He’s said this before, but “The Caretaker” may very well be Ron Rash’s last novel.
The book, which published Sept. 26, one day after Rash’s 70th birthday, is set in midcentury Appalachia, in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, where the politics of small-town social class threaten the marriage of Jacob, the only son of a prominent local family, and his teenage wife Naomi, an outlander who works as a hotel maid. When Jacob gets drafted into the Korean War, he tasks his best friend Blackburn — the disfigured caretaker of the town’s hilltop cemetery — to watch over the pregnant and friendless Naomi.
Shunned by the townsfolk, Blackburn and Naomi grow closer until a confrontation with Jacob’s father sends Naomi running back home to Tennessee to await her husband’s return. But when Jacob is seriously wounded in combat and is sent home for a long convalescence, his parents see an opportunity to rid the family of Naomi and the baby for good.
Speaking by phone from his home in Clemson, Rash said the idea for the book came from a story he heard years ago.
“There had been a young woman and young man — I think they were both teenagers — who eloped, and the parents of the young man were incredibly upset,” Rash said.
This was during World War II, Rash said, so the man eventually got drafted. While he was gone, the family had his wife murdered, then claimed she died of natural causes.
“I don’t know if her husband ever found out. It was in a small town, and there was a sense that a lot of people in the town knew about it,” Rash said. “I just found that a fascinating story, and I always thought, ‘you know, there has to be a novel there.’”
He had also always wanted to set a novel on his grandparents’ farm near Boone, North Carolina, but had never been able to find a story to fit that place.
“These things just started coming together, and I realized that the caretaker of the cemetery was going to be kind of a central character of the book,” Rash said.
But the writing process was fraught. Despite being a short novel — it’s just 272 pages — Rash wrote over a thousand pages in drafts.
“I kept getting it wrong and giving up on it. I gave up on it four or five times,” he said. “I didn’t know if it was ever going to work. Even when I pretty much invested five years into it, I still wasn’t sure.”
After all that, writing another novel “might kill me off,” Rash joked.
“I’ve said this before, but this may be my last novel, and if it is, I think it ends the way I’d like my last novel to end — on a more hopeful note,” he said. “It’s the way I’d like to finish up a career.”
Rash will give a free book talk and signing 7-9 p.m. on Oct. 6 at the Capt. Kimberly Hampton Memorial Library in Easley.
