Hammon Falls [Paperback]

Every family has a story to tell, but few ever tell it. We look with fascination at the remains of a life in an old scrapbook. Who is that pretty brunette with bobbed hair, dressed in white, staring back at us from a sepia print?

Roger Hileman stared back. And wondered. With nothing more than a few newspaper clippings, some grainy photos, and a letter, he wrote a screenplay and showed it to his lifelong buddy Dave Hoing. Together Hoing and Hileman transformed an obscure 20th-century girl's short life into a novel that is compelling and unforgettable.

Most of the novel is fiction, and the real-life story doesn't take long to summarize. Cora Felton "had to" marry Lester Hileman; their infant son was born infected, disfigured and not breathing; Lester left the boy in his mother's care; the child grew up, married, raised four sons of his own and lived a normal life, like anyone. Unlike everyone else, though, Lester's story piqued the interest of two men who know how to write.

The main plot of Hammon Falls unfolds during WWI with a young man, his socially prominent, controlling mother, and a seedy boxer whose only child loses her innocence to the young man and ultimately dies in childbirth. The novel ends in the 21st century with an old man trying to grasp how the sins of our fathers¬--and mothers---determine our lives, down the generations.

Dave Hoing's famously beautiful prose captures the timeless poignancy and elegance of a forever-young grandma. I love the Gaelic phrase he composed for the dedication page:

Ta se ag cuir baisteach, Cora, Ach ta tu go halainn
(It is raining, Cora, But you are beautiful)

His writing is so poetic and beautiful, I have to stop and re-read at times to luxuriate in his words.

The novel opens with an old man gazing into his father's eyes in the haunting way we peer at old photos of ancestors we never met:

*Yellowed and tattered behind the glass, the picture had hung in the bedroom of every house he had ever owned. In it a teenaged boy ... stood alone on a vast scarred plain, layers of clouds stopped mid-swirl by the camera's lens. The boy's (uniform) rippled in long-silent wind...His face was slightly out of focus, as if a sudden small movement blurred the image. Only one eye, the right one, was clearly defined. Even squinting against the wind, it captured light in a way that made the whole photograph revolve around it, a whirlpool of gray spiraling into, or out of, a single bright point. In that eye Will saw the sum of the teeenager's life. Although there was much more to come, his tale was already one of surprise, and sadness, and fear.

Handwritten on the bottom of the picture were the words, 'Ypres, 1915,' the year Will turned one.

For the thousandth time, the ten-thousandth, the millionth, Will studied the solder in the photograph. It was his father George at nineteen.*

From here, we are swept to blood-soaked Ypres, to post-pandemic Paris, to newly liberated Ireland, and back to Iowa. We meet mobsters, socialites, and soldiers, a wise black stable hand, a spiritual Irish lady, and a heartbroken alcoholic. We see one family's heirloom cross time and distance to become another family's treasure. We see a doomed romance that is agonizing and searingly real.

Hammon Falls is well crafted, depicting multiple points of view, settings and time periods, and enriched by imagery that defines each character's story arc: Life and death, light and dark, water and wind.

Although we know from page one how some of the novel's storylines must end, we are compelled to watch as the characters play out their parts, inexorably. However, the authors are sly enough to hold back a few surprises for us, and those ultimately turn tragedy to triumph.

Finally, Hammon Falls offers a bonus most novels don't: photographs. We get to see the portrait of the haunting girl in white who inspired this novel. We see her young husband Lester, fictionalized as George Hammon. We see snapshots of Lester and his son as old men, but Cora is frozen in time at seventeen. It sounds like a riddle: what kind of grandma never grows wrinkled and gray? The answer evokes tears, not laughter.

Hammon Falls is an American epic of a fallen family and a post-WWI nation, of innocence lost, responsibilities shirked, and a timeless search for who we are, what our grandparents before us were like, and how the choices they made determined who we are.

This is a book I didn't want to put down. The story weaves through family members and time and the characters are true to life - they have good and bad qualities. I wanted to keep reading to see what happened to them. Ultimately there is some redemption and understanding. Having grown up in this part of Iowa I recognized some of the places and was intrigued by what happened in the first part of the century - and how things were then. Interesting history, interesting characters.

