Pineville Trace

By Wes Blake
Etchings Press, 2024, 140 pages
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This poignant and quietly revelatory novella explores how we can never fully escape our past, and how fully confronting it may offer the opposite of comfort or deliverance. Still, the main character’s trajectory suggests that such reckonings, harrowing though they may be, might offer striking moments of clarity.

The protagonist is Frank Russet, a former Southern revival preacher who at the start of the novella escapes a minimum-security prison in Kentucky, where he’d been serving time for fraud. Frank is accompanied by his preternaturally wise cat, Buffalo, who seems to understand the path they must take to reach a haven that Frank has envisioned: a cabin enveloped by pine trees. Over the following months, he and Buffalo embark on a long, often arduous trek toward this destination, which in the early chapters might be taken as a figment of Frank’s imagination. But eventually, Buffalo leads the two of them to the very cabin Frank had envisioned, in the Canadian wilderness.

The book is described as a novella-in-flash, and most of the stories are two to three pages long. The abbreviated nature of the stories nicely captures the episodic and increasingly fragmented nature of Frank’s reality, and of his sense of time, as past and present become more and more indistinguishable. 

Throughout the novella, Frank seems driven by a desire to keep moving, but in the first two-thirds of the book, the goal seems to be to escape from his past, and from the person he’d once been. In fact, he appears to be able to keep troubling aspects of his past from eclipsing the present entirely. Still, he’s haunted by how the “magic” of his revivalist days changed:

Despite being troubled by this change, Frank, at least in the early chapters of the novella, lives in a present that shimmers with a degree of promise. He reflects: “He felt better now. In his new life. No one expected magic of him anymore. No one expected anything.” 

Also, the natural world into which Frank and Buffalo have escaped, though at times harsh and even life-threatening, offers glimpses of beauty that briefly transcend various hardships that the two of them face. In particular, pine trees–which Frank and Buffalo encounter on their journey to the cabin, and which envelop the cabin itself–seem to serve as a grounding and protective force. And then there’s Buffalo’s companionship, and logistical and spiritual guidance, which give Frank a measure of comfort, direction, and hope.

But in the final third of the novella, a life-altering tragedy strikes, and it sends Frank down a path of self-destruction through constant drinking, a path that also takes him back into the darkest realms of his past, which he never fully reckoned with. At this point in the novella, Frank travels back to the United States, driven to retrace the journey he’d made as a revivalist preacher. This time, however, his musician-brother Henry, who’d accompanied him on the revival circuit, is no longer at his side. At this point in the story, we know that Henry died some time ago, but the circumstances of his death aren’t clear. Yet as the novella draws to a close, we discover that Frank believed himself responsible for Henry’s death, an emotional burden that the Canada-bound version of himself appeared to have kept submerged in his subconsciousness.

But in the final pages of the book, a reckoning with this guilt comes in a surprising, deeply moving, and revelatory way that I’ll leave prospective readers to discover for themselves. At this point in the novella, Frank’s past and present, as well as reality and what might be a hallucinatory state, seem to merge. Yet even during this bending of reality, a new clarity emerges for him. (Frank also seems to reckon with the loss of a woman he’d loved, whom he’d met during travels to Mexico.) 

Here and elsewhere in the novella, the author has made the portrayal of Frank’s internal journey, with all its challenges and revelations, just as compelling as the physical journey he makes first with Buffalo and then accompanied only by unresolved elements of his past. The result is a haunting and emotionally resonant read.