How characters in this year's One Read heal from homesickness
Editor's note: Each Sunday in September, Karena Tse of Daniel Boone Regional Library will explore a different aspect of this year's One Read title, "When Two Feathers Fell From the Sky" by Margaret Verble. Columns may include mild spoilers.
"He wished for moonlight over the cliffs of Dover, for a canopy of stars over the moors of Yorkshire, for the shadow of the steeple of the Salisbury Cathedral."
At this moment in Margaret Verble’s "When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky," a man misses home. Clive Lovett is an Englishman, and a veteran of World War I, who has found himself managing a zoo in Glendale, Tennessee. After weeks of hesitant courting, he debates moving in for a first kiss after a date. But something just isn’t quite right — the setting isn’t romantic, or meaningful, or comfortable enough. It isn’t home. How can his heart relax into the moment when part of it is still on the other side of the world?
Clive isn’t the only resident of Glendale Park and Zoo reckoning with a feeling of displacement. Our protagonist, Two Feathers, lives inside this feeling. She was raised at a distance from her origins, a descendant of Cherokee peoples who were killed and scattered by white colonizers. The family that she does know is back in Oklahoma on the 101, the ranch where Two learned to ride a horse and talk to animals.
Like Clive, Two longs for the landscapes of her past life. While Clive’s mind conjures the cliffs of Dover, Two’s wanders to southwestern skies and sprawling buffalo pastures. Uprooted and adrift, these two characters find a feeling of understanding, stability and trust in their relationships with animals that they struggle to find with humans.
Ironically, neither Clive nor Two has any trouble drawing the attention or affection of their fellow humans. Both are admired by their peers and patrons — Clive being the trustworthy, decent, soft-spoken zoo manager, and Two the beautiful and fearless horse diver. But both take care to keep their distance from human matters: "He’d learned in childhood the fragility of personal attachments and had turned his love to animals instead."
After a devastating accident that leaves her injured and grieving, Two accepts help from a few trusted peers. But it’s only with Adam, a buffalo, that she feels safe enough to let her guard down. Adam is not just a zoo creature to Two; he is a reminder of home, and a grounding, kindred spirit.
In a touching scene, Two weeps as she recounts the traumatic accident to Adam through the fence of his enclosure — a rare act of release from our proud protagonist. "I’ll be back tomorrow, Adam," she promises at the end of the visit. "I love ya." It is the first and last time those three words are uttered by Two, or by anyone, in the entire book.
Clive also leans into the familiar and reliable love of the animals in his care, dodging the bewildering romantic signals coming from the women of Glendale — one woman, in particular. Helen Hampton is kind and warm, but Clive struggles to move forward with her. He walks with one foot in the present, and one in a harrowing past he could never explain to her, or to anyone. It’s easier for him to shrink back into solitude than it is to open up. It’s easier to drink through difficult feelings, like he always has, than it is to share them.
Through Clive and Two’s stories, Verble asks us to consider how homesickness can hurt us when we let it fester. Sometimes, "home" is a shelter we build in a storm, and it is important to notice when the storm has passed, and to emerge — if you’re not careful, you might forget the way out.
Lucky for Clive and Two, there are a few people who refuse to leave them alone. Helen stays patient during her slow courting with Clive, despite his reluctance to commune with anyone who isn’t an animal or a ghost. And while Two may prefer the company of Adam the buffalo, her friends and fellow performers — along with one unexpected suitor — do not back away from her walls.
If Two is a plant, she spends most of the book as a potted one, positioned within Glendale’s social ecosystem — belonging, yet self-contained. A plant can certainly survive this way. But what happens when you ease the plant from its pot; nestle it directly into shared soil; let its roots wander? You might see new growth, like in this special moment Two experiences after her own first kiss (Clive isn’t the only one nurturing a new romance):
"She hurried off to her room, feeling a stirring in her body that was like … Well, she couldn’t say, exactly. But she saw a picture in her mind of a crocus breaking through soil."
Learn more about this year's One Read and related programming at https://www.dbrl.org/one-read.
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: How characters in this year's One Read heal from homesickness
