Lee Rinehart

It began with a whisper. It took the form of a raven and had the voice of an electric church choir, and its measures were carried on the Appalachian night breeze from the mountain to the dark hollow. It built to a crescendo like ancient thunder and then settled on the landscape like a breathless lover, exhausted, transformed by dreams.

“At first, you see, there was only the wind. It was almost like someone breathing. And it was the only sound in all of
existence. For lifetimes it shuttled through empty and dark, through that cavern that was neither death nor life. And
then, suddenly, the breathing became a song.”

 Across dusty streets and empty porches, it sang like bird flutter trailing black ink into the rooms of lovemakers and daydreamers, transformed worshipers into bands of berserkers and convinced sinners to switch religions. It was accompanied by rain when it was dry and wind when it was still. And the hearts of those who heard it burst and spilled blessed curses and riotous prophesying on crocheted tablecloths and old Bibles and, once at least, “caught all of Red Pine County on fire with laughter.”

            Jordan Dotson’s speculative novel The Ballad of Falling Rock unveils the primordial spell that has plagued humans since words were first breathed into the landscape and nature was tamed. Set in rural Appalachia and spanning over a century, Dotson reveals through myth and metaphor the summum bonum, the impetus of religion and war, the reason we have been given breath:

Love.

As if the planet waited for the advent of the human voice, in a billion years of long anticipated evolution, to express itself. As if we are the universe knowing itself finally, in the depths and darkness of the cosmos.

            Fiction has the power to break conventions and take the reader on journeys otherwise incomprehensible, revealing the inner bark of the soul, opening the soil to the mysterious mycelium, demystifying bird flight and childbirth and the tears of old men. Perhaps because the truth revealed is primaeval, a clarion from a shared experience that transcends cultures and continents, it can only be heard as song:

“… so full of heart that it didn’t sound like a song, but crying, but praying, supplicating, and it wasn’t even beautiful. It was
just something real and true.”

Dotson’s language runs like a child barefoot in the neighboring forest when mother isn’t looking, leaping over snags and crashing through streams sending the crawdads into their muddy burrows. His narrative merges the elements of scene setting with character development, weaving nature and culture into the spell of music to leave the reader with a visceral mental picture, like a stag lifting its head from a trout stream, like a sermon that echoes off the hills and resonates in the soul:

“Saul’s first memory was a sound. Or more precisely, a collection of sounds, invisible currents of a great placid river of song. It was the wind in the chestnut trees, the snap and whiz of flying grasshoppers, the creak of the clothesline tugging at its post and the bedsheets dipping to the ground.”

Nature is not merely a character in this novel, it is an extension, a reflection, a prayer overlaying the human heart. As if the song emanating from antiquity and carried on the breeze came from an entity that knew the human heart intimately and took the form they could recognize… the ancient spirits of the woods, witches and demons, a Jewish carpenter who sang in words that carried across millennia. And finally, a young man thrust into the prophet’s lineage who knew “She was the reason… For every broken heart. For the saddest song anybody in the world ever heard.” And through the woman who captivated his heart the song entered his soul, entwined his pharynx, rooted him to soil and sent his inflorescence into the sky, and rained its truth on the people and seeded the land with the ghosts of their ancestors:

“They would say that within his voice you could hear the muffled thunder of distant rainstorms, candles burning low,
falling leaves, and the melancholy whispers of all the loved ones they’d ever lost…”

Dotson has spun a tale of the primal spell that binds, blinds, and destroys people’s hearts, where the prophet, the vessel chosen by the wind to voice the song the mountains have longed to sing, reveals the magical machinations nature employs in his mystical performance:

“Don’t you get it? That thing that makes people cry? It’s like cutting yourself on stage for show. It’s like letting people
watch your heart break to pieces… It’s being broken. It’s knowing you’re broken. It’s sacrificing yourself for everyone’s
pain.”

The Ballad of Falling Rock is more than a novel. It is a walk in forest under a clouded sky, where each falling leaf is a loved one, a memory that takes your hand as you become weightless. It is sitting on the porch of an old wooden house, deep in the woods with your people, when the smell of nightfall infuses your veins. Finally, it is a reflection on our story. The universal yearning for the horizon that wells up in the throats of lovers, mothers, sisters, and fathers. “This is not a happy tale,” Dotson writes. “But yet, it is how we know today that if we sing truly, we can still see glimmers of our loved ones who have passed, and can sometimes hear them softly whispering our names.”