Read of the Month: “The Watersmith” by Yance Wyatt

Water imagery cascades through Yance Wyatt’s lyrical literary novel, The Watersmith, from beginning to end in both expected and very unexpected ways.

Three epigraphs illustrate the religious importance of water with quotations from the Buddha, Allah, and Jesus.—totally expected use of water in a novel. So are the thunder, rainstorms, rivers, and lakes created by the Tennessee Valley Authority.

But then, there’s the short opening section titled “Inlet.” Jack Calloway carries a thermos into an AA meeting. Everyone at the meeting—and readers like me—first assume liquor is in the thermos. But he tells us he has come to tell his story honestly and carry his son along with him through the Twelfth Step. Raises the question—why isn’t the son doing this himself? Can one person rehab another from alcoholism? Seems a bit odd. It only gets odder:

JJ: “Jack rattles me around that insulated echo chamber, the hollow sound making all of us salivate with remembrances of refills.”

Jack: “I turned him into an ice cube, believe it or not. Here’s how it happened.”

Say what? Who is that “me?” I had to read it twice before accepting that a son turned into an ice cube was the narrator for that short first segment of the novel. Many pages pass by before we understand what’s going on.

Yes, a catchy gimmick starts the novel, but it was the nuanced humanity of the characters—their love for each other and their suffering—that kept me turning the pages. At times Jack’s behavior is so reprehensible, it is impossible to empathize with him. At other moments, his tenderness is so endearing I wanted to hug him. Both lyrical and gritty, The Watersmith is an outstanding debut novel.

The next section begins with a phone call announcing the death of both of Jack’s parents. His wife Jolene takes the phone call. The author drops another piece of shocking foreshadowing as Jolene speaks into the phone:

“ ‘I see, I see, I see,’ said my wife, three days before she lost the ability to do just that.”

Now, I really have to keep reading. Both of Jack’s parents die—and three days later his wife can no longer see? What gripping tension and suspense!

The story takes place in a small Tennessee town, Show Low, half of which was drowned by the TVA. Quickly we learn that Jack Calloway and Jolene Treadwell, like Romeo and Juliet, have been disowned by their feuding parents, one set rich, the other not. They haven’t spoken to their parents for eighteen years, ever since Jolene got pregnant. Not even the arrival of Jack Jr., known as JJ, brought peace to the warring tribes.

Yet the death of Jack’s parents sends him to the local funeral home where Jolene’s brother Percy is offering him a choice of caskets or urns. Percy also offers this insight:

“A funeral is more for the living than the dead. Grief isn’t about pitying a loved one. It’s about pitying ourselves for having to go one without them.”

This is the first of several astute observations Percy makes.

Not only the parents’ bodies must be dealt with, so must their property. Jack loads JJ into his pickup and bounces along “poorly patched roads” to visit his grandparents’ cabin for the first time. The trip deep into the mountains past barbed-wire fences, boarded up windows, stockpiles of hubcaps and transmissions is eye-opening for the teen:

“That country mile just about summed up the whole palette of the Mid-South: the lushes of green, the reddest of rust, and blinding flashes of chrome.”

The plan is for Jolene, who is a real estate agent, to sell the cabin. The plan goes off the rails when Jack discovers the remains of a still in the back acres behind the cabin. JJ challenges his dad to get it working again. Father and son have never been close, but as they work together on the still, a bond begins to form. And when the liquor comes out, the bond grows even stronger:

“Father and son, passing a jar back and forth under a broad blue sky. If ever there was a rite of passage, this was it.”

But plans derail completely when Jolene is horribly burned in an accident. Jack blames JJ and sends him away. Jack grows increasingly desperate to help Jolene, who only retains her sense of smell. He puts the still to use in unique ways, distilling her favorite flowers to obtain their essences. From here, the novel spins into magical realism, ultimately demonstrating that love and forgiveness contain the strongest magic of all.

Beautifully developed themes of sin and redemption, and love and loss underpin this wholly unique and lovely work of literary fiction. Don’t miss The Watersmith.

Yance Wyatt

Yance Wyatt is from Nashville, Tennessee. He studied fiction at the University of Southern California, where he now teaches writing. His stories have appeared in dozens of nationally circulated literary journals and received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. He lives with his wife and son in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. The Watersmith is his first novel.