Lambs of Men
By Charles Dodd White

Reviewed by Laura Ellen Scott

Casperian Books, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-934081-27-3
Paperback, 158 pp., $13.50

In the absorbing Lambs of Men, Charles Dodd White hangs a tale of masculinity and grief upon the myth that men can bear what women cannot. An unabashed southern gothic novel, Lambs is set in World War I-era Appalachia where emotionally confined men vibrate against a lush, precarious landscape. This part of American history and culture still fascinates us, and White deliberately manipulates the familiar, as in this particularly cinematic moment between Marine Sergeant Hiram Tobit and a wild child named Note:

It was a little girl, perhaps nine or ten, dressed in a dark red flannel dress so long it was a wonder she didn’t trip when she walked. She wore a man’s black slouch hat, the flopped brim hanging down low so that she couldn’t have seen more than a few feet in front of her. The horse shuffled behind, occasionally pausing to crop bracken.

“You ain’t the scariest horse thief I met.”

Wracked by the horrors of war, Hiram has been sent home to North Carolina to serve as recruiter, but as soon as he settles into his new position he finds himself compelled to help track down “Old Man Vaughan,” who has taken off with his lying, pregnant daughter. As the Sheriff puts it:

His youngest went and got herself in trouble with some boy. Seems he got tipped to the fact she’s carrying a bastard and like to have a fit. Said if she didn’t tell him who the daddy was, he was gonna cut the little rabbit right out of her belly.

But Vaughan is the long-time friend of Hiram’s estranged, reclusive, alcoholic father, Sloane, who joins the hunt. Sloane has lived his prime between the wars and feels “incomplete” because he never served. A horribly failed father, Sloane is responsible for the accidental shooting death of Hiram’s brother and the suicide of his mother. As you might expect, Hiram and Sloane live in the dark worlds of their minds, and this journey presents their last chance to understand one another.

Sloane is correct about his measure as a man, especially in light of Hiram’s morality and wisdom. Once proud and driven, Hiram has matured, thanks to the epiphanies of war. It doesn’t take long for Note’s unmarried mother, Cass, to snatch him up, and with a ready-made family snugly in place, Hiram seems set for life, having earned the right to peace by paying his dues as a warrior. Sloane, however, is defined by his losses. Haunted and angry, he still seeks meaning, mostly through drink. So when Hiram ushers Sloane back to town and civility, it is his vulnerability that dominates:

After supper they took the evening breeze on the front porch. Note played with her raggedy doll while Hiram and Sloane smoked and Cass sipped a glass of mint tea. The crickets were out and sawing like a million hell-bent fiddlers in the sedge. It wasn’t the first time Sloane could remember turning his ear to that old sound, but there was something about the music of that evening to suggest he’d never properly heard it.

In the present of the novel, women serve supporting roles only. There’s the gossipy widowed landlady, the feisty child, and her good-hearted but scandalized mother. The women worth talking about are either recently dispatched, like Hiram’s mother, or ancestral and legendary. When the time comes for the Vaughan search party to swap fireside tales, Sloane holds forth with an Ambrose Bierce-flavored story of his father’s wild encounter with a woman driven mad by war, which prompts Hiram to tell a story of his maternal grandmother’s bravery under the same circumstances. The next day, they will all discover that Vaughan has indeed committed unspeakable violence against his own daughter, rendering the one truth Sloane feels sure of, that women’s “hearts are too tender . . . to truly know the ways of men,” which is deliriously beside the point.

Lambs of Men is a thoroughly enjoyable book that plumbs the dark depths of men, so it is disappointing that White didn’t create more focused characterizations of the women in their lives. That shortfall, along with the novel’s gorgeous but bruise-purple prose, sometimes sends Lambs staggering toward Bonanza territory. Luckily the wobbly, uncertain pursuit of the original question—what Sloane and Hiram can mean to one another—ultimately sends us reeling away from any easy resolution.

Visit Charles Dodd White’s author page here and Casperion Books’ Lambs of Men page here.

Laura Ellen Scott teaches fiction writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Her short fiction has been selected for Wigleaf’s Top Fifty, Short Story Month, Eclectica Best Fiction, Gravity Dancers: More Fiction by Washington Area Women, and Barellhouse’s “Futures.” She was nominated twice for Dzanc’s Best of the Web and has made the StorySouth Million Writers notable stories list three times. Most of her published work is linked at her blog, Probably just a story. Laura is also the curator of VIPs on vsf, where editors and writers of very short fiction express very brief thoughts on form and craft.

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