Novel tracks girl’s life through family breakup

• By GREGT LANGLEY
• Books editor
• Published: May 31, 2009

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TENDER GRACES
By Kathryn Magendie; Bell Bridge Books, $14.95 softcover

Magendie’s novel is the fictional biography of Virginia Kate Carey. The story unfolds partly in retrospective, but mostly in the present tense, first-person voice of Virginia Kate.

She is the daughter of a wild yet beautiful West Virginia mountain woman, Katie Ivene Holmes, and the Shakespeare-quoting, kitchen-tool-peddling Texan, Frederick Hale Carey, who comes to the cabin where she lives. It’s the 1950s and Frederick is trying to sell pots and pans. He talks to Katey Ivene’s mother, but it’s the daughter that catches his eye.

“Momma looked as if she came from an ancient palace in Egypt instead of a slanted house deep on a mountain in West Virginia. She didn’t belong, even with her thin cotton dresses and dirty bare feet. Everyone knew it. It was in the pictures buried in Grandma Faith’s journals. It was in the men’s faces whenever my mother sashayed by, leaving her trail of Shalimar and sex. It was in Daddy’s face when he met her across Grandma Faith’s kitchen table.”

In short order the pair are married and quickly have three children, Virginia Kate sandwiched between brothers Micah and Andy. They move into a house in the holler not far from Katey Ivene’s parents. From the start, they drink too much. Soon they are living an alcoholic lifestyle, and it’s clear fidelity is a casualty of drink too. Their raging arguments terrify the children.

In an effort to improve their marriage, Frederick and Katey Ivene send the children away to stay with an aunt for a short time. The aunt turns out to be spiteful and abusive and her husband is something worse. A tragic event ends their visit.

Predictably, the parents split up, but the children stay with Katey Ivene in West Virginia as Frederick heads off to some place called Louisiana to go to college.

Even at the long distance, the bickering between the parents continues, and one day Frederick, now remarried, comes and takes the oldest son away with him to live in Baton Rouge. Virginia Kate is devastated. Her mother continues on, drinking and carrying on.

Then her mother and father work out an agreement and Virginia Kate goes to live with her father in Baton Rouge, too. It’s 1965 and Virginia Kate is 7. It’s a big adjustment for her. She’s glad to see her older brother Micah again, but she misses her younger brother, Andy. Micah gives her some tips on living in Louisiana to try to help her out.

Micah explains that Louisiana doesn’t have counties like West Virginia. “They have parishes,” he tells Virginia Kate.

“Par-what?” she asks.

Geography is not her only adjustment. Virginia Kate has to learn new ways of speaking.

“First you have to say yawl. It’s spelled y-a-l-l,” Micah tells his sister.