Love Among the Orphans

Despite being titled All the Living, I find C. E. Morgan’s novel about finding love on a poor Kentucky tobacco farm to be about a man and a woman who are emotionally scarred from being orphans.

Aloma’s parents died when she was two; she lived with her aunt and uncle, where she perceived herself to be an unwanted burden, until she twelve and shipped off to a residential school. The only subject she excelled at was music, where playing the piano became her fantasy of escaping the dark, poor mountain hollows where even the joys of sunlight are curtailed.

Orren’s father died leaving his small tobacco farm to be operated by his widow and two sons. Orren’s mother and older brother are subsequently killed in a horrific car accident, leaving Orren determined to make a go of the farm all by himself.

Orren meets Aloma at a career day kind of event at the boarding school where she has stayed on to teach. They meet before the accident and see each other for over a year. When left alone after the funeral, he asks her to move in.

Both characters are trailing dusty clouds of pain and frustrated ambition. Orren is badly in debt, having to sell off the horses and bull, and moving into a smaller house to avoid looking at the rooms where he lived with his mother and brother. Aloma goes to the farm still believing she will ultimately take Orren away from their as she makes a career out of music somewhere else.

He withdraws farther and farther into the pressures of farming during a drought; with only a broken-down, untuned piano in the house, Aloma secures a job playing for a local church where she eventually becomes attracted to the pastor. The silences of Aloma and Orren living together and their tension and coldness they foist on each other as they grow into adulthood and self-sufficiency hardly seem to be fertile ground for an enduring love. They both seem to value more their individual motives rather than setting mutual goals as a couple.

So they story seems to be less of a red flame story of lust mellowing into a blue flamed marriage than it is one of demarcation and compromise. I almost feel like this book would have been the perfect book for Kentucky for the 2009 50 States blog list. It is the rhythm and beauty of the land, its very dustiness and isolation, the image of a blooming tobacco field that must be “deflowered” before the leaves can develop properly. That one image stays with me the longest and is a wonderful symbol of Aloma’s maturation: however brief and infrequent the beauty of her life and surroundings, she can take human satisfaction in contributing to it.