Introduction

“All the elements are in place for an inspirational, heartland- America redemption story, but Hart taps into his characters’ fears with gritty lyricism and noirish repartee that subvert any feel- good temptations.” —New York Times Book Review

“Hart’s clipped prose mirrors the stark Western landscape . . . A solid, original work that defies convention.”—San Francisco Book Review

Bandy Dorner, a Vietnam veteran, awakes from an alcoholic bender to learn that his cabin has burnt to the ground, with his wife, Iona, presumed inside. Reeling from his losses, Bandy shoots and kills a police officer. Meanwhile Iona, alive and well, walks away from the ashes of her old life, without telling her new boyfriend that she is pregnant with Bandy’s child. Eighteen years later, as Bandy awaits parole, he learns that he has a son, Tracy. Now that he is an adult, Tracy wants to reclaim his grandparents’ house in Lake Fork, Idaho. He is eager to prove himself in Lake Fork – and to get away from his mother, Iona, who has turned reckless after her second husband’s death. When Tracy suffers a near-fatal accident, Iona returns to Lake Fork for the first time in eighteen years. Bandy makes his way home, too, ravaged from his time in prison and unsure how to fit in with his ex-wife and son. Just as the three Dorners begin to rebuild their broken family, Bandy is forced commit one last crime. Iona and Tracy, abandoned again, resist the gravitational pull of land and family, staking new claims in their modernizing town. As Bandy struggles to return home, yet again, he must face the broken pieces of a family shattered by violence.

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Excerpt

Chapter 1

THE BURNING SEASON

The cabin was dark then a light flickered inside. Flames filled the windows and wormed at the sash; the glass blackened and shattered. Smoke poured out and drifted over the fields, the marshlands, and the creek and formed a dark ribbon at the base of the three hills that separated the Dorner land from the main road. Sometime after midnight the wind picked up and the trees on the mountainsides whispered and bent to it. The smoke was pushed beyond the hills and settled against the walls of the Finnish church and in the small graveyard nearby, but by then the fire was only a flicker, and the cabin was gone.

Bandy Dorner woke to a fogged windshield, cracked and spattered with mud and grass, the watery shadows of two policemen banging on his car hood with their fists. He opened the car door with his shoulder and fell into the canal. The shock of the water stole his breath and when he went to stand the strong current knocked him down. He dug his hands into the mud bank and pulled himself up to flat ground and stood dripping. The fog was nearly as dense outside of the car as it was within and it took him a few seconds to orient himself. The barbed wire from the fence he’d driven through was tangled up in his rear axle and strung across the field with some of the posts still attached.

“You can’t prove a thing,” Bandy said. He knew the two policemen and didn’t like them. Turner was the tall man’s name; Meeks was the shorter.

“I care about proof,” Turner said.

Meeks took a toothpick from his breast pocket and slipped it into his mouth. “We got your bed ready in town. It ain’t even pissed in. Yet.” He smiled and the toothpick pointed skyward.

Bandy slapped the water and mud from his pants. “Go on, leave me alone. I’ll fix the damn fence. It’s not like I hurt anybody. Yet.”

He smiled and went toward them and they stepped aside and he walked between, a few inches taller than Turner.

“Go up there and load yourself into the backseat of that car and we’ll be fine,” Turner called after him. “We ain’t wrestling with you again.”

Bandy ignored him. Dead grass snared his boots and made him stumble. He didn’t feel well. He touched his back pocket to see if his wallet was there and it was. He didn’t bother taking it out and looking inside because it was empty. He’d have liked to get home before Iona woke up, but it didn’t really matter. He could do as he pleased. They’d argued before he left for the bar. Going home was exactly what he’d been avoiding.

He walked through a dense belt of fog into a lesser pocket and saw his father standing in the ditch bottom with his fists clenched on the top wire of the fence. On the road behind him the haggard ranch truck that Iona usually drove was parked in front of the police car, but she wasn’t there. He didn’t see her. The gumdrop light turned and sounded out the closeness of the fog. Meeks and Turner followed Bandy at some distance and spoke quietly to one another; what they said he couldn’t hear.

