Indie presses may be downsizing or dying but those still in the running, such as Sag Harbor’s Permanent Press, still know fine fiction when they see it – stories with original plots and characters, themes that go to the mind and heart, and prose that proves its value on page one. And so it is with award-winning writer Paul Barra’s compelling, suspenseful, and moving novel, Sgt. Ford’s Widow – an unusual narrative that links the Mekong Delta in Vietnam and Casper, Wyoming in the late `60s, early 1970s, each place invoked with rhythmic sensual detail.
And what diverse characters – each introduced without much explanation. There is the American army veteran Gilbert Ford who works as a private investigator; a recent widow Ellie Wyatt, who runs a dude ranch in eastern Wyoming and hires Gil to find out who killed her husband in a remote canyon, stealing the valuable rubies he was carrying; and a middle-aged Asian woman named Tran Thi Linh, small, silent, frail, who lives in Gil’s cabin and cooks for him.
After two present-tense chapters set in the early 1970s, the narrative switches to Vietnam where Gil was stationed as a staff sergeant with the military police. Writing up reports is part of his job. He wants to do it and he wants to do it well, so he spends his not-so-ample free time reading and rereading Fowler’s Modern English Usage – nice touch.
It doesn’t take long for him to demonstrate his innate humanity, as well as, army skills. A sudden siege on the army camp by the Viet Cong which includes the surprising presence of a Vietnamese barber the soldiers know and like is finally put down, but in its savage wake the widow of the barber who lives in a mud hut and tries to collect his body is viciously raped and almost beaten to death.
Gil forcibly stops the violence, reports the incident, and goes out of his way to try to save the deeply damaged woman. The surgeons do an incredible job and though scarred for life – in every way – she lives. And, following Asian tradition, becomes forever beholden to the person who saved her life.
With wily help from his army buddies, Gil smuggles Linh out of Vietnam and manages to get her to his home in Wyoming. She doesn’t speak English, knows nothing of America, and is, for the town, a reclusive oddity, someone to make fun of. But Linh, who remains an oddity, becomes a revered oddity in Casper, a “legend” --smart, intuitive, polite, loyal, and a devoted friend to Gil and to Ellie who is his lover and becomes Linh’s best friend.
How this change comes about, which involves Linh’s uncanny ability to psych out motives and behavior as she comes to assist Gil in his murder investigation, is a marvelous structuring of events set against the primitive landscape of big sky, extreme climate, and dry emptiness.
“Wyomingites were a resilient kind of people in the sixties,” Barra writes, “they wrested a living from an unforgiving land and expected everyone to pull his or her load.” But the sparseness also attracted hippies and petty criminals who easily disappeared into the vastness of canyons, plains, and mesas. Gil, who has a reputation for honesty and generosity and gets along with everyone, nonetheless underestimates a killer he doesn’t know but is out to trap. Though the reader senses that Linh is somehow going to prove ironically invaluable to Gil, that sense – or expectation only enhances the attraction of this extraordinary story. The writing is so evocative you can hear the silence, feel the heat, sense the danger, anticipate the final joy.
