Prime Leaf: A Novel of the Kentucky Tobacco Wars

Wall's first novel, which appears posthumously, is a tale of moral reevaluations set in post-Civil War Kentucky. It opens with a flashback: the murder of eight-year-old Boyd Converse's father. Local vigilantes scoop up the boy and give him a gun to dispatch his father's killer. The justice--or injustice--of this act is to echo through the rest of Boyd's life, setting the tone for his relationship with his mother, brother, wife and neighbors. For much of the book, those relationships are all there is to the story : the drama occurs only at the very beginning and the very end. The characters brood on honor and the difference between responsibility to one's friends and one's family; they discuss the importance of reputations; and they occasionally sleep with each other's spouses while contemplating the nature of loyalty. Boyd's conflicting ideals are eventually tested when the Dark Tobacco District Planters' Protective Association, organized to act as a bargaining unit to force tobacco buyers to pay reasonable prices, forms the Night Riders, a group of vigilantes sworn to bully nonmembers into cooperation. While Boyd believes in the association, he grapples with the unsavory aspects of the Night Riders' work. Although outlaw justice is never quite condoned, the tone of the story is noncommittal, suggesting that the Night Riders are still better than nothing. The novel has an unfinished feel to it--perhaps because the manuscript was not fully polished when Wall died. As a story about moral decisions, it leaves a surprising number of them unresolved. (Dec. 8)