The Far Side of Redemption by Forest A. Ormes

This collection is a celebration of the unremarkable and the mundane, pierced by moments of devastation and loss. Ormes’ territory is the racehorse tracks of Lincoln and Hickory Downs and the people living on their periphery. An eclectic cast of alcoholics, priests, jockeys, mothers and reverends mingles with social workers, foster parents and policemen. Death stalks these homes, stables, and lives, while the shadow of the Cross is ever present, a still point in this turning world.

In the opening story, Alice, an overlooked woman paces out the dimensions of her rooms, seeking the key to her life. Reckoning is woven throughout this collection, whether measured in fractions in I’m Quickly Becoming Stone and Head Down from Malmedy or in the daily calculation of survival against the odds. Ormes writes with unusual precision and tenderness when describing the exile from childhood. In Merry Christmas, Harriet Francis, we hear Harriet, a lonely foster child, recalling, "The trees were my friends. They could make beautiful sounds and listen silently when I was sad." The boy and girl in The Language of Prayer are bound together as orphans, and the seismic moment where they bury a lost skull outside Greenwood’s boundary is an unforgettable epiphany.

A first reading of this collection and the quality of Ormes' characterisation suggest that the novel may be a better medium for him. However, the kaleidoscopic nature of his stories allows him to introduce the unsettling reappearance of the same characters and familiar names, which mirrors our own experience of passing through a world where a note of recognition or connection disappears in a brisk wind. This approach allows the reader to glimpse the possibilities of other lives the protagonists could have had. Notable amongst this diaspora is Officer Richard Francis, who, like his mendicant namesake, seeks out the lost, extending a hand of quiet compassion in the most unexpected places. In The Far Side of Redemption, a struggling Reverend marvels at his insight, and in Nolan Francis, a bereaved mother is given a fleeting respite from her grief on Christmas Day, his kindness allowing her to return to her lonely home to imagine her little boy, had he lived.

The titles of these stories point to lives of suffering, exile, transition, and death: Barabbas’s Cross; A Bitter Crossing; The Tent with a Thousand and One Bingo Cards; and Gates. The movement from darkness to light is captured effortlessly in the smallest moments. In The Training of Zebras, Little Bird, with his uniquely beautiful singing voice, face like a fish, and stilted speech, tends to Mary’s Child, a dying horse, on Christmas Eve. In The Complexity of Snowflakes, Samuel, who sees death in each person’s face, receives a mysterious visitation on Good Friday. Barabbas’s Cross is dominated by Chaplain Jesus Diego, with his blue Mexican eyes, who performs a modern-day miracle that raises unsettling questions. In The Tent with a Thousand and One Bingo Cards, two days of Charlie’s life, twenty years apart, are probed through the startling medium of the Janus-Faced man.

This recurring motif of looking backward and forwards, explored so tenderly in Chestnut Riley and so irrepressibly in Gates, reaches its apotheosis in the final story. Vanderdecken differs from what has gone before and is, in some senses, an anti-climax. Yet the quieter register here seems intentional. Perhaps this is Ormes’ gift to his readers, taken from the landscapes he knows so intimately—moments of grace and purity breaking through life’s toils and tragedies. It is fitting that an author who writes so movingly of faith and love should end on this quiet note of hope. ( )