The Wergild

About the Novel

The novel is built in three movements across a gulf of years, each carried by a different keeper of the same book. The first belongs to August Wardlaw and his wife Marvel, who run the colored parlor in Verlin Bluffs in the year the country came apart. Nineteen nineteen is the summer of the packinghouse and the levee, of the burial league that meets in a church basement and buries its members a nickel at a time so that no one goes into the ground in a county box. It is also the summer a mob works the Bottoms, and August washes the results, and enters on his right-hand pages the things a death certificate has no line for: who a man belonged to, what his hands had done, whether anyone had held them lately. Among the entries is a cook passing through on his way east, one train from home, who sits at a neighbor's table and works a homecoming kitchen and leaves in the middle of the singing so as not to break it, and whose name burns with his papers before the house can learn it. The book holds his line open, described but unnamed, and waits.

The second movement moves the keeping to the next generation and the demand to a single voice. Odessa Wardlaw Rooks, August's daughter, loses her son Odell in a county cell, where the record writes unattended and a sixteen-minute dictation belt says otherwise. She stands up in a council chamber and asks the city one sentence: the name of the man responsible. For eleven months the city answers with everything except the name, a scholarship resolved in his memory, a service of unity, a park drawn and rendered, an envelope carried to her door after dark, and for eleven months she repeats the one sentence without changing a word, because a sentence said the same way every time is an instrument and variation is what negotiation feeds on. When the name finally reaches her on a slip of paper read into the public record, she keeps it off every page and has it cut instead into the underside of her son's gravestone, face down against the earth, and pays for the cutting herself.

The third movement wakes in the present, when a printer's file proof of a photograph made in Verlin Bluffs in 1919 surfaces in an auction catalog, and a curator's honest scholarship and the family's century of keeping arrive at the same object from opposite directions. The hoard the family has guarded in its cellar, the ledgers and envelopes and the belt and the one photograph, draws a fire the way the old poem's gold draws one, and the front rooms of the parlor burn, arson by nobody, filed the way the county files such things. It falls to Wren Wardlaw, the fourth generation and the first keeper who chooses the book rather than inheriting it unasked, to close an account her great-grandfather opened, and to read a name aloud on a hill with both towns listening.

Verlin Bluffs, its county, and its newspapers are invented. The year they stand in is not. The reader is owed that distinction on the first page that can make it, and the novel makes it there.

About Fractional Fiction

Fractional Fiction is a series built on a single method. Each novel takes three works of the public domain, breaks each one down to the load-bearing structure under its story, the engine that made it move, and raises a new book on those three frames, bound by one present idea and carried on contemporary research and consequence. The fraction is the relation: three old numerators over one new denominator. None of the sources is hidden and none is mere decoration. A reader who knows the originals feels them working under the floor; a reader who has never met them finishes the book already halfway into all three.

The Wergild is the tenth novel in the series, following The Dying Grove (mycorrhizal networks and forest consciousness), The Inheritance (transgenerational epigenetics and family secrets), The Kinship of Strangers (population genetics and identity), The Held Land (Black land dispossession and inheritance), The Corollary (women's peace activism in World War I), The Somnambulist's Prophecy (disorders of consciousness and foreknowledge), Civility Certified (bureaucratic violence and institutional exclusion), Standard Deviation (algorithmic governance and surveillance scoring), and The Likeness (voice cloning and the fabricated voice).

Source Material: A Poem, a Play, and an Epic

The Wergild raises its three movements on three works of the public domain, each supplying a different organ, all three converging on the idea named in its title: the price owed for a life, and what happens when the debtor will never be billed.

W. B. Yeats, "Easter, 1916" supplies the engine of the withheld name. Yeats wrote his elegy for the executed leaders of the Dublin Rising within months of the firing squads, then held it back for four years, and its most radical move is structural. For three stanzas the dead are only them, people the poet passed in the street and traded idle courtesies with, and only in the final movement does he write the names out, so that naming becomes the poem's climax rather than its premise. The Wergild borrows that engine and stretches it across a century, withholding its murdered man's name from its own pages for fifty chapters until a raking lamp and a child's pencil give it back, so the reader receives it with the same weight the family does. Yeats also set the book's discipline about verdicts. He declines to say whether the sacrifice was needless, assigning himself only the duty of the record, to murmur name upon name, and the novel keeps that refusal, levying its debt as a name and a stone and a reading and withholding every judgment the record cannot carry.

