In Linden on the Saugus Branch
Paul did not treat his own boyhood problems directly or extensively, but found an allusive
outlet for it in the Alice Townsend story. In A Ghost Town on the Yellowstone there
is perhaps surprisingly no personal difficulty for a sixteen year old facing the Wild
West, albeit with an older brother in the wings, certainly not the anxiety which Paul had
Lester Davis experience in the same time and place in Imperturbe. Young Elliot
is all but unflappable, gets on well with a broad range of humanity from men of the cloth
to hookers, engineers, Wobblies and Bohunks, and when the overturned stagecoach from
Glendive to Sidney crashes, he is present at the origins of his "Ghost Town" in
two meanings, "Trembles, Montana," named after the French for its quaking
aspens. It is a landscape of "desperate scenery," the expression he would later
use for the further west region of the fourth book of his series.
The founding of Trembles powerfully suggests rebirth, and that is how in memory the
experience now seemed to Paul, stripped of the anxieties he had given Lester Davis. It was
the way of America, then, the fresh start, and the opening scenes enable Paul to associate
himself with that kind of America. The minority in Linden is centre stage in Trembles, and
all along the Lower Yellowstone from Glendive to Montak. People live in the present not in
the shadow of the past, personal or regional. Society does not need to live by rules
handed down, or by the iron hand of external authority. It can start again, from scratch.
The "bond between the citizens" of Trembles did not require "families
related to one another by ties of blood and common experience, and people who had gone to
school together." You do not need to be hemmed in by the Linden fathers: you can be
fatherless, as a community and an individual, and thrive. The people of the Lower
Yellowstone can triumph over crafty bosses who want to extract the last ounce of profit
from the drifters and the Bohunks and are not above turning the "Americans"
against the foreigners. The joy of this life asserts itself even in a country where ever
since the days of tyrannosaurus rex it has always been "[o]ne thing... eating another
in that region," and against a climate such as New England does not know - an epic
blizzard, arriving on 6 January 1908, provides the climactic challenge in the book, and is
lived through with
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ingenuity and good will.1
As in Linden, there is
in A Ghost Town, amid all the celebratory release, a displacement of young
Elliot’s own fears in the presence of the community of Amish-Mennonites and its stern
treatment of the beautiful Cora Lentz. Nor is the "ending" as blissful as it was
for Alice and Ruth in Linden, but it intimates a broader acceptance by Paul and
possibly his earlier self that societies do not necessarily come to reason. Cora finds a
set of precious matched sapphires when eviscerating a turkey, but the Elders do not allow
her to keep them. The Mennonites sense her wavering, and keep her under close orders. In
the end all the schemes of the "Americans" to satisfy the girl’s inner
craving for beauty fail. When Cora, like others, is stricken with smallpox, an Amish woman
(possibly acting on instructions) induces Cora to scratch off her scabs - "If thine
eye offend thee, pluck it out." Cora, to the dismay of the Americans, emerges from
her ordeal horribly disfigured. Paul comments:
I thought of the six matched sapphires. I, too, had become mildly obsessed, and stole a
look at them whenever I could. That anyone in human form could believe they were evil, or
that Cora was wicked, was beyond my comprehension. I had detested Puritans, zealots and
crepehangers always, but never with the loathing I felt then toward the Mennonites. I was
glad they had been persecuted, and hoped that they would suffer much more.2
Elliot’s involvement with the story (true, enhanced or invented) of Cora is
revealed by the expression of his "obsession" with the sapphires, and the last
event before he leaves is his hearing of Cora’s joyless marriage to the Mennonite who
had earlier deplored his fiancée’s beautiful appearance as a temptation. His is
spared we wonder what reaction by the good luck of an opportunity to leave. The story of
Cora reinforces Elliot’s view of the rightness of the reasonable, worldly and secular
societies of Trembles, Sidney and Glendive, Montana, even as it exposes his lingering fear
of the power of its opposite.
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