The Fields

This book, the second in a trilogy, continues the story of Sayward and her growing clan as they continue to carve their lives out of the forests of Ohio, at the turn of the 19th century. Having hewn out a clearing for themselves, quite literally, the pioneers can now begin to look out on open fields of wheat and corn with a measure of hopefulness that they are making progress against the frontier.

Even so the war rages on: no longer battling the dense forests, their open fields are perfect targets for all the small animals expropriated from the dense cover of trees: it is a constant battle to eke out a living out of the fields of wheat and corn, from battling the squirrels who eat the seeds to the deer who eat all the young shoots show more before they can have time to mature. Where once the forest provided shelter and food, the open fields now make them slaves to a different kind of cruel environment: slaves to drought and famine, created by their own resourcefulness and industry. In a cruel irony, the pioneers face worse problems in the fields than they did in the dense forests.

In eloquent dialect, and true to the period, Richter leaves readers feeling they are reading a personal diary of the period. Like a memoir, it seduces you into Sayward's life, and you emerge from the book having felt you experienced her life, rather than merely read about it. show less

The Fields is the second volume in Conrad Richter’s trilogy The Awakening Land. In The Trees, Sayward Luckett arrived in the wilds of Ohio, where the forest was so thick it blocked out the sun, and the family were the only people, aside from Indians, inhabiting the land. Before the next group of settlers is established, Sayward’s mother, Jary, is dead and not long after her father, Worth, has departed for the next wilderness he can find.

Sayward stays in the cabin the family built, raises her remaining siblings, and establishes a life. Married now, she becomes the backbone of this land. She raises her children and clears her land, and it is the coming of the fields from the forest that this book deals with. We see, step-by-step, how show more the wilderness gives way to civilization; how a church and a school and businesses begin to take root in what was once an unsettled land. With the coming of this new place comes a new way of life, and not one without trouble or toil, but one with a different breed of both.

Richter’s style of writing makes me feel I am present in the settlement these people inhabit. I can feel the sweat that is required to make a good life out of a harsh environment, I can see the larger wildlife recede and the smaller animals, mice and possums, foxes and birds, take their place. There is a marked difference between Sayward’s children’s lives and the clear picture that remains in our minds of that of Sayward and her siblings. The change is gradual, but the change is real, and Richter is masterful at bringing us from one stage of the growth of this territory to another in exactly the kind of slow progression that life itself takes. In fact, he has now brought us out of the territory and into Ohio statehood.

I love books with strong women, particularly women who are strong in times and places where men are meant to prevail. Sayward is such a woman. She is much stronger than her husband, Portius, and it is her determination and sweat that carves civilization out of this wilderness, not his books or his law offices. Nothing about this life is easy, the dangers lie all around, and they are coupled with the human failings that have also been with us since the beginning of time.

I am looking forward to the final book, The Town, for I know it will bring these characters full circle and leave them in a place that is not wilderness any longer. I wonder if it will be better, for it is evident to us all that as we gain one thing, we lose something else. show less

While I didn't like The Fields as much as The Trees, it was still very enjoyable. Overall, this is one of the best series or trilogies that I can remember reading. Of course, the lead character Sayward makes the story for me. I have never come across another female character that is so strong, so demanding of respect, so independent, so supportive and loving towards her family and neighbors, so talented and hard-working and yet so human. For me the strongest image of Sayward is drawn with her speech as compared to her husband's. Sayward's speech is heavy with local dialect and lacking any formal education, whereas her husband is from the east coast and well-educated. And yet, often it is Sayward who provides the insight and wisdom while show more her husband pays attention. It is not unimportant that Sayward owns the land; she is the dominant force in the family and a major factor in the community. She is a leader, despite her faults, and is recognized as such. But she recognizes that she must often lead by discretely guiding.

The Fields could have been just more of the same, but Conrad Richter took the characters and therefore the reader to some very different and unexpected places than one would have thought at the end of The Trees. show less

When we rejoin Sayward Wheeler (nee Luckett), she has given birth to a baby boy she names Resolve. What a cool name for a kid! Sayward is a lonely woman because she has married a hesitant man. Portius ran out on Sayward when it came time to get married. He disappeared when she gave birth to their first son and it took Portius a long time to even acknowledge his first born son, Resolve. Portius was not even part of the baptism ceremony for Resolve. Sayward's sister Genny is the only family she has left in the region. Everyone else has scattered to the wind. Her father left when Jary died and Wyitt only returns from time to time. Sulie is still missing, presumed either dead or held captive by the regional natives. Betrayal follows Sayward show more but she is a resilient woman. She knows how to fight adversity fair and square.
Fast fast forward and now Sayward has had seven children; eight if you could little Sulie who died in a fire. With her brood of children Sayward watches her southern Ohio woodland home stretch into fields of openness with more and more people populating the area. Statehood has been declared and soon there is a need for a meeting house, school, boat launch, grist mill; times are changing. As the trees and animals are cleared out Sayward knows nothing will be the same. A competition grows between the newly established Tateville and Sayward's Moonshine Settlement. With Portius spending more time in town Sayward must chose between society's growing expansion and the comfort of all she has ever known.
As an aside, I have always wondered about churches with a graveyard attached. Why the two always seem to go together. It was interesting when the townspeople approached Sayward for her land. The fields are growing into towns and people need a church. Sayward has the most land to offer.
As another aside, I found the gluttonous hunting scene a little much: in total the men slaughtered at one time nineteen wolves, twenty-one bears, three panthers ,two hundred and ninety seven deer, and too many raccoon, fox, squirrel, and turkey to count. Richter summed it up well when he wrote of Sayward's brother Wyitt, "He was drunk, that's what he was, drunk on blood and gunpowder" (p 78). show less

