Yes, But…: The Bog Wife By Kay Chronister
CW: Generational Family Trauma, Patriarchy, forced “purity”, death
Dad says the Haddesley family has always been in the cranberry bog, that it was so far into their blood that they can’t live elsewhere. Wenna, the middle child of five, has decided to prove him wrong by leaving the bog and trying to make her own way. Dad is dying, though, and in order for the oldest son, Charlie, to take over, Wenna must return for the ritual offering of Dad to the bog. In turn, the bog will offer up a wife made of its own flesh for Charlie, if he is worthy.
This is the beginning of the end for the Haddesley family.
Welcome to The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister.
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I’m not a bog witch, I’m a bog wife! |
The Haddesley family, at least this generation, has five children. In order of birth, Eda, Charlie, Wenna, Norma, and Percy all lend their voices in the chapters that are divided by the seasons. Charlie, the eldest son and the heir presumptive, suffers from a terrible injury which prevents him from having children. When the bog refuses to produce a wife for him, the family is sent spiraling into its own destruction. But nothing is as it seems, as Charlie learns the true history of the Haddesley family and other secrets come back to haunt them. There are a lot of questions and no real answers, other than the slow destruction of the mastery that the Haddesley Patriarchs demand of the land and of their children.
The story is what I would label a Southern Gothic, a la Michael McDowell, taking place in West Virginia in Appalachia territory. The crumbling manor house and the relationship with the surrounding town evokes Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle with a family of children who seem never to grow up, despite their bodies aging. Their education was at the hands of their father, both with their history and his treatment of their mother. Nora is in her twenties, but acts like a younger teenager.
The stories that their father told them begin to fall apart when a bog wife doesn’t appear for Charlie, or so it seems. They actually begin to unravel much earlier due to the disappearance of their mother. Wenna suspects that he murdered her after she stopped emerging from her winter torpor. The implication becomes that everything they know is a lie and that their mother was murdered (and perhaps had been kidnapped by their father in order to have children). Those revelations come much later in the book, but even then the truth isn’t as straightforward as the five siblings think.
An underlying theme is family trauma - the tyranny of the fathers passed down upon the children for several generations. There is also the use of the land - the Haddesley family takes and takes from the bog, and doesn’t help it recover in a sustainable way. Even at the end, there are no real answers, except that the earth will heal itself with or without the help of humans (or even, with the destruction of civilization). We can embrace nature and help it or we can be consumed by it.
There’s a poignant lesson there - even the most fervent of cults will fall apart when confronted with truth.
Remember, my friends, when the last batch of cranberries have been picked and the peat has been cut for the winter burning, I shall be here with another book suggestion, should you need it.
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