Book Review

According to Alice Nighthawk, one of the principal characters in Amy Frykholm’s debut novel High Hawk, “Wakan ye ja” are the Lakota words for children, translating as: “They are too sacred.”

The implication seems to be that there is something fearful about children, that their innocence and vulnerability—their sacredness—is too much, that it becomes terrifying in the context of a cruel and dangerous world. So imagine the jolt of fear that hits the novel’s protagonist, Father Joe Kreitzer, when he shambles up to the steps of his church one morning on the Windy Creek Reservation of South Dakota and finds a baby boy abandoned in a cardboard box.

The trope of the foundling is perhaps as old as storytelling itself, and Frykholm adheres to its time-worn formula, which demands there be someone on hand to adopt the child. Father Joe, way out of his depth, calls his friend and most dedicated parishioner. The aforementioned Alice Nighthawk, who—despite already being a single mother to four children—stops him from alerting the authorities and insists on raising the baby. This incident, taking place in 1970, sets the novel in motion, and it is the only one that plays out according to established narrative patterns. From here on, Frykholm charts her own course.

The majority of the novel takes place thirteen years later, in 1983. Father Joe is still going through the motions as parish priest of Windy Creek, “more function than person,” and is about to receive a series of shocks: First comes a letter from an old flame, Veronica, who is feeling adrift in life and wants to reconnect. It turns out nothing transpired between these two except some long walks and engrossing conversation, but in its own way this represents a torrid love affair, the embers of which are still smoldering beneath both of their carefully managed lives. Frykholm shines in these epistolary exchanges—the letters between Veronica and Father Joe have an electric charge that compel the reader’s attention.

Next, Alice Nighthawk’s oldest son, the charismatic Albert, is killed in a barfight in Rapid City—details very murky—and shortly afterward the lone witness to the killing begins hanging around. He won’t say what happened that night, but he does start dating Alice’s youngest daughter, Jackie—needless to say, no one has a good feeling about this guy. Indeed, the calamity escalates with another violent mystery as both Jackie and Vincent (the no-good boyfriend) are hospitalized after a savage fight in which it’s unclear who was the aggressor. Finally, there’s Bear, the baby in the box, now a dreamy, enigmatic boy of thirteen who likes to sketch landscapes. He is implicated in the attack on Vincent and becomes the subject of a legal dispute between the tribal authorities and the Feds over who will try his case. This makes discovering his parentage of vital importance, to determine if he has native blood and can be tried on the reservation.

At this juncture, it could almost seem that Frykholm is positioning Father Joe to join the likes of Cadfael and Father Brown among the ranks of crime-solving clerics. But she has no intention of indulging the wish-fulfillment fantasies of the detective story. Instead, what develops is a kind of anti-mystery: Life carries on in the midst of bewildering tragedy, and the struggle to get by day-to-day precludes Sherlockian acts of sleuthing. Even the police quickly lose interest. In real life, and especially in the harsh and neglected environs of a South Dakota reservation, most problems go unsolved, most questions unanswered.

Besides, Father Joe isn’t detective material. He’s barely priest material—the vocation has become so mechanical, so divorced from any spiritual connection, that “he was hardly human in doing it.” He’s most content when left to his hobby of translating the Psalms from the original Hebrew, puzzling over the variable meanings of those ancient hymns. In these scenes, much as in the letters with Veronica, Father Joe’s fascination is infectious; the reader gets drawn into his “searching for the place where heaven and earth crossed.”

But when it comes to searching for answers to more worldly questions, like how Albert died and who Bear’s mother is, Joe is as ineffectual as most of us would probably be. We are told early on that he “wasn’t a truth seeker. He was more inclined to accept things as they were.” I might argue that Father Joe accepts things as they seem to be; things like the Catholic church, of which he is a servant and a representative. As the novel unfolds, we see how this trait—a certain blend of complacence and naivete—brings about his personal unraveling and has a rippling effect on many lives.

Secrets do come to light over the course of the story, many of them concerning the now-shuttered mission school where vulnerable Native American children were left to the sole supervision of Catholic priests. We become privy to letters written by the head of the school to his church superiors that describe child sexual abuse in a horrifyingly laconic style. Father Joe was there at the time, and his failure to fully grasp what was happening, let alone stop it, has been corroding the pillars of his faith and self-respect ever since.

The novel’s final act sees Father Joe and Alice travel to the big city (Sioux Falls, South Dakota, rendered in beautifully spare and menacing prose) on a rescue mission, where they finally hit the mean streets like real gumshoes, staking out abandoned vehicles and questioning the clientele in dive bars. But again, Frykholm refuses to deliver a fantasy narrative in which mysteries are resolved and our tarnished heroes redeemed. They don’t find what they’ve been looking for, but they find something else, something that offers the possibility of wonder, perhaps even grace, in the bleakest of lives.

Frykholm’s decision to avoid conventional narrative arcs and imitate real life, with all of its cul-de-sacs and oxbows, occasionally gives the impression that both too much and too little is happening, causing the novel to flounder slightly. But it always rights itself, ballasted by its rich sense of the intertwined existence of people and place.

On that note, Alice Nighthawk deserves a special word: She emerges as the novel’s beating heart and its closest thing to a hero. While the church’s ordained priests are busy playing political games and interfering with children, Alice is both retaining a connection to her Lakota heritage and quietly, powerfully living as a Christian that Christ might recognize, one whose fundamental way of touching the world is love.

The novel’s satisfying conclusion is a testament to the power of that kind of love, a selfless love for the things that are too sacred. Frykholm has previously written on the 14^th-century Christian mystic Julian of Norwich, but I’m reminded of the words of an even earlier mystic, Hildegard of Bingen, who seems to sum up Alice when she says: “For I am love, which the vast expanses of evil can never still.”