In 1893 in the small town of Pameroy, Iowa, west of Fort Dodge, twenty-year-old Margaret Morrissey's young life once again collapses. After losing her mother and siblings to a typhoid epidemic two years previously, her family's homestead is destroyed by a tornado along with much of the town where Margaret's father had a thriving general store. Left destitute, Margaret, her father and emotionally distant stepmother head over a hundred miles east to the town of Waterton, a thinly-veiled representation of Waterloo, Iowa.

Shortly thereafter, Margaret's father dies from grief after one tragedy too many for him to bear, while her stepmother promptly abandons her stepdaughter to her fate after taking refuge in a cheap boarding house and turning to domestic work. However, Margaret proves resilient and has the good fortune of having the area's richest man fall in love with her after having taken the indigent young woman into his household as a laundress.

Despite the fact that G. W. Hammon is over a quarter-century Margaret's senior, he marries her, oblivious to any potential gossip concerning his "gold digging" young wife. After all, the childless widower is the most prominent citizen of Johnson's Landing, an unincorporated township just outside of Waterton, owning a good chunk of it and of Waterton as well.

Margaret lives contentedly with her combination husband and surrogate father, bearing G. W. their only child, a son named George, until 1898 and the Spanish-American War. Despite his advanced age, Hammon insists on volunteering as an officer, having previously served as a teen during the tail end of the Civil War. Having missed combat in the earlier war, Hammon gets his opportunity and is mortally wounded leaving Margaret a very wealthy young widow, while the name of the township is changed to Hammon Falls in her husband's honor.

Seemingly unflappable, Margaret endures the loss and raises her son George in an environment suitable to her newfound social status. Despite being a devoted mother to her son, Margaret's aloof manner and insistence on instilling a proper sense of decorum within the boy causes George to doubt his mother's affection for him, engendering within him a rebellious streak that manifests at age sixteen with his seeking and accepting a menial job grooming horses at a local livery stable.

Promoted to driving horse-drawn cabs, George is charged with driving a seemingly spoiled teenage girl on a grocery errand. Picking her up at her house in the second best neighborhood in the Waterton area (inferior only to his own), George is confronted with a sulky, belligerent girl whom he strives to mollify in accordance with his responsibilities to his employer.

After he soothes her to some extent and she apologizes to the boy for her attitude, prompted by her pique towards her domineering father, George finds himself attracted to her; feelings which are reciprocated by Cora Curtis, the daughter of Waterton's second richest denizen, a beer distributor with a reputation for ruthlessness and shady dealings. The fateful meeting and youthful romance engenders an odyssey from the battlefields of World War One, to the bohemian Parisian section of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, to the Emerald Isle and a quest to fulfill a commitment to a fallen soldier.

In place of chapters, the novel is broken up into usually short sections headed by a character's name, recounted from his or her perspective, and dates disjointed in time (ranging from 1893 to 2009), though not in a manner that impedes the smooth flow of the narrative. The writing is crisp which effectively holds the reader's interest throughout. Getting through this rather lengthy novel is not at all laborious. Indeed, upon finishing it, I rather wished it had gone on somewhat longer.

Mr. Hoing is a veteran writer with short credits in myriad professional and semi-professional publications, while Mr. Hileman makes an impressive writing debut.

*Hammon Falls* reads like a Booth Tarkington Midwestern yarn in which Alice Adams climbs her way to the top only to find that the view is not all she had anticipated. Largely set in early twentieth-century Iowa, the novel presents the rise and decline of a family, bred from an unlikely and malevolent alliance of convenience, torn apart by greed, ruthlessness and a star-crossed love. Unhindered by the social restraints under which Tarkington toiled, the authors present an intriguing cast of characters set against a post-World War I burgeoning nation.

From the flowing blood of the Somme, through the fringes of organized crime of the Capone era, to reflections from a contemporary perspective, *Hammon Falls* is a memorable and compelling American epic of a benighted family and age. I would highly recommend it to all with an affinity for heartland Americana fare with a gritty edge. Waterton is most decidedly not the River City of Meredith Willson's nostalgic valentine to his native state.

Donald Schneider's Literary Reviews