Where the Ground Remembers: Book Three of the Lights Trilogy

In 1883, the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway reachesthe high plateau of the Trans-Pecos and establishes a water stop.The railroad's survey has already named the place — Marfa, after acharacter in a Russian novel the chief engineer's wife was readingon the line of inspection. The name stays. The old names do notreach the paper.Clara Harwood, forty-seven, arrives that first year with a notebook.She is the daughter of Thomas Harwood, the translator who walkedbetween Spanish and English on the upper Nueces in 1851, and thegranddaughter of Elias Harwood, who drove the first cedar post intothe Hill Country grass in the 1830s. She has come to the new townto write down the names the survey did not take — the names for thearroyos and the cerros and the springs, the names the older peoplestill use when no one is writing. She means to listen and to setdown what she hears.Samuel Pace, a Texas Ranger whose institution has begun to outlivethe frontier it was built to hold, watches her go about her workand decides she is neither danger nor trouble but something thecountry has not seen before. Tomás Luján, whose people carried theolder names before the railroad had names, watches too, and decideswhether to speak.On the Mitchell Flat east of town, at dusk, lights appear that noone who has come with the railroad can explain. Clara sees them.She closes her notebook.The third and final novella in the Lights Trilogy, Where the GroundRemembers completes a sixty-year story that began in 1830s TexasHill Country with a fence and continued in 1850s Nueces countrywith a survey. It is a work of literary historical fiction aboutthe first year of the town of Marfa and the people who werealready there — a novel about the last quiet form of listening ina country that has finished most of its speaking."What the ground remembered did not require acknowledgment to persist." Read more