The Fields is the second book in the Awakening Land Trilogy. Richter received the Pulitzer Prize for The Town, the third book of the trilogy about American pioneers, and according to the short biography in the back, the first book, The Trees, was the one he "felt was most alive." This is the middle book, and I'd rate it only a smidgin below the first. It's mostly told through the point of view of Sayward Luckett, who was fifteen years old when she came to the Northwest Territory with her family. The books opens in 1803 when she has given birth to her first child and Ohio has just become a state. She described her first glimpse of where she'd come to live for the rest of her life as an ocean of trees. The trees called to "woodsies" like show more her father and brother, but for her they were the enemy with whom she was at war, and this installment is about her victory:

Only last week the stalks were still green and supple. Most every day she had come here to feel the heads and watch the wind run through the field like water. Sometimes the waves minded her of silver fire weaving this way and that... One day last week the wind came from the east. The waves that time rose from the bottom, and then it looked like a waterfall running up hill. Oh, ever since those stalks had stayed so fresh and green through the cold winter she had the feeling that something in that wheat was alive and everlasting.

I loved the voice of this short novel. Richter was born in 1890 and knew people who could tell him of the early pioneer days first hand; he talks in his acknowledgements of trying to approximate the speech of the eighteenth and early nineteen century from "old manuscripts, letters, records and other sources, and quite different from the formal written language of the period." The voice he creates is different enough from what we're accustomed to suggest a different time without ever becoming hard to comprehend. And though this was written in 1946, the way he writes women never feels dated. His Sayward came across as very real. I found particularly moving and striking her fierce joy in finally learning to write her own name. All in all I greatly enjoyed this. It's like an adult Little House book, with touches of lyricism, humor, and moving moments. show less

Conrad Richter’s “The Fields” is the second novel of ”The Awakening Land” trilogy, which chronicles changing frontier life in southern Ohio beginning after the American Revolution and lengthening into the Nineteenth Century. Sayward Luckett Wheeler, the novel’s main character -- instinctively wise, competent, emotionally balanced – faces now different challenges. Long gone from her life are her father Worth, the inveterate hunter; her mother Jary, buried so long ago; and two sisters: the child Sulie, taken away by Indians, and the devious Achsa, living in the English Lakes area with her sister Genny’s husband Louie Scurrah. Of Sayward’s siblings only Genny and Wyitt remain.

During the time period of “The Fields,” show more which begins just before Ohio’s statehood is declared in 1803, Sayward -- married to the learned recluse Portius Wheeler at the conclusion of “The Trees” -- gives birth to eight children. The novel concerns itself with Sayward’s experiences as a mother, wife, homemaker, and land owner. It reveals several important experiences of three of Sayward’s older children. It exposes several of Portius’s not always commendable peculiarities. It chronicles the transition of the fledgling river settlement close to Sayward’s property from mostly a trading post establishment to a recognizable, successful town.

Specific events mark the transition. Statehood is declared. A township is created, necessitating the listing of property and acreage for taxing purposes. A large community hunt is undertaken to drive wild life out of the woods. A community meeting house is built on a parcel of Sayward’s property. A grain mill is built on the river. A school for boys is constructed. The town of Tateville is created. A locally built keel boat is launched. Toil, self-sacrifice, selfishness, disillusionment, tragedy, and self-discovery companion these events.

What engaged me most – not to ignore the novel’s feel of authenticity and depth of knowledge about frontier life at that time in that locality – was the author’s superb use of subjective narration to reveal at certain crisis moments his primary characters’ thoughts and emotions. Here are several examples.

Sayward’s fourth child and first daughter Sulie – so bright and engaging, walks on ashes outside the house to impress her brothers. Her dress catches on fire.

"If she got to be a hundred years old, Sayward told herself, never without her voice breaking could she tell a stranger how it went with their little Sulie that day. How she lay in her bed looking up at them with blackened rims where her eyelashes ought to be. How one minute she had been in this world light and free, and the next the gates of the other world were open and she had to pass through. Already she was where her own mammy couldn’t reach her. She couldn’t even touch grease to that scorched young flesh without Sulie screaming so they could hear her over at the Covenhovens."

