The Winter Family: A Novel by Clifford Jackman
My rating: 4/5 cats
The sparsely settled West was lawless and chaotic. Men dueled, drank, poached, grazed their cattle, and cut trees on the land of others. The sold whiskey to Indians, raped and whored. Banditry was endemic. Men took what they wanted and disappeared.
wow. so, lots of people die in this book.
and it’s fun as shit.
i personally love a good western/grit lit novel and am willing to withstand all of the unsavory things the genre entails: causal murder, torture, rape, and scalping among them. if you prefer our modern sanitized america with its organic produce and child-safety locks on the silverware drawers, you will not like this. this is rowdy olde america – kids with guns and porcine blood from the slaughterhouse running insalubriously in the gutters. this is a land without accountability until the wrong man learns your name. there are no heroes here.
august winter starts the novel as a young boy with a back twisted and crisscrossed with a thousand scars, looping in and around one another like a pile of rope or a ball of rattlesnakes, courtesy of his reverend father’s lessons, and he grows into the hardest man you will ever meet. while fighting in the civil war on the union side at age fifteen, he is exposed to the violence of his world, and the lessons in cruelty continue.
the war encourages all types of violence: masters kill slaves, slaves kill masters, men hang slaves for killing masters, soldiers on both sides kill dispassionately in the permissive climate of a civility suspended by war, and opportunistic sadists join up just for the pleasure of killing. entire towns of civilians are sacrificed for strategy, and the genocide of native tribes is perpetuated by soldiers as well as warring tribes.
“The world’s a hard fucking place…A little hard to get by with just please.”
after the war, winter finds that he has become an outlaw – that those who gave the orders are all too willing to wash their hands of the unpleasantness they set in motion, and along with other similarly-discarded individuals, he crosses this wild america, providing the muscle for those too squeamish or civilized to do more than give the orders. these men form their own kind of family (HENCE THE TITLE), but it’s a singular kind of family comprised of people who have saved each others’ lives but don’t necessarily trust one another, just a shifting group of men who have nothing to lose and are well-suited to the life of a mercenary.
“Not everyone in this room is smart, or handsome. Ain’t nobody in here a good person. But everyone here has fought together. Everyone here has put his life on the line for everyone else. Everyone here was out in the woods together, out in enemy country, with bushwhackers looking to take our scalps and Klansmen looking to burn us alive. Everyone here put everything he had in the pot. Everybody”.
winter is watchful, careful, and ruthless and he disdains the hypocrisy of those who use the law as a shield while twisting it to keep themselves in power and safe from scrutiny. he understands that violence springing from idealistic intentions is no better than killing for profit. some of his speeches made me think of my future husband’s:
best scene ever when addressing the hypocrisy of the system.
this in no way makes winter a hero, or even an antihero. he is just a man who sees the world as it is – a violent grasping place where opportunities arise for men willing to recognize it when they see it. cowardly men hidden underneath white robes, dishonest politicians exploiting newly-arrived immigrants, genocide in the name of progress – all offer winter and his men a place to exercise the skills they learned in war, by the very men who are now horrified by their actions. august’s worldview is chilling, but it isn’t entirely inaccurate. he has adapted to the violence powering the entire machine of america, but at least he’s not bullshitting himself about it, like so many on both sides of the law:
It was the age of the outlaw, but the Winter Family were not like the other bandits, who hit soft targets for money and then hid with those who would hide them. Other bandits carefully crafted a romantic image, courted the newspapers, and dispensed largesse like Robin Hood. The James gang cast themselves as Confederate partisans, while the Reno Gang started out as bounty jumpers, accepting money to enlist in the Union Army and then deserting. The Winter Family never gave a damn what anyone thought of them, and if men gave them shelter, they did it out of fear.
it’s a story of the history of america, and an acknowledgement of the cruelty that made it all possible. in a very “sing of walls” moment, winter speechifies:
“Everything out there is a lie,” Winter said. “Can’t you see it? It was them behind us in Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi. It was them behind us yesterday. And then they just pretend. They just talk. ‘Cause they can’t face this.”
Winter made a gesture that encompassed the blood, the flesh, the clattering steel and steam, the darkness, the herds of terrified pigs.
“Jan,” Winter said. “This is what’s real. This is how the meat you eat gets on your plate. This is how everything works. Everything they tell you is just a lie to hide it.”
rereading what i just wrote, i realize i made it sound like some kind of cranky anti-america polemic, but it’s not. this is all pretty standard in neo-western fare – an honest examination of the lawlessness of the times and how the brutality of war and territorial expansion carried over into the supposedly civilized areas of politics and business. but it’s way more action and shoot ’em up than moral exhortation. lots of killing, many unexpected turns. there were some things i didn’t understand, motive-wise, around the 3/4 mark, but by that point, you’re all caught up in momentum and rains of bullets, so you’re less concerned about the “why” and more concerned about who’s still gonna be left at the end of it all.
it’s a propulsive, bloody romp for those of you into that sort of thing.
and as a shout-out, i just have to say that sevenkiller is one of the most phenomenally creepy bad guys i have ever read View Spoiler »
bang bang bang.
good times.