It occurred to him that he’d been dreaming of the mill fire before the police woke him. He’d been a boy when it burned and hadn’t seen the actual fire, only the aftermath: the slow collapse of the town. In the dream, the fire raged in the mill and the ripe colors of the flames danced in the night and painted the glass surface of the lake. There was the sound of snapping cables and creaking timbers then the tower tilted and fell to the ground with such force that a single wave left the shoreline, only a few inches high, but it lifted the logs in the booming grounds one after the other and ran across the water with the silent determination of a falling star.

The fence wire was loose and the staples half pulled in the crisp and rotting posts. Bandy spread the wires and ducked through but he was too big and a barb tore the back of his shirt and gave him a rosary bead scratch just above his belt. Jack Dorner stayed fixed as a statue and watched him. He looked tired, like he’d been up. Bandy wanted to be easy with the old man but the tension was there always and had been getting worse. He pointed at the ranch truck. “How’s Iona supposed to get around if you steal her rig?”

His father drew back a little as if he’d seen something terrible over his son’s shoulder. Bandy turned but it was only the policemen and the fog behind him. “What’s wrong with you?” he said to his father. “You don’t like my shortcut?”

The old man’s eyes dulled and he shook his head. Bandy picked up a stick from the ditch and carefully made his way up the steep bank onto the road. Black, gummy hunks of mud fell from his boots with every step. He hopped onto the hood of the cop car and dented it and fuck their car along with them. He crossed his legs and held onto his boot with one hand and rooted the mud out with the stick. His father still hadn’t moved.

The cops took turns holding the fence wires for one another like they were cocking a crossbow. Their shoes were slick-soled and it took them several tries to make it from the borrow pit to the road. The old man followed them, mechanically kicking the toes of his boots into the soft earth for leverage. He made it to flat ground and touched his forehead and brushed his hand across his chest then looked at Bandy.

“It’s my car and I crashed it,” Bandy said to him. “There’s no reason for you to be out here. This is a young man’s game.”

“Some game.”

Bandy smiled at that and finished with his boots and threw the stick over the fence into the field. “Nothing for you,” he said, blinking.

“God, I’m still drunk.” He turned and noticed the rip in his shirt and touched it, held up two bloody fingers. “Cut myself. You see that? Sonofabitch.” He smeared his blood on the cop car, made an X.

“I sent for these police,” his father said.

Bandy looked at the old man, not really believing him. “That’s a rotten thing to do. Even to me.”

Jack Dorner showed his teeth, not a smile. “You certainly pick your days.” He poked a finger into the corner of his eye then held it out and looked at it, at Bandy. “Son, last night, out of all of them, you should’ve been at home.”

“Well, I’m headed there now. That’ll have to do.”

“It’s too late.” The old man retrieved his pink, once red, kerchief

from his back pocket and wiped his hands then stepped back

and waved the cops in. “Go to it,” he said. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the publisher:

1. Then Came the Evening begins and ends with house fires, and Bandy also dreams of a mill fire from Lake Fork’s history. Discuss who set each fire, and why: Bandy and Iona’s cottage, Tracy’s restoration of his grandparents’ home, and the old mill fire. What is destroyed in each of these blazes, and what is rebuilt?

2. Describe the opening scene of the novel, when Bandy Dorner commits the crime that changes his life. Why is Bandy so violent when he awakes in the canal? How does the situation escalate so quickly into murder? How does Bandy look back on this incident during and after his jail sentence?

3. On her way toward a new life with Bill, Iona thinks, “Bill was no longer her shadow man; he was in the light. Bandy was in the dark.” (9) Discuss the love triangle of Bandy, Iona, and Bill. What does Bill offer Iona that Bandy cannot? What elements of light and darkness exist within each of Iona’s romantic relationships?

4. In a review of Then Came the Evening, the New Yorker praises Brian Hart as “an astute observer of the transitional Western landscape.” What changes to Lake Fork do Bandy, Iona, Tracy, and Wilhelm witness? How do they feel about their evolving town?

