A BACKWARDS PRAYER

The Life Stone of Singing Bird
Melody Henion Stevenson

by r. owen j.

Oren, an idealistic soul traveling west in the mid-19^th century with a glowing image of Rousseau's noble savage in tow, is struck down by an arrow before he is introduced at any length. Symbolizing the dismissal of flat and easily judged characters, this event prefigures an astonishing plunge into the painful and vivid world of early 'settlers' and their Native counterparts. Stevenson's debut novel depicts female experience in two uncomfortably overlapping societies, offering no easy answers and tirelessly challenging the reader's sympathies. As the saints on the fringes of the plot are brutalized by circumstance, main characters struggle with their own delicious imperfection and the reckless forces out of their control which torment them with what they deserve, and what simultaneously confounds any sort of rational justice. Stevenson opens up a space for the reader to revel in the ultimate convolution of life itself.

India, a dead, and consequently omnipotent settler, narrates the work grudgingly to the reader, whom she accuses of not loving her from the outset. And truly, she is not "lovable" in a traditional sense, even in her subtle demand that she be loved. Beginning at the end, she allows chronological time to dissipate into the folds of events that can be pieced together into the type of time we are more familiar with only at the expense of considerable strain by the reader. However, at the conclusion, which is, again, the very beginning, the entire effort resolves into something which has occurred and which folds in on itself with great agility. To attempt anything resembling a summary would do great violence to this effect; rather, perhaps we might survey some of the telling events which compose this panoply of lived experience.

In the struggling power center of an unnamed Indian tribe we observe the shunning and disfiguration of an adulterous, yet poignantly innocent "Singing Bird", who escapes into an ambiguous invisible state in the interstices of Indian and settler societies. A chief-to-be drums up a false vision in order to ensure his prominence as future leader of the tribe. A widowed settler lost in the woods is saved from an attacking wolf by a bird with a broken wing before discovering an abandoned Indian child buried under a tree. A kidnapping Indian chops off a settler's hand before being silenced by his shotgun. Good and evil merge and intermingle endlessly, summating to the ultimate delivery of that which just is. No excuses are offered for those who cannot accept it.

Taking a feather from Toni Morrison's cap, the work opens up skillfully into the supernatural at times, delivering a mysterious "Life Stone" which pulls and pushes central actors into madness, treachery and mistake as it dangles around the necks of its 'victims'. However, the life stone itself deftly avoids characterization and polarity, and while denounced as a curse by narrator India, can be construed as no more of a curse than life itself. Stevenson demonstrates skill and versatility in this debut- a highly promising contribution to the field of "new voices in American fiction".

"It isn't fair. Singing Bird got off easy compared to me; only her face was disfigured. My soul is scarred and dangling, and yet I am powerless still, in death as in life."