Oscar Wilde, Salomé supplies the engine of the single demand. Wilde's one-act tragedy runs on the simplest mechanism in drama, a demand made under an oath that cannot be bought off. Herod swears to give the dancer whatever she asks and then bids against his own oath, offering the largest emerald in the world, his white peacocks, the veil of the sanctuary itself, and to each offer she answers with one sentence, unchanged, until the sentence wins. The novel's second movement inverts the object. A mother whose son died in a county cell stands in a council chamber and asks for a name, refuses the scholarship and the service and the park and the envelope across eleven months, and answers every counter-offer with her one sentence said word for word, because variation is what negotiation eats. Where Salomé demands a death and receives it on a silver charger, the mother demands a name and receives it on a slip of paper, and what she does with it, cutting it into the underside of a gravestone to lie face down against the earth, is the novel's answer to the platter.

Beowulf supplies the skeleton and the title. Built in three fights, the last across a gulf of fifty years, the poem gave The Wergild its architecture at the joints: 1919, then 1968 and 1969, then 2025 and 2026, three generations of one keeping with the gaps left dark. It opens on a funeral and closes on a funeral, and the novel keeps that envelope, opening on a nameless man taken from the river and closing on a homegoing and a burial mound of its own. The dragon's hoard is here translated into a cellar of ledgers and envelopes and a dictation belt and one photograph, wakened when a single piece surfaces at auction, and the dragon's fire into the fire that takes the parlor's front rooms. Most of all the poem supplies the law. Wergild is its peace-machinery, the payment that settles a killing before it becomes a feud, and the poem's first horror is a creature who refuses the whole system, Grendel, who makes no peace and pays no death-price and settles nothing with fee, which is why that passage becomes the book's third epigraph. In the novel the refusing party is the county, which for a century names nobody and closes its files with the coroner's phrase, and the family answers the only way the old law allows when the debtor will not pay: it assesses the wergild itself and prices the debt in the one currency the poem says outlasts gold, which is a name.

Research Domain: 1919, the Camera, and the African American Way of Death

The novel is grounded in the documentary record of American racial violence and of the trade that buried its dead. Its Nebraska summer draws on the history of 1919, the year of the Red Summer and, in Omaha, of the courthouse mob and the machine politics behind it, work anchored in Orville Menard's account in Nebraska History and in the larger surveys by Philip Dray and the Equal Justice Initiative. The photograph at the center of the third movement comes out of the scholarship on lynching as spectacle and commodity, the real photo postcard and the printer's file proof, documented in Without Sanctuary and in Amy Louise Wood's study of witnessing, with Ida B. Wells-Barnett's Red Record behind all of it. Its undertaking family and their ledger are drawn from the history of the African American funeral trade and the mutual-aid burial league, the church-basement covenant that did the work of a bank and an insurer where white companies would not, work found in Suzanne Smith's To Serve the Living and Karla Holloway's Passed On, and set inside the Great Migration that Isabel Wilkerson charted in The Warmth of Other Suns. For the old law and the poem, the sources are Klaeber's Beowulf and Yeats's own 1921 volume. Period-accurate technology carries each era, from the 1919 postcard press to the mid-century dictation belt to the auction house condition report of the present.

Excerpt

The night the river gives up a man with no name, August Wardlaw makes his two entries, one for the county and one for the house.

No. 611. Man unknown. About fifty years. Trade not shown. Taken from the river below the Kettle the eleventh of June. Cause, drowning. Buried the fourteenth of June, county rate, Section D, grave 41.

The right-hand pages of the tall book were ruled the same as the left, and the county had no questions for them, and so they belonged to August, as they had belonged to his father. Remarks, the printer had headed the column, forty years ago, and remarks were what the house made there, in a smaller hand, the weekday one, the one that did the actual living.

Remarks: No mark on him. River kept him three days and was kind about it. Tin in his shirt with a woman's picture, folded dry. He carried her careful. Somebody's.

Marvel came to the office door with her sleeves still pinned from the washing and read the pages upside down, a skill twenty years of marriage to the stand had given her. "Anybody come asking after him, ever," she said, "what do we tell them?"

"Where he is," August said. "And that he was carried decent."

Further Reading

For more on the themes explored in The Wergild, see these related works from the Boles constellation:

The Kinship of Strangers: When DNA Reveals What Identity Cannot Accept · The Book I Could Not Afford to Get Wrong · Bury My Casino at Wounded Knee · The Held Land · Beyond the Burial Tree

About the Author

David Boles is an author, dramatist, editor, publisher, and teacher. He was born in Nebraska and lives in the New York City area, where he has written and published under the David Boles Books imprint since 1975. He holds an MFA from Columbia University, where he trained at the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies, and he has been a member of the Dramatists Guild since 1984 and of the Authors Guild and PEN America.

With Janna Sweenie he co-founded an American Sign Language program at the City University of New York School of Professional Studies and co-authored the ASL Linguistics for Practitioners series. His work spans fiction, drama, cultural criticism, and institutional history, including the Fractional Fiction novels, of which The Wergild is the tenth.

He writes daily at bolesblogs.com. Boles.com stands at the center of his constellation of projects, and the full catalog lives at bolesbooks.com.