Mark Spragg’s “Bone Fire” Returns to Familiar Ground

By Jenny Shank, 3-15-10

Bone Fire
by Mark Spragg
Knopf, 304 pages, $25.95

Mark Spragg’s understated yet satisfying third novel, Bone Fire, takes several characters from his first two novels and binds them together in a story in which some of the people are struggling to find a way to leave the town of Ishawooa, Wyoming, while others are trying to return to it.  In Bone Fire, Einar Gilkyson and Crane Carlson, two characters from Spragg’s prior novels, have moved a bit farther down the inevitable conveyor belt that is life, declining in health while Griff, the young woman they both care about, flounders as she seeks direction.

In 2004’s An Unfinished Life, Griff Gilkyson was a nine-year-old girl, named after her dead father, who found refuge from her mother’s flighty ways at her crusty paternal grandfather Einar’s Wyoming ranch.  Griff’s mother, Jean, ended up marrying the town sheriff, Crane Carlson. 

In 2002’s The Fruit of Stone, Barnum McEban set out on a journey toward the married woman whom he and his friend, the woman’s husband, both loved.  Along the way McEban met the mystical Rita and her ten-year-old brother, Paul, and in Bone Fire, McEban and Rita are still in their quasi-relationship, and he’s helping raise Rita’s ten-year-old boy, Kenneth, who believes he is McEban’s son.

In Bone Fire, Paul and Griff are young adults in love with each other, but Paul is enrolled in graduate school in Chicago and has plans to volunteer for a year in Uganda, while Griff has dropped out of college in Laramie and moved back home to care for the ailing Einar.  Einar wants her to move ahead with her life, and to that end he’s contacted his sister Marin, a lesbian who hasn’t returned home for decades.  The other storyline playing out simultaneously involves Crane’s discovery that he is dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease like his grandfather did, a fact he shares with no one as he sets about investigating a murder of a young man in a meth lab.

In Bone Fire, Spragg relies on the deep histories that he developed for each of his characters in the prior novels.  He doesn’t explain much of their past, but he doesn’t really have to, as Spragg knows them so well that he makes them easy to get to know through characteristic dialogue and action.  In the opening pages, when Jean badgers her daughter about her relationship with Paul, a Native American studying Public Health in grad school, saying, “Just think of the career opportunities he’ll have for scrubbing bathrooms in some reservation casino,” she needs no extended introduction.

The novel builds slowly, meandering a bit before the storylines begin to converge.  But there are many pleasures in the quiet moments of Bone Fire, for example, the way Spragg depicts Griff’s somewhat unrequited love for Paul.  She fears losing Paul, and wants to punish him for leaving, but can’t quite manage it, an internal tug of war that’s illustrated in one scene where Griff and Paul are walking outside: “She thought to reach out to take his hand but wouldn’t,” Spragg writes, “and that set up an itch, a slight but specific panic like wanting a cigarette and not having one.”

In another scene, where Griff learns Paul is applying to volunteer in Uganda, she can’t keep her emotions in check: “The application was spread across the table and she snatched a page, wadded it up and pitched it hard against his chest, at the same time suffering that peculiar dislocation of having been standing to the side and watching herself react like a child.”

Spragg invests many of his characters with surprising dimensions—Griff isn’t always weak, as she is in her relationship with Paul at this point.  Her power comes through in the haunting ceramic bone sculptures that she fashions in her kiln.  Even Jean, who comes off as an alcoholic racist at the outset of the book, will earn a reader’s human sympathy before the end.

Another winning aspect of Bone Fire is Kenneth and McEban’s relationship, built on long days of ranchwork.  When they attempt to take a vacation at the Frontier Days in Cheyenne, they can’t quite manage to enjoy themselves wasting time.  The pair’s dislocation amid the idle merriment of carnival rides, country music concerts, and rodeo is tender and funny.  Spragg writes:

“That night they went to an outdoor concert to hear a singer named Taylor Swift and were surprised she was a woman.  She had long blonde hair and wore cowboy boots and a shimmery black dress.  She danced across the stage while she sang, at times so vigorously he thought it was a miracle the dress didn’t fly off, or parts of her out of it.” Later, when McEban asks Kenneth if he’s having a good time, the boy replies, “It’s harder than I thought it would be.”

Bone Fire begins with its characters restless, uncertain of their fates, and ends with the characters at peace with where they are going and where they have been, even if their own deaths are the next events they must confront.

Mark Spragg is currently on a book tour with Laura Bell, with stops in Boulder (Boulder Book Store, March 16, 7:30 p.m.), Bozeman (Country Bookshelf, April 20, 7 p.m.), Missoula (Fact & Fiction, April 21, 7 p.m.), and many more places in Montana, Utah, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and California.