The legacy of uranium
Maria’s Bookshop hosts the author of ‘Yellowcake’

by Joe Foster

Yellowcake by Ann Cummins. Houghton Mifflin 2007, 303pgs.

Award-winning author Ann Cummins returns to Durango, her birthplace, for an appearance at Maria’s Bookshop on May 2 at 6:30 p.m. She will be promoting her latest work, Yellowcake. I had the good fortune to see Ms. Cummins reading at Maria’s from her last book, Red Ant House, and was very impressed, as were others: this first collection was named “Best Book of the Year” by the San Francisco Chronicle and earned some pretty hefty words of praise from the likes of Joyce Carol Oates and Dave Eggers. Born here in Durango, Cummins has a beautiful feel for the spirit of the area, and her love for it comes through in her stories. I find it interesting and telling that while she currently resides in Arizona and California, her stories keep bringing her back here, to the mountains and deserts of the Four Corners.

The centerpiece of Yellowcake is a man named Ryland. Old before his time, Ryland hauls an oxygen tank around, can’t sleep and is working on an addiction to Xanax, which helps him tolerate the people in his life. Back in the days when uranium was going to save the country, days when the world didn’t yet understand the dangers of such things, Ryland worked as a foreman at the mines, this is why he’s sick, wasting away and basically sitting around waiting to die. He’s a great character; grumpy but loving, contrary but loyal. The story starts when his wife is gone and there is a knock at the door, which turns out to be a group of people, lawyers, activists and family members of stricken miners looking to get the gears turning on the lawsuit machine. This part – not the beginning, but the whole issue of the mines and the health issues, and where exactly Ryland fits in, sick himself – is really fascinating. As the boss, the man in charge so long ago, is Ryland responsible for these men dying now so many years later? He says on multiple occasions that he, they, just didn’t know any better, so how could it be his fault? But Ryland is a good guy that’s gotten a raw deal himself, and so can’t help but feel that guilt.

Then there’s Sam, Ryland’s lifelong friend and a certified scoundrel. Sam spent his life carefree, drunk and with the smallest amount of responsibility possible. He married Lily, Ryland’s sister-in-law, and absolutely destroyed her self-image and self-respect, sleeping around as much as possible and keeping Lily constantly on the edge of panic for their entire marriage. He was eventually caught with a young Navajo woman, (just a girl, really) which finally ended Lily’s torment, giving her a legitimate way out. Sam impregnated the girl and fled to Florida, where he lived on a boat and hand-tied flies to eke out a meager alcohol-hazed living. In the mines, Sam had always turned down any offer of a promotion, which kept him right in the middle of the yellowcake. The shits of it all is that Sam is as healthy as a 60-something alcoholic can be. The illnesses that have plagued his friends and coworkers never found him. The injustice of it all bothers Ryland throughout the book, but he never really acknowledges it.

Ryland’s wife, Rose, is hilarious in her fussiness, while Lily, Sam’s ex, is inspiring in her courage to live and find new love in the face of an ever-present fear, the leftovers of her life of abuse. Young Becky Atcitty, one of the people that knocks on Ryland’s door, wants to help her uncle Woody, a former employee of Ryland’s, and struggles with blame and guilt of her own. Her cousin Delmar gets out of jail and struggles with his parole and an overwhelming desire to do good, while living with the legacy of his father Sam’s genes, wondering all the while why his mother kept in touch with Sam for all these years. Mining executives from Texas, (here, you ask? No…) a Navajo family split between traditionalists and those that have left that path, and an overweight but brilliantly nice life insurance agent struggling to win Lily’s heart and help her through her ex-husband’s reappearance in her life… and all this with a wedding to plan, too.

The characters are myriad and complex, and it is this complexity that keeps them clear and keeps the story moving, no matter whose tale we are reading at the moment. They’re all connected, whether they like it or not, and those connections provide the pains and joys that are their lives. Ann Cummins has a wonderful talent for being subtle but not beating you, the reader, over the head with the story. She puts you in the story as an observer; the judgments made are your own. Very honest, very good. I encourage you to go see Ann Cummins read from Yellowcake. •