How The Weed & the Winter Solstice Grew out of a Legend

State narcotics agents pay Mr. Byrd an unexpected visited and show him ariel
photos of a field of marijuana growing on his land.  Mr. Byrd conspires with them
and find thats the marijuana is being cultivated by a parolee, one Charlie Jim who
has recently been telephoning him (Mr. Byrd) in the wee hours of morning and
making extravagant offers to buy Mr. Byrd's land and hinting at blackmail if he
refuses to sell.
The narcs catch Charlie Jim and  return him to prison.  But his prison term is soon
over and he returns to the scene to renew his blackmail threats.  He knows that  Mr.
Byrd, years ago,  helped a young woman accused of killing  her husband escape
from the clutches of the law, married her and brought up her son as his own.  That
son, now an astrophysicist with NASA, is engaged to be married to celebrated lady
astronaut.  
Will Charlie Jim succeed in exposing Mr. Byrd's past and spoil their  marriage
plans?  
The reader is held in suspense to the last page.
The story derives from the Frankie Silver legend, a true story that has inspired folk
tales, ballads, novels, a movies and a ballet.






The connections between The Weed & the Winter Solstice and the Frankie Silver
story are subtle and complex. "Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of
the incidental symbolism" were suggested by that version of the Frankie Silver story
which appears on pages 31-35 of Cabins in the Laurel by Muriel Earley Sheppard,
an enchanting mix of facts and folk tales.  What is abundantly exhibited in that
version of the legend are the archetypes to which we are all connected   

(The above words in quotation are from T. S. Elliot's notes to The Wasteland.)  

The mystery of the winter solstice, the idea that all winter solstice events are
recursively related, has always intrigued both science and religion and that  
fascination is obviously with us still.               

Readers familiar with the widely publicized ideas swirling around the topic of the
impending winter solstice of 2012, for example, will recognize the connections
between the controlling symbols in The Weed & the Winter Solstice -- an allegory of
the changes taking place around us -- and the anxiously anticipated winter solstice
of 2012. The notion that something world-shaking must necessarily happen on that
date is widespread -- foreboding sense of impending calamities that will result in an
unmanageable global collapse of civilized human life. Such highly regarded scholars
as Terrence McKenna, José Argüelles, and John Major Jenkins have weighed in on
the subject.   

The topic has become complicated enough to involve astronomy, astrology,
mythology, anthropology, hyper dimensional physics, crop circles, and such New
Age topics as ooparts, ETs, and channelling.  Some connect it with an impending
global Great Depression that will end civilization as we know it.  Others associate it
with the religious concept of the Rapture.  And one hypothesis holds that a hyper
dimensional cellular mitosis will result in an ungluing of consensual reality: "mere
dislike between individuals can grow to parting of ways, a parting of time lines, and
finally parting of dimensions.  It is cellular mitosis on the hyper dimensional
scale."  Speculations are heavily present on the web, and doomsday scenarios
bound.  The notion, for example, that a conjunction of the black hole at the center
of our galaxy with our local star, the Sun will increase the gravitational pull on the
Yellowstone caldera and trigger a super volcano.
click here
Speculation has even involved relativistic and quantum physics -- and hyper
dimensional physics.  See
Google brings up about 2,450,000 connections with the concept of a new world
order and the 2012 winter solstice; and, quite predictably, with the Obama
phenomena.

Countless iconic myths recognize the connection of the winter solstice with a change
in the growing season.  Jung recognized the archetype in those myths, and noted
that the end of one season and the beginning of another was a change of
archetypes.  Changes in archetypes were thought to have a connection to major
movements in astrological houses.  "This transformation,"Jung noted, began "in
the historical era and left its traces first in the passing of the aeon of Taurus into
that of Aries, and then of Aries into Pisces, whose beginning coincides with the rise
of Christianity. We are now nearing that great change which may be expected when
the spring-point enters Aquarius."  Hence the deep fascination with the coming
winter solstice of 2012..

