie learns some bones have been dug up at New Mexico’s Pecos Pueblo visiting center not far from where she spent her early childhood, she fears they may be the bones of beloved family pets, and she demands Meg take her to New Mexico to oversee the dig.
Meg has deliberately never read her great grandmother’s journal. Yet when she and Bassie arrive in New Mexico where Hannah actually lived, Meg finally opens the pages for the first time.
Jim Layton, the superintendent of the Pecos Pueblo ruins and an admirer of Bassie’s since his college days, is in charge of the dig. All goes as it should until a horrific discovery is made, suddenly throwing the truth of Hannah’s journal and the reliability of Bassie’s memories in doubt. And Meg and Jim Layton go in search of her family’s past.
The use of the narrative shift from present to past does serve to connect the three generations of women. Yet the core of the novel is its history and, unfortunately, the full effect of the story within the journal never gets its due.
“Six Bits a Day,” by Elmer Kelton (Forge, 252 pages, $23.95)
Veterans of two earlier novels and the 1995 movie starring Tommy Lee Jones and Sissy Spacek, Hewey Calloway and his brother, Walter, are back again, this time in their younger years. They have left the family farm in Kansas and are heading west in hopes of joining a cattle drive again. But it is 1889, and cattle drives are pretty much a thing of the past.
By now they are in West Texas cow country, where they have heard large ranches need men willing to work. Hewey is willing to do almost anything as long as he can do it in a saddle. But Walter yearns for the feel of a plow in his hands and a place of his own.
Down to their last chunk of hog belly, the brothers are happy to get work for six bits a day on the Pecos River ranch owned by the penny-pinching C.C. Tarpley. On pay day, while Hewey happily drinks up his wages at the saloon, his brother is falling in love with the girl who works at the boardinghouse, a situation Hewey knows could break up their team. He persuades his brother to go with him to San Antonio, where they are to pick up 600 head of cattle for their boss and drive them back to the Double C Ranch.
Thus begins a series of adventures that is Kelton at his best. Along the way, the brothers are joined by a black man just mustered out of the cavalry, and the unlikely trio makes its way east. Kelton knows them all. The territory is near to his heart, and he is enjoying the return visit. This is a lively story with its full share of twists and turns. All of it pure fun.
Sybil Downing is a Boulder novelist who writes monthly on new regional fiction.
