Publication Date: July 14, 2015 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Formats: eBook, Hardcover
ISBN-10: 0544470192
Pages: 304
Genre: Historical Fiction
A debut novel chronicling the life and loves of a headstrong, earthy, and magnetic heroine
Eastern Oklahoma, 1928. Eighteen-year-old Maud Nail lives with her rogue father and sensitive brother on one of the allotments parceled out by the U.S. Government to the Cherokees when their land was confiscated for Oklahoma?s statehood. Maud's days are filled with hard work and simple pleasures, but often marked by violence and tragedy, a fact that she accepts with determined practicality. Her prospects for a better life are slim, but when a newcomer with good looks and books rides down her section line, she takes notice. Soon she finds herself facing a series of high-stakes decisions that will determine her future and those of her loved ones.
Maud's Line is accessible, sensuous, and vivid. It will sit on the bookshelf alongside novels by Jim Harrison, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, and other beloved chroniclers of the American West and its people.
Read an Excerpt
Maud was bent over one row suckering
tomato plants and Lovely was bent over the next one. They were talking about a
girl Lovely had his eyes set on. But a cow’s bawling interrupted that. Maud
unfolded and looked toward the river. Lovely did the same. The bawling was
loud, unnatural, and awful, and it set them to running. They ran first toward
the house, not toward the sound, because neither had taken a gun to the garden.
Maud stopped at the steps; Lovely rushed in for their rifles. Armed up and not
bothering to talk, they both ran straight toward the pump to get to the pasture
below the ridge where the howling was coming from. If they hadn’t been fearful,
they would’ve run fifty more yards to the gate and gone through it. But they
were scared and hurrying, so they climbed the barbed wire just past the pump,
and Lovely snagged his sleeve, leaving behind a piece of blue cotton waving
like the flag of a small foreign country. Maud did worse than that. She snagged
her leg below the knee at the back, opening a tear deep at its top and three
inches long. Maud was vain about her legs and Lovely had only three shirts, but
still they ran, focused on the bawling, without minding their mishaps.
When they got to the cow, Betty was folded with both her head and her rump
sticking up. Between them, smack across the ridge of her spine, were three
wide, angry gashes. She was thrashing all over the ground. She’d flattened out
a circle of weeds, and, oddly, out of the center wound, a stalk of poke
protruded. It was a thick stem of poke and resembled, stuck out as it was, a
spear. That’s what Maud thought as soon as she saw it.
Lovely yelled, “Her back’s axed. We’ll have to shoot her.” He moved toward
Betty’s head and raised his rifle. But then he just stood, cheek on the stock,
eye down the sights, finger on the trigger.
Maud yelled, “Pull it.”
But the end of Lovely’s gun shook like a leaf in a breeze. So Maud raised her
rifle, moved a step west to keep from shooting her brother, and waited until
she had a good look at an ear.
The blowback of skull and brain splattered onto Lovely’s overalls and shirt. He
lowered his gun and looked down at his bib. He said, “I’m gonna be sick.”
Before he completely bent over, he threw up fatback and biscuits over pieces of
cow head.
Betty’s legs kept flailing. Maud shouldered her rifle again; said, “Move
farther back”; looked down her sights; and sent another bullet into the white
patch between the cow’s eyes. Then she cradled her gun in the crook of her arm,
cupped her hand over her mouth, and cried, “Betty, I’m sorry.” Her shoulders
heaved. She felt the blood trickle down the back of her leg. She looked at the
rivulet, laid her gun on the ground, and tore off a Johnson grass blade. She
plastered it over the wound and then sat in the weeds and watched the cow
twitching to death.
Tears watered Maud’s eyes and spilled onto her cheeks. Betty was a tough
Hereford with a big heart and strong legs and, the year before, had climbed a
fallen tree to escape the worst of the flood. But any dead cow would’ve been a
disaster. They’d lost all but three of their herd to the water. To take her
eyes and mind off of Betty’s trembling, Maud looked over to Lovely. He was
wiping his bib with a leaf. She said, “Don’t worry about that. We’ve got to
save this meat.”
Maud sent Lovely off to round up their uncles, Blue and Early. The men came
back with Blue driving Great-Uncle Ame’s 1920 Dodge sedan. He maneuvered it
into the pasture as close to Betty as he could get, and the four of them strung
her up to the sturdiest tree around. They set to butchering, talking about the
meanness it took to ax a cow in the back. They gave Blue the hide to cure and
packed Betty’s meat in old newspapers and feed sacks. They deposited those on
the floor of the backseat and agreed they’d pay Hector Hempel, the dwarf who
ran the icehouse, two rump roasts for storing the meat. The men drove off with
the car loaded so heavy it didn’t rattle.