Facts and Folk Tales

In the summer of 1833, in Morganton, NC, Frankie Silver was hanged for having
killed her husband, Charles Silver, in 1831 on the night of the winter solstice.  The
facts on public record are few and of little intrinsic interest.   
But the folk tales and legends that have grown out of the case have inspired ballads,
novels, a motion picture, a ballet, and over half-a-million web sites.  Why is the
Frankie Silver legend so enduringly popular?   Stories of domestic violence are a
staple in the daily news -- and they are all soon forgotten.
But the Frankie Silver story sticks in the memory.  Like the cherished fictions of
Christianity and the great vegetation myths its abiding appeal seems to lie in a deep
unconscious association of ideas and  images, in a collective unconscious awakened
by its connection withe the winter solstice.
Apparently so, for in the particular version cited above there are a striking number
of parallels to classical myths -- and universal archetypes, in Jung's terminology --
that suggest that such is the case -- that help to explain the story's perennial
appeal.  
The drama begins, for example,  precisely at the winter solstice and, like the story of
the first Christmas, features at the center of the action a nuclear family: mother,
father, and child.   

Here is a Summary of the Above Cited Muriel Early Sheppard Version

On December 22, 1831, at the break of dawn, Frankie Silver wraps her baby in a
blanket and struggles through fields of new-fallen snow to reach her mother-in-law's
house.   There she finds the family preparing to wash clothes.
"I've done my washing," Frankie boasts, "and my scrubbing, too!"  
They are all surprised that she has finished the family wash so early in the
morning..  
Then she tells them why she has come so early.  She's worried about Charlie.   He
went across the river to get his Christmas liquor last night and never came back.  
She begins to wail.  "He tried to cross the river and fell through the ice!"   She
thrusts her baby into her mother-in-law's arms and runs outside.
"He tried to cross the river and fell through the ice!"   Whe wails and screams the
words over and over again.
Alarmed by her loud keening, kinfolks and neighbors come running to see what the
matter is.   They form a search party and go looking for the missing man.  
They search up and down both banks of the river but find no signs of any beaks in
the ice.
The old man leading the search takes them back to Frankie's now deserted cabin
and look for footprints in the snow that might show the direction Charlie took
when he left home last night.  He -- the old man leading the search -- had been
chopping firewood with Charlie the day before.  They had stacked the wood on
Frankie and Charlie's back porch.  Enough to do over Christmas.
The washing Frankie had boasted of is hanging on the clothesline.  Frozen stiff.  
The old man sees something strange!  The firewood he and missing masn had
stacked on the back porch yesterday is gone.  Had Charlie moved it indoors?
He tries to peer through the windows.  But the panes were too foggy.  
He pushes the door open.
Wisps of stem rise from the scrubbed floor.  Leaning against the wall, next to the
fireplace, is the double-bit axe he and Charlie had used to chop firewood yesterday.
How did that ax get ther?  Folks in these parts never bring an ax into the house.  
It's the worst bad luck in the world!  
The old man picks up the ax.  Exmaines the blades.  The blades of that ax had been
razor sharp yesterday.  Now they were gapped.
He notices chips in the brinks around the fireplace.  
And greasey spots.
The empty fireplace is radiating heat.  The ashes have been ranked out.  Into an ash
pit under the floor.  
"Here, help me me lift this puncheon."   From under the puncheon floor he brings
up a hand full of ashes.  The ashes contain what look liike blood clots.   And
splinters of charred bone.  
Frankie is watching from a distance.  At that moment she comes in and orderes the
men out of her house.  
The splinters of bone are from meat scraps she explains.  She had tried to burn
some meat scraps in the fireplace and had used the ax to chip spatters of grease
spots out of the bricks.  Charlie brought the ax into the house.
They send for the sheriff.  
Frankie puts up a resistance, protesting her innocence; and in the struggle the
sheriff has no time to take the ax and collect the ashes.  
Next day he sends two deputies to collected evidence.  But the ax has
disappeared.       The blood-clotted ashes containing splinters of charred bone are
gone.  The fireplace has been washed clean.   
Frankie languishes in jail, protesting her innocence.
When the weather grows warm, the snow melts.  In their search the two deputies
come across a dog digging into the hollow trunk of a sourwood tree near Frankie's
cabin.  From the hollow trunk of the sourwood tree they pull out the mangles
remains of a human torso wrapped in the bloody sheet.  Male.  
Confronted with this evidence Frankie confesses.
On the night of December 21st, she tells the magistrate, Charlie comes into the
house from his wood-chopping, shaking from the cold, the ax across his shoulder.
She approached him.  He shoved her away, flings down the ax.  Frightened by the
noise the baby starts crying.   Charlie takes the baby from the crib and lies down on
the floor in front of the fireplace to get the chill out of his bones.  He falls and
asleep.  
Frankie slips the baby out of his arms.  He did not awaken.  The ax lies handy.  She
seized the weapon and tries to sever his head in one blow.  He moves and the blow
glances.   Mortally wounded he jumps up, falls back on the floor and  begins  
making horrible noises.  
Terrified, Frankie  jumps in bed and tries to shut out the sounds.  When he grows
quiet she gets out of bed and with one blow the ax quiets him forever.
Then she spens the rest of the night trying to dispose of the body by burning it piece
by piece in the fireplace.  
Comes the dawn.  The job is unfinished.  She wraps the remains in a bed sheet,
drags them outdoors and stuffed them  into the hollow trunk of a sourwood tree on
the edged of the yard.  Drifting snow now soon covers the remains.
Back inside she rakes the ashes out of the fireplace and into a pit under the floor.  
She tries to chip the blood and greasy spots out the bricks.  Then she scrubs the
floor with homemade soap, washes the blood-stained bed sheets and hangs them
out on the clothes line.   That is the washing she will boast of to her mother-in-law
later that morning.
Frankie is tried, found guilty and sentenced to hang the following summer.  
But before the scheduled execution day arrives, family members spirit her out of
jail.  Dressed in men's clothes she hides under a mound of hay on the bed of a farm
wagon.   She gets too warm under the hay,  and when they are out of town headed
for the mountains Frankie gets out to walk.   from her hiding place and starts
walking along side the wagon.    A shotgun across her shoulder, she is dressed in
men’s clothing and wearing a man’s hat.
The sheriff's posse catches up with them and rides along for a spell between Frankie
and the farm wagon.   The sheriff looks down in silence.
Frankie pulls the hat down over her eyes, and in as deep a voice as she can manage,
says "You men want to buy some hay?"
The sheriff reaches for her shotgut."No, we don't want no hay, Frankie; we want
you."  
Back in jail awaiting execution, Frienkie begins writing something.  
Rumors spread that she has more to tell.   People do not believe that she did the
deed alone.  Family members must have helped her.    
A medical group petitions for the body.  
On the day of the hanging a curious, expectant crowd gathers around the
scaffold.      
The hangman asks Frankie if she had any last words.
Yes.  She wants to sing a ballad she has written in jail.             
Now the truth will come out.   
"Die with it in you Frankie!"  her father yells out from the crowd.  
But Frankie's mournful ballad tells them nothing they have not already been told.  
The hangman covers her face with a black hood.  The trap door opens.   Her father
rushes forward from the crowd.  The rope snaps.  He cuts the rope, snatches up the
body and carries it away to a waiting wagon.
To make sure his daughter's dead body will never be dissected under the cold,
impersonal gaze of medical students, he buries her in a secret grave, somewhere in
the mountains, in the dark of night.             
Then, to mislead any would be grave robbers,  he digs seven more graves and fills
them with earth.

