Cured by Fire

It is hard to talk about "Cured by Fire" in casual overview because it touches on so many native feelings about life, death, faith, suffering and survival. It is the story of two good men, who, through a series of horrible events, endure difficult tests. One falls apart relatively early and the other, ensconced in his own "temple" of faith, only turns bitter at the very end. By that time the other man, severly disfigured and by now a gutter drunk, has turned a corner and comforts the dying and formerly faithful man to find a peace of his own. It is a story about growing up, heartbreak and hard living, woven together in clear-eyed flashbacks that bring the avid reader to a white-hot, emotional finale. A stirring work on every count.

McLaurin's eloquent novel of loss and redemption begins with two homeless men, Lewis and Elbridge, on a hillside near Seattle, waiting for one of them, Elbridge, to die. And it ends (I'm not ruining any surprises) with Elbridge's death and Lewis' first steps back into the world.In between is the story, told in alternate voices - first person for Elbridge, third for Lewis, of how the destinies of these two Southern men so far from home become intertwined.Lewis and Elbridge have little in common besides an impoverished boyhood, a hideous tragedy and fire. Lewis is a white boy from North Carolina, son of a drunk, who often ends up in foster care with a viciously abusive church-going woman. From the age of 8 he has worked the tobacco harvest, graduating from barn to fields at age 11. Heat waves rise from the page with McLaurin's descriptions of this backbreaking work and the people who do it. Lewis' fellow croppers are all black: "Sweat had dried on their faces, and their forearms and hands were caked with tobacco gum."Elbridge is the son of a part-Indian white woman who ran off in his infancy and a black man he never knew. Raised in a Kentucky mountain hollow by his grandfather, a retired coal miner, he suffers the taunts of his schoolfellows with a bewildered fatalism. But home to Elbridge is a place of simple warmth where you can almost smell the greens melting down in bacon grease.Elbridge's needs are met by the garden, the fishing and his grandfather. And when he was 12 Elbridge received a shotgun. His grandfather warns him, "It can kill you like a snake if you let it. Don't ever forget that. But it can feed you too. And it can free you from the world. Maybe just for an hour or so, but it can free you."Lewis, too, receives this gift of freedom, which makes his isolation an idyll rather than a prison. But suddenly he gets his growth and the "white trash" outcast becomes a football star - and much in demand by the world, so much so his only escape is into the woods with his rifle.No spurts of growth for Elbridge. Instead his grandfather dies and he's forced off the rented land. Wandering, he finds religion. "I kept reading my Bible, and I found out I was invisible. ...My mixed blood was only on the outside, and the real me was inside and pure as the first snow....I was a temple."Both men establish families and lose them, which is the crux of the story. For Lewis, tragedy is a taunt from a vengeful god and he dares God to kill him and is, very nearly, killed in a fire. For Elbridge the fire is the tragedy which takes his life but leaves him still walking the earth, following God's will in a search for meaning.McLaurin's early chapters are the strongest, immersing the reader in the heat and earthy smells of the south, the all-encompassing loneliness of a child, the petty meanness and wisdom of adults. While the beauty of the writing never flags, the book's themes of self-deception, blame and eventual self-knowledge and acceptance seem simplistic and