Maud walked to the house. She first tended her leg and then drew her dress and
slip off over her head. At eighteen, she was fit, dark, and tall like the rest
of her mother’s family and most of her tribe. She was more of a willow than an
oak, and her figure and personality had grown pleasing to every male within a
twenty-mile radius, to some of the women, too, and to most of the animals. Maud
carried that admiration the way eggs are carried in a basket, carefully, with a
little tenderness, but without minding too closely the individual. She drew on
another slip and dress, tossed her and Lovely’s dirty clothes in a tub, and
pumped cool water over them until they were completely covered. She left them
to soak while she filled one of the front-yard kettles with water and lit a
fire under it.
While she stirred their clothes in the kettle, her heart sank further than it’d
sunk since the flood, and tears came to her eyes again. Heat rose up to her
cheeks, and the fire under the pot made her shins hot. She poked the clothes
with the pole and gave in to crying and to some self-pity she didn’t much
admire. She wanted a washer with a tub and ringers. They were advertised all
the time in the papers. So were refrigerators, lamps that turned on with
buttons, toilets that flushed in the house. She lifted her dress out of the
water with the end of the pole and dipped it again. She wiped her nose with the
back of her hand and forced her mind off of the things she wanted. She turned
it to the cold kind of cruelty that would kill an innocent cow. She felt Betty’s
twitching in the wound on the back of her leg, felt her bawling all over again
in her heart.
But she was recovered and hanging the clothes on the line when the men got back
to the farm. And although they were noticeably tired from the butchering and
lugging of meat, and Lovely was still shaken from the whole ordeal, they
pitched in and scooped out the wash water, carried it to the garden for the
tomato plants, and set wood for a fire in the pit. Maud had saved back enough
meat to feed some of their extended family: Blue and Early, of course; and her
grandpa Bert; and her great-uncle Ame and his wife, Viola; and her aunt Lucy
and her husband, Cole. She didn’t save out any for her father. It was Saturday
and late in the afternoon. He wouldn’t crawl back until well into the
night.
Blue left to clean up and fetch the others. But Early hung around to eat his
share of the beef. He was only twenty-six, and his talk was about going to
town, gambling, and people of the female persuasion. Maud found Early a lot of
fun, and having him to herself raised her spirits some. She teased him about
his plans for the evening and fed him the food that was ready, except for the
onions. She told him he needed to hold off on those out of respect for the
women.
Shortly after Early left, Blue came back in a wagon with his father, Ame and
Viola, Lucy and Cole, and their baby boy. He pulled the wagon close to the fire
and hitched the mules to the rail. There weren’t enough chairs for everybody to
sit, so they ate from the wagon bed, some in it...
PRAISE FOR MAUD'S LINE
"Maud is refreshingly open and honest about her own sexuality though conscious of her place as a woman in a sexist society, always careful not to insult the intelligence or manhood of her male friends and relations. Verble writes in a simple style that matches the hardscrabble setting and plainspoken characters. Verble, herself a member of the Cherokee Nation, tells a compelling story peopled with flawed yet sympathetic characters, sharing insights into Cherokee society on the parcels of land allotted to them after the Trail of Tears." ..KirkusWriting as though Daniel Woodrell nods over one shoulder and the spirit of Willa Cather over the other, Margaret Verble gives us Maud, a gun-toting, book-loving, dream-chasing young woman whose often agonizing dilemmas can only be countered by sheer strength of heart.
..Malcolm Brooks, author of Painted Horses
"I want to live with Maud in a little farm in a little valley under the shadow of a mountain wall. Maud's Line is an absolutely wonderful novel and Margaret Verble can drop you from great heights and still easily pick you up. I will read anything she writes, with enthusiasm. ...Jim Harrison, author of Dalva, Legends of the Fall, and The Big Seven
Margaret Verble gives us a gorgeous window onto the Cherokee world in Oklahoma, 1927. Verble?s voice is utterly authentic, tender and funny, vivid and smart, and she creates a living community the Nail family, Maud herself, her father, Mustard, and brother, Lovely, and the brothers Blue and Early, the quiet, tender-mouthed mare Leaf, and the big landscape of the bottoms, the land given to the Cherokees after the Trail of Tears. Beyond the allotments, it opens up into the wild, which is more or less what Verble does with this narrative. A wonderful debut novel...Roxana Robinson, author of Sparta
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARGARET VERBLE, an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, has set her novel on her family's allotment land. She currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky, and Old Windsor, England.
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