On First Reading
Fresh from a double major in Philosophy and Comparative Literature, and steeped
in the anthropology of The Golden Bough and Jung's theory of the collective
unconscious, I was startled on first reading by the parallels between the Frankie
Silver legend and thost universal solar myths of dying and resurrected year gods
and goddesses.
"The characters in this myth," Toynbeen tells us, "have played their alloted parts
on a thousand stages under and in\finite variety of names."

Zeitgeist
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."  I was living on 16th Street in
Washington, D.C.,  in an apartment building overlooking Rock Creek Park, and
trying to write a novel.   A novel that would give expression to the spirit of the
times.  It was the Age of Anxiety, it was the Age of McCarthy, it was the Age of the
Cold War, it was the Age of the Atomic Bomb.   William Faulkner, in his Nobel
Prize acceptance speech, had summed up the zeitgeist in these words: "Our tragedy
today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can
even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question:
When will I be blown up?"
Faulkner had cautioned young writers that the only thing worth writing about is the
human heart in conflict with itself.  Well, the Frankie Silver story was nothing if not
a story of the heart in conflict with itself.  Not to be forgotten, however, it seemed
to me, was the larger and deeper conflicts of our time, the conflicts over
boundaries: national boundaries, geological boundaries, cultural boundaries,
political boundaries, all those boundaries that Paul Tillich had described as walls of
sel-seclusion.   My novel would be about boundaries.  
I had got as far as the opening scene in which a young academic, a ballad scholar
doing field research for a book about native American ballads, crosses a river and
meets a mountain woman picking blackberries.  She was to embody the
Appalachian culture on her side of the river.   The ballad scholar was to represent
the high academic culture from the other side.
In my boyhood I had known the Appalachian way of life intimately.  But that was
long ago, and I needed something to jog my memories.  A book maybe.  With
photographs.  So I went  to the nearby Mount Pleasant Branch of the D. C. Public
Library to browse the revelant shelves; and low and behold,  like an answered
prayer, I found on the first shelf I looked on, Murial Early Sheppard's Cabins in
the Laurel.   

