A native Texan, Bruce Machart was born and raised in the Houston area.
After high school, he worked his way through eight years of undergraduate study
before leaving for the Midwest and graduate work in Columbus, Ohio. He later
spent three years in the Boston area, where he taught literature and writing at
Berklee College of Music, Boston University and Grub Street Writers. In 2003,
he returned to Houston, where he joined the faculty of Lone Star College. He is
currently at work, we are happy to hear, on a second novel.
How did you research the book? Were there family stories?
Very little of what appears in the novel actually came from family stories, although my paternal grandfather was from Lavaca County and made his first communion at St. Mary's in Praha. My grandparents met at a dance in Wied. But when I was 13 or 14, my father did tell me a story about some boys whose father, out of meanness or desperation, used them as plow horses. It seemed so unbelievable that I wondered if I could pull it off. It seemed so unreal. That was really the only family story that found its way into the book.
When I finished the novel, I mentioned to my father that he had told me this story, and he said, "That was your Aunt Dorothy's first husband--he was one of the boys."
And late in the novel when Vaclav is delirious
and says nobody's doing anything until he gets his bale of cotton--that came
from my grandfather. He always demanded a bale of cotton for his birthday. But
it wasn't out of meanness, but as a challenge to his kids.
As for the research, I love librarians. Their vocation is to help other people get what they need. I met a wonderful librarian who helped me locate all the Lavaca County newspapers for the time period I needed.
Your evocation of the land and the weather is so perfect. Did you grow up on a farm or in the country?
I didn't. I'm a first-generation city boy (Houston). My father grew up on a cattle and cotton farm in Wharton County, which is near Lavaca County. Most of his family stayed there, and I have 36 cousins in the area. That country landscape was always of interest to me. It's not exactly homesickness, but I always felt like an outsider at family gatherings. We really only went to "the country" four or five times a year. It felt lonely, and it was the kind of loneliness that made me curious--out of place in the landscape that is supposed to be your roots as a family. I never felt anything other than out of place there, and that was arresting to me.
So you're a Texan, but you have no accent.
There is less of an accent in southeast Texas, and the language is distinguished more by idiom than by accent. When I wrote the dialogue, I didn't want to try to capture the accent, so I concentrated on idiom and rhythm.
And I do have an accent, depending on whom I am talking to. I have a chameleon voice.
Your descriptions of horseback riding are spectacular. Do you ride?
I rode a little growing up. I love to ride, but don't often get the chance. I was around horses a little in high school--my girlfriend rode. I'm not in any danger of falling out of the saddle, but I'm not an accomplished rider.
Maybe the experience sticks with you if you don't do it a lot. It's hard to find a place to really run on a horse, so when it's not such a workaday thing, it is special. And I try to write about what I don't know. Writing's a lot of work, and I never want to work that hard only to get someplace I've already been.
Were moonlight horse races common?
I would daresay not. And the racing in my novel is not. People were pretty conservative with their money and their land. I did read one account about a Lavaca race, but it was considered a crime if there was gambling involved, so any racing would have been done at night outside of town. But you can be sure that men went to them when they occurred.
In the book you say that Czech farmers have run off all the red-haired settlers--who were they, and how did that happen?
I got a map from the University of Texas archives,
and if you look at the map--it was from the 1890s--you see mostly Anglo names. Irish
and English and Scots-Irish. And at about the time the story starts, in 1895,
there was an incredible influx of Moravian and Bohemian and German settlers
into the region.
I think pushing out the Anglo settlers was, in reality, more a matter of circumstance and tenacity, and maybe a desire on the part of the early settlers by then to move to bigger cities and cooler climates.
Was it common to use people for plowing, or was Vaclav unusual? He didn't seem to be unusual for that era in his harshness.
No, but it did happen once. Some early readers were appalled and disgusted by that, calling it "child abuse." But I don't think someone raised in the country, even as late as the 1950s, would think that. Extremely harsh, yes, but not abuse.
My initial challenge as a writer was to make that believable. But I have so much empathy for Vaclav in his situation. He's prone to cruelty, but he's also heartbroken. And he's human. And it was a tough life, and boys were a boon to a farmer. They were used without a thought as to the rightness or wrongness of it. It's just what they did. There were expectations on everyone for hard work, but for boys it was an inflexible expectation.
Karel is unexpectedly tender with his daughters. That surprised me.
For me it was a natural function of his character, and I didn't question it at first. But I have to be careful so that I don't make characters better or worse than they really are. It struck me in revision that Karel seemed to be a better dad than I might have expected. But the more I thought about it, I thought my instincts were right. He's a man so in need of feminine connection that he's sweet with his daughters and his wife, against all expectation. Even when he strays, his sins stem from a very real desire to fill the void from the loss of his mother.
He's been searching and searching, and every memory he has of his mother is a fabrication, even if he can't pull it to the fore. Of course, in the womb he did physically did touch her. There is something there. But that's so precarious-- to need something so acutely, and to think it might be in you, but you can't access it.
He thinks he might have heard his mother's voice singing to him when he was as yet unborn--as she went about her chores and such--and while he can't recall it, he's been carrying the memory of it around inside him all his life.
Did the birth of his son have anything to do with his shift toward his brothers?
I think it's so important. Perhaps having a son doesn't carry the all-important weight that it once did, but having his line carried forth is so important to Karel. He's living in the past--the 1910 race and loss and rejection is still very much where he is, both emotionally and psychologically. But the son is the future. If his relationship with his son can be different, the implications fan out from there.