5. As Tracy approaches the old Dorner house for the first time, “He wondered, on a blood level, how much do you get from one parent and how much do you get from the other?” (22) What personality traits does Tracy have in common with each of his parents, Iona and Bandy? Which traits seem entirely his own?

6. Consider Iona’s character at the beginning, middle, and end of the novel. How does Iona change between the year she leaves Lake Fork with Bill and the year she returns with Tracy? What low point does Iona reach on her fortieth birthday in Spokane? How does she turn her life around? Do Tracy and Bandy seem to appreciate Iona’s self-reinvention? Why or why not?

7. Consider the relationship between the Dorner and Guntly families. Why does Wilhelm Guntly hold a grudge against Bandy Dorner, and how does his relationship with Tracy affect those old resentments? Why does Iona refuse to identify with Ellen Guntly’s checkered past in Kansas City? Why do you think Ellen continues to bring Bandy groceries during his last winter illness?

8. Discuss the rekindled romance between Bandy and Iona. Why does Iona allow Bandy back in her bed after eighteen years apart? What regrets does she have after Bandy leaves town again?

9. After living under the same roof as Bandy, Tracy decides that “his ideas about family suddenly seemed very childish.” (147) What does Tracy expect of Bandy when he invites him to live in the house? How does Bandy fulfill or disappoint his son’s expectations? Why, after the murderous trip to Butte, can Bandy “tell in some small way that his son was actually proud of him, of what he’d done?” (243) Discuss Tracy’s pride and shame of his father at the end of the novel.

10. As he relearns to walk after his accident, Tracy realizes, “Accidents happen and afterwards it’s just a matter of salvage. Maybe all the time it’s a matter of letting what you can while you can, haul the lumber up the bank, save what you can from the fire. Let it go.” (209) Over the course of the novel, what does Tracy learn about accidents, consequences, and letting go? Which accidents must Tracy recover from, and what thoughts, feelings, and possessions must he let go of?

11. Although the novel takes place in Midwestern America, two international wars are happening in these years: the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. How do the novel’s characters talk about each of these wars? How does each war affect everyday life in Lake Fork?

12. Compare Bandy and Tracy’s reactions when they find out that it was Dan Cole who stripped the Dorner house. How are their reactions similar, and how are they different? Why is Jack’s footlocker so important to Bandy? What does he discover when he gets it back?

13. Review Bandy’s long journey from Butte back to Lake Fork, with a terrifying detour into a river. How does this journey compare to Bandy’s ordeals in prison? How does Bandy manage to survive these terrifying situations and find his way home twice?

14. Discuss how violence is passed on from one generation to another in the novel. How does Tracy suffer for Bandy’s crimes? How do Jake and Olin absorb the fight between Tracy and Dan Cole at the Piatt house? Iona hopes that “With grandchildren came a promise of redemption” (251) – can these cycles of violence come to an end? Why or why not?

15. When Iona realizes Bandy has died, “She hated herself for being relieved.” (254) Discuss Iona’s feelings at this moment. Why do relief and self-hatred mix in with grief? Why does Iona respond to these feelings with fire?

16. At the end of the novel, Bandy can’t bear to slaughter Tracy’s steer, Lyman, while Tracy makes his first kill during a hunting trip with Wilhelm and the Piatt brothers. Why can Tracy now shoot and kill, and Bandy cannot? What is the significance of each man’s new relationship to violence and the land?


Suggested reading
Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men; Philipp Meyer, American Rust; Larry Brown, Father and Son; Ron Carlson, The Signal and Five Skies; Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers; Sam Shepard, Day Out of Days: Stories; Jim Harrison, The Farmer’s Daughter; Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain; Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned; Jane Smiley, Private Life.

Born in Idaho, Brian Hart spent years working as a carpenter, welder, commercial fisherman, and framer of elevator shafts before earning his MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. He was the winner of the 2005 Keene Prize, one of the largest student prizes for literature.

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