Synchronisities
A synchronisity!  Jung describes "synchronisities" as the occurring together of two
or more  events in a meaningful manner when the events are not causally related.   
And when I read the Frankie Silver legend I recognized another synchronicity: the
fact that the story is dated precisely at the winter solstice.

Boundaries
Charles Silver went across the river not for the "Christmas spirit" but grain natural
spirits.  And it has been suggested by a person knowledgeable about his character
and his circumstances that moonshine was probably contributing factor to the
subsequent tragedy.   Whatever the case, the river firgures in the story as a
boundary between the inside and the outside, between mountains and lowlands,
between town and country.  
And the boundary theme comes dramatically into play when Frankie is spirited out
of jail and hidden under a mound of hay on a farm wagon bound for home only to
be overtaken by the sheriff's posse and taken back to jail.   When Frankie's father
calls out from the crowd around the scaffold "Die with it in you, Frankie" his words
set a boundary between public knowledge and private secrets.         
Thus the literal sense of the legend suggest a parallel, deeper, symbolic sense.  How
we hear it or read it depends on what we bring to it. Frankie's cry "He tried to cross
the river and fell through the ice" seems to take on a symbolic meaning from the
very beginning when we remember that xenophobia has long been a deep-dyed
feature of Appalachian culture.  And it may explain the curious fact  that our
sympathy is on Frankie's side from the beginning of the story to the end.   Her
confession only deepens our sympathy for her.  Why?
Is it because she represents the inside against the outside?   In that light, the river
seems to emerge as a boundary between Frankie's world of kith and kin, hearth and
home, the family and that other world on the other side.  Frankie Silver's world is
the world of the mountains.  The other world is the lower world of the county jail,
the hangman's noose and impersonal medical science.
"Meaning in literature," Poe wrote, "should be an undercurrent just beneath the
surface."  Today we use the terms subtext and metanarratives.  

Primordial Images
"He who speaks with primordial images speaks with a thousand tongues," Jung
wrote.  Apropos of which it is worth noting that much of the power of this legend
derives from its primordial images.   Here, from a familiar poem by Robert Frost, is
an example of primordial images:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
The primordial images "fire" and "ice" name things, but they symbolize concepts.  
Their magic lies not in their denotation  but their connotations.  Like "fire" and
"ice" in the Frost poem, primordial images tend to come in pairs, or polarities.  
Here are some primordial images in the Frankie Silver legend: fire / ice, night / day,
life / death, man / woman, winter / summer, the wise old man leading the search
party/ the innocent baby.  The polarities that spin the cosmos spin the legend.    
The male dies precisely at the winter solstice.  The female dies in the season of the
summer solstice.  The emphatic beginning date of the story -- December 21st, 22nd  
--  ineluctably reminds us of Christmas, the birthday of the Sun of God, the "Light
of the World."  For scholars commonly classify the gospel stories of Jesus with
other stories of life-death-rebirth deities: Horus, Osiris, Demeter, Persephone,
Tammuz, Attis, Adonis, Balder.  According to a theory developed by Sir James
Frazer, elaborated on in the works of Carl Gustav Jung, and made popular by
Joseph Campbell, these deities are personifications of the seasons of vegetation in
the northern hemisphere.

The Holy Family
At the center of the action are mother and child, calling to mind the story of the
first Christmas, and reminiscent of Isis and Horus, prototype images of mother and
child.   And the carrying of the baby into the dawn of a solstice new year calls to
mind the image of a new-born baby as a common icon of our calendar new year.  
The legend is parallel -- darkly, perversely -- to the Christmas story, the master
narrative of Western
civilization.


