The Floor of the Sky by Pamela Carter Joern (University of Nebraska Press, $16.95 paperback, 0803276311)
 
The Floor of the Sky is part of the University of Nebraska's Flyover Fiction series, which supports the work of writers from the center of the country ("flyover country" to many, the Heartland to others). The in-house editor is Ladette Randolph, and she explains, "It's exactly the stereotype of the wholesome pioneer past that we're trying to address in the series. The region has suffered for a fossilized perception of time stopping at the point of westward migration." The series editor is Ron Hansen, an excellent sign if one is looking for exceptional writing, and that's just what Pamela Carter Joern has provided. In an elegant, spare style, she tells the story of a family living deep in the Sandhills of Nebraska, a story filled with regret, resentment, secrets and love.
 
Toby is an aging widow, barely hanging on to the ranch her parents built in 1920. Her sister Gertie lives with her, a stay laced with tension and past hurts, and Toby often behaves like their mother around her, passively resentful. Gertie wears two-piece polyester outfits from Wal-Mart, while "Toby refuses such clothes, making her mind up, as she has throughout life, not to be like Gertie. Ten years older than Toby, Gertie's her advance warning, her red light flashing. Instead, Toby wears a plaid cotton shirt, tails out over the bunchy elastic waistline of her jeans. She does allow herself elastic. She's not a fool." In turn, Gertie resents Toby. Her husband is in a home with Alzheimer's, her son's dead, his wife has remarried and doesn't speak to Gertie, and she blames her grandson Clay for mismanaging her ranch. "And Toby. Toby's the last car on Gertie's train." At the start of summer, Toby's granddaughter Lila arrives to stay, sixteen, pregnant and prickly. Adding to the strain, the local banker wants to foreclose on the ranch. After her husband died with no life insurance, Toby had been forced to sell her herd and lease most of her land, which had worked until taxes soared. As determined as she is to hold fast, "She knows she's going to lose this land . . . she only hoped to die first. She's in a race now. She needs to get this girl through the summer. Then . . . she's got to find a way to die."
 
She has allies in her fight to save her legacy: her brother John, broken by World War II and by his father, and George Bates, who has been watching out for things on the ranch most of his life, ever since he showed up with his family during the Depression and was hired by Toby's mother. There is nothing George wouldn't do for Toby, and he takes her granddaughter under his wing. He wants to impart his life knowledge to Lila by telling her stories about calving season, about ranching injuries, about breaking horses. He wants her to see that orphan calves are taken care of and mothers recover from losing their young, that people get hurt and survive, that "you ride the colt to the bones so that it will have more freedom and will not be afraid to move about the earth." As Lila settles in to ranch life, learning to move about the earth, she comes to trust Toby. "She looks at her grandmother's wrinkled face, the dark circles under her eyes, the sag of her eyelids. She could fall into that face, live forever under its roof." Lila also tries to unravel a mystery she finds in the family graveyard, when she notices that her grandmother's day of death is the same as George's son David: June 10, 1948. The subsequent uncovering of long-held secrets is the crux of this family saga, and they are all waiting for something--birth, foreclosure, death, perhaps deliverance--even if it means confronting the truth.
 
Pamela Carter Joern's prose is graceful, as spacious as the land she describes: "The western sky is a box of crayons, painful in its beauty, while the hills on either side of the draw shadow them like hovering angels." With well-chosen words she describes the dying of a small town, as corporate agribusiness and superstores choke the life out of rural America. She writes about compassion and courage, and the need to forgive and to accept forgiveness; above all, she writes about love for land and family.--Marilyn Dahl