…

"All the time in her mind she could see that little body when she first started to walk. Back and forwards Sulie’s small red dress used to go, her little red arms out to balance. She’d never get a weary. She could go it all day, wraggling and wriggling, skipping and jumping, going hoppity-hoppity, nodding and bobbing, in and out, from one side to another. Did that little mite know, she wondered? Did something tell her she had only a short while in this world, and that’s why she was always on the go, making up for it, cutting one dido after another?"

Sayward’s brother Wyitt decides to surrender to his desire to become a full-time hunter. Savoring his participation in the big community hunt to rid the woods of wildlife, he determines he must leave the area, strike out independently.

"No, never could he go back to corn-hoeing after today. Those black moose they told about and the hairy and naked wild bulls over the big river! He would have to see them and trail them and get them in his sights. Likewise the tiger cat, the striped prairie deer that outran the wind and the big horns that some called mountain rams. … He would send home his share of today’s meat… He would pick up his traps from his line and go. But never would he stop in at Sayward’s, for if he did, he might stay.

"... Oh, never would he go back to Sayward and Portius now, and yet he hated running off without saying something. Sayward had raised him, you might say. He had fought her plenty and called her names, but most times it turned out she was right. Maybe she was right that those who followed the woods never amounted to much. A farmer could stay in one place and gather plunder, she claimed, but a hunter had to keep following the game. … He knowed she was right. He had knowed it a long time. He had tried to break his self of it. He’d knock the wildness out of him, he said, if it was the last thing he did. He had done his dangdest to kill the ever-hunter in him, but it wouldn’t stay killed.

"... They [his nephews] were harder to leave than his full sister, for he took to them, and they to him. Especially Resolve, that tyke was different from his Uncle Wyitt as daylight to night time. For a little feller he was steady as could be. He could even read and write where Wyitt couldn’t sign his own name. He was his uncle’s favor-rite. Wyitt wished he had asked him to write something on a piece of paper so he could take it with him. Then some time he sat alone at night in some far woods or prairie, he could take out that paper. It would make him see Resolve plain as if standing here, screwing up his mouth and making pothooks and curleycues with his goosefeather pen while around him his smaller brothers watched and admired."

Sayward’s second-born son Guerdon is willful, selfish, and, sometimes, disobedient.

"Guerdon wished he had him another mammy. Oh, once he liked his mam good enough, but she’d changed. She’d gone back on him. He couldn’t make her out any more.

First she stood a slab bench with a gourd of soft soap by the run, and all had to scrub their heads and hands like they were pewter plates. Then she hung up a haw comb, and every time before you came in to eat, you have to hackle your hair with it. Oh, she was bound you’d be somebody around here. She put these puncheons down in the cabin just so she’d had a floor to scour, he believed. Now she talked of getting lime from Maytown and making her boys whitewash the logs.

"Her ways were so 'cam' you figured she was easy-going, but that’s where she fooled you. The day wasn’t long enough for the things she studied out to do to get you along in the world."

Sayward assigns Guerdon and his younger brother Kinzie to mill corn. The sweat mill standing in the chimney corner … " was the devil’s own contraption and turned hard as a four-horse wagon. A day’s grinding seemed a month long, and no Sabbaths."

While Sayward is away helping nurse a neighbor, the two boys take the corn they have been assigned to mill to the new grain mill at the river. They spend the entire day listening to stories told by patrons before returning home with a large sack of well-grounded flour. Sayward switches them. In bed that night, Guerdon is resentful.

"No, he wanted for forget his mam. He didn’t care if he never thought of her again."

Later in the novel Guerdon is bit on a finger by a rattlesnake. He cuts off the upper portion of his finger. Neighbors gather inside Sayward’s cabin to offer suggestions and witness the snakebite’s outcome. Sayward tends Guerdon as she sees fit.

"Guerdon believed he felt a mite better. It had worse things in this world than to lay here with nothing to do but have folks talk and worry over you. He couldn’t get over how good his mam had been to him. She was so 'cam' most times you thought she took you for granted and didn’t give a whoop for you any more. But let something real like this or stone blindness or black plague come along and you found out how much she liked you. Why, she’d chop off her own finger if it would help him any, he could tell. It gave him a feeling for her like old times."

I did not enjoy “The Fields” as much as I did “The Trees,” the first novel of Richter’s trilogy; although I am happy that I read it. “The Fields,” I felt, lacked its predecessor’s dramatic edge. Conflicts seemed a bit less daunting, less consequential. I look forward to reading the third novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Town,” which, I expect, will focus on the consequences of a major human failing committed by Portius in “The Fields,” a failing I chose not to reveal in this review. show less

This second entry in Richter’s Awakening Land series sees statehood come to Ohio as farms and then towns replace the wilderness. It continues the story of resilient pioneer woman Sayward Luckett Wheeler in the same folksy vernacular as the first book but now there’s a growing family and a contrary husband to add to her challenges.