Oblation    
Frankie's efforts to dispose of the body in the fireplace, moreover,  is hauntingly
reminiscent of those archaic rituals of purification in which portions of the body of
a slain victim are offered to the flames. The family fireplace seems to take on the
features of a sacrificial altar;  the firewood a pyre, and the flesh of the slain victim
an oblation.  From the Latin word oblatum, to offer, an oblation is a solemn
sacrificial offering to the Deity.  Oblation is a term used in the liturgy of the Roman
church and others.  Here is a familiar example of an oblation from the Bible:  Noah
builded an altar unto the Lord; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean
fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. Genesis 8:20.  In that light, the semi-
religious tone of the legend is subconsciously intensified.

Macabre Resurrection
Religious associations are further evoked when the dog digs the dead man's remains
out of the hollow trunk of a sourwood tree.  The melting snow, harbinger of spring,
the season of the Resurrection, calls Easter to mind.  That scene may also bring to
mind lines from  T. S. Eliot's poem, The Wasteland:  "Oh, keep the Dog far hence
that's friend to men/  Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!"
The more I pondered the narrative the more it seemed to take on the features of an
arcane puzzle with a mysterious quality that draws us in like a good Kubrick  movie
until we becomes not just a witness but a participant.  Hints of hidden meanings
peep out, then flicker and fade.  Shifting symbols, oracular, elusive, arcane, go
unexplained.  The details about the ax in the house, for example; are not explained.  
How did it get there?  

Ax in the House
Bringing an ax into the house is bad luck – taboo – in Appalachian culture, a fact I
leanred when living with my paternal grandparents in Zion Hill, TN during the
Great Depression, when one day I came into my grandmother's kitchen carrying the
ax I had been using to chop pine kindling for her.  "Lord a'mercy, Son!  Never
bring the ax in house!  It's the worst bad luck in the world!"  She made me take the
ax back out to the chopping block and leave it there.  
That scolding, and other memories,  left me sensitive to a details in the legend that
for readers unfamiliar with Appalachian culture will likely go unnoticed.  When, for
example, the old man leads the search party into Frankie's cabin, he is startled to
see the ax he and Charlie had used the day before leaning against the wall beside
the fireplace.  How did it get there?  The answer comes out in Frankie's confession:
"The axe lay handy."  Charlie had brought it in!   

Appalachian Culture and the Great Depression
The photographs in  Muriel Early Sheppard's book had the familiar look of a
family album.  They carried me back my pre-adolescent boyhood, to a culture, a
way of life I had come to know in Zion Hill, TN, in the early 1930s.  
Before 1930, before the stock market crash of 1929, my world had been world of the
roaring twenties, the  prosperous booming, Jazz-Age  Alcoa, TN,  where everything
was new: gramophones, air planes, talking pictures, telephones, radios.  My daddy
worked for the Aluminum Company of America, around which and for which
Alcoa had been built and named.  
He drove a big red Studebaker and got his bottled whiskey from a speak-easy.  My
mother had a player piano and Daddy was teaching her how to make homebrew.   
One of my aunts, a flapper in a short skirts, with swinging beads, bobbed hair, spit
curls, high heels and rolled silk stockings was teaching me how to dance the
Charleston.  Or trying  to.  
Then the stock market crashed.  And that world suddenly ended.
One day Daddy came to my school and took me home where a farm wagon was
parked in the street in front of our house with all our household furniture in it.  He
had lost his job.  He had to take us, my mother and me, to "the old home place,"  
the family farm in Zion Hill.     
Zion Hill, in those days, was a little farming community centered around a white
clapboard church and a one-room school house.  That one-room school where one
teacher managed eight grades, and where I had to go to school the following winter,
was the model for the Sleepy Ditch school in The Weed & the Winter Solstice.  
The rugged farm life in Zion Hill was just about the way it had been on the 18th
century American frontier.  Nobody had a bathtub.   Hot and cold running water
were unknown.  Electric lights, street cars, radios, talking picture shows, even
autos    existed only in distant towns and cities.  
My grandfather had lost his life savings when the bank in Englewood failed, but
nobody we knew had money in 1931.  Trade was reduced to barter.  When we
needed kerosene for the lamps -- we called it coal oil -- one of my cousins and I
carried a fine fat hen 3 miles to little country general store in Mars Hill.  Mars Hill
was a little farming community much like Zion Hill.  There the hen -- sometimes
eggs --  for such necssities as salt, baking soda and coal oil.  The coal oil we carried
back home in a coal oil can with a potato jammed over the spout for a stopper.
My grandmother, tall, gaunt and gray, had big busy hands and spoke with an
Overhill accent.  She boasted of having split rails in her youth and having plowed
with a team of oxen.   In rainwater collected in barrels at the four corners of her
two-story house she washed the family clothes, boiling them first in a big, black
iron washpot outdoors.  She made her own  soap from hog fat and Eagle lye.  She
fetched water for cooking and drinking from a spring half-mile away, where she
kept her milk and butter, squat in the swirling cold water between barrels of
sauerkraut.  She plucked her own geese to make featherbeds, and still cooked over
the open fire in the big fireplace in the middle room.  
In the lean-to kitchen at the back of the house she kept a 'tow sack' of green coffee
beans; and at breakfast time she would dip from the sack a handful green coffee
beans, roast them in the oven of her big gray-enamel wood-burning stove.   When
the coffee beans began to smell like coffee she would take them out, let them cool,
grind them in her coffee grinder, then boiled them in spring water on her cook
stove.  Coffee had never smelled so rich, nor tasted so good  when flavored with
fresh cream and sweetened with honey.  
She could spin thread from wool on her big spinning wheel; but homespun was a
thing of the past.  So the old spinning wheel stood idle in the front-room beside the
reed organ.  I never heard her play the organ.  I don't think she could.  She still
made feather beds with feathers plucked from her own geese, a task she showed me
how to help her with.  
Shoes, saddles, pitch forks, garden hoes and such were ordered from a Sears and
Roebuck catalog, the softer pages of which served for another purpose later.  Toilet
paper was a forgotten luxury, and most of the time we had to make do with
corncobs -- down behind the corn crib.   We didn't  have an outhouse and neither
did the school.  At school served the woods served for an outhose, and there we had
neither toilet paper nor corncobs.   But nobody called it "hard times" in Zion Hill.  
Things were just about the way they always had been.  Grandma and Grandpa  
took it all in stride and, child that I was, I learned to followed their lead.  
That frontier way of life still existed in East Tennessee until after World War II,
when the Great Depression finally came to an end.   So in The Weed & the Winter
Solstice I move the story into a 20th century fictional setting like the one in Zion
Hill.

