“WAYLAND” by Rita Sims Quillen (Iris Press, 160 pages, $20).
Rita Sims Quillen’s novel “Wayland” offers a slightly different twist on the timeless “stranger comes to town” theme. All the usual elements are here: a close-knit community with a few secrets, a loving family that has its troubles and a mysterious, compelling outsider bent on stirring things up. But Quillen gives her outsider a past and a point of view, and she has a complex take on how fear and well-intentioned deception make good people vulnerable to those who would do them harm.
The novel opens with a fellow named Buddy Newman entering a hobo camp in southwestern Virginia. It’s the early days of the Depression, and the encampment is a rough place, but Buddy is well-equipped to navigate it, having been on the road for “four long years.” We soon learn that his appealing name is a fiction and his formative influences include a drunken mother and sadistic father. Buddy is a schemer, a con artist with a talent for reshaping himself to suit the scam. “When a man is hollow inside,” writes Quillen, “he can fill himself up with anything he needs, get bigger or smaller, stay fluid or form a solid wall.”
Buddy finds his way to the nearby town of Wayland and the home of Eva and Andrew Nettles, who own a local sawmill. Eva, alone during the day with her young niece, Katie, catches the drifter trying to steal a chicken and chases him off with a gun. That night, with Andrew at home, Buddy returns to apologize, begging for a job and a chance at redemption. He quickly worms his way into the Nettles household, and it becomes clear to readers – though not to the Nettleses – that he plans to rob the family of something far more precious than a chicken.
Photo from Chapter16.org / Rita Sims QuillenEva’s perspective dominates the omniscient narrative. She’s the emotional center of the story, and we discover her growing misgivings about Buddy through her journal entries. She writes of the dismay she feels as Buddy charms her husband and Katie, and this utter stranger becomes a constant presence at their dinner table and in their lives. “Andrew don’t seem to see the extra work and expense he’s took on,” she observes. “He’s happy as a hog, walks around whistling to himself and talking more than he ever used to. It’s like Buddy is the brother he never had.”