This is a novel for a winter’s night—or two or three. I’d not read North Carolina writer John Ehle before—better late than never to discover a writer as character- and place-brilliant as Ehle.
It opens like this: On a cold evening in the remote, Depression-era mountains of western North Carolina, Wayland Jackson appears on Collie Wright’s doorstep. A Pennsylvania clockmaker traveling to Tennessee, with his daughter and pet pig in tow. He’s lost his way, and needs a place to sleep, and Collie makes room for him.
It’s not just Wayland who’s a mystery—Collie herself has her community wondering who the father of her baby might be. Ehle is masterful at stacking up clues, so that you’re really not surprised when you find out who he is. You will, however, be surprised at what happens to him.
I’ve not read an Appalachian novel in which the stock plotline of feuding mountain families ends not in family bloodshed but in human understanding and possibility. Ehle finds ways over and over to make a reader think she knows what’s coming…but his characters know differently. And you trust them enough to follow them.
“The Winter People” was made into a movie in 1989, with Kurt Russell playing Wayland Jackson and Kelly McGillis as Collie Wright. Watch it if you need to—but you’ll do better discovering the story in book form. It’s as honest as they come.
John Ehle. The Winter People. (Harper & Row, 1981; Carolina Classics Press, 2017). 272 pp..
The story above first appeared in our January/ February 2022 issue.