Putting It All Together
Those were the memories I drew on when I turned the Frankie Silver legend into a  
novel.  Zion Hill became Penitentiary Hollow, an actual place name; but in The
Weed & the Winter Solstice it became transmogrified by memories of Zion Hill.  
Frankie Silver becomes Agatha Mills, mythical  earth goddess.  Her erring spouse is
Jeb, a contemporary everyman, divided against himself.  Their child is Charles, who
grows up to be an astrophysicist, marries a female astronaut and fathers a child
they name Space.   
Developing the mythic parallels in the story required a narrator who, like Henry
James narrator in The Turn of the Screw, is intimately involved in the action, sees
things in it others do not see, and is capable of telling the story from his own
peculiarly sensitized point of view.
The narrator is Mr. Byrd, outsider, victim, rebel, alienated, self-exiled.  He grew out
of my original academic ballad hunter, and is based on a real person, a greatly
admired instructor in Comparative Literature I had known in college.  A  
postmodern intellectual with a classical education, capably of playful language,
experimentation with form, and capable, above all, of mixing popular culture with
high art,  Mr. Byrd represents today's enlightened and highly educated few -- a tiny
minority.  Rhodes Scholar, a young man of classical learning, a student of English-
American folk ballads and, like John Rice Irwin, a devoted admirer of Appalachian
culture.        
Charles, son of Jeb and Agatha, whom he adopts as his own, is a paragon of what
careful nurture can produce in promising offspring.     
Keys to allegorical meanings in the story are in the names of the characters and the
place names.  Form follows content.   The four parts of the narrative reflect the four
seasons and are named for the four major characters.       
Place names, like the names of the characters, are iconic.  The name of the county
seat, for example, is Avernus, an allusion to oft-quoted lines from Vergil's Aeneid:
"The descent to Avernus is easy, but to come back up to the upper air, that's the hard
part."
Avernus is the locus and symbol of the modern industrial world.  Penitentiary
Hollow, in stark contrast, is the locus and symbol of a traditional, land-based,
family-centered way of life.  Sleepy Ditch, once called Mansberg, a symbol of
decadence, is “where the church and the school are.”  Little Lost Snowbird is the
name of the mountain on top of which Mr. Byrd lives and from which he looks
down on the world around him.  
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