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Worth
by A. LaFaye
Simon & Schuster, 2004. 144 pages.
The theme of adoption receives unique treatment in Worth, A. LaFaye’s new historical novel for young people.
Nathaniel James Peale lives with his father and mother in nineteenth-century Nebraska, where they put in long hours as farmers and as tinkers, repairing pots and pans and other tools for their neighbors. Nathaniel, who tells the story, begins by remarking that “Ma says you can hear the lightning in the tall grass before a storm.” And it is on a day that Ma has heard the lightning in the grass that Nate and his father get quickly to work bringing in as much hay as possible before the storm hits. Just as they are about to complete the task, one of the horses bolts, spooked by the storm, and Nate’s leg is crushed in the ensuing accident. Recovering from his injuries will be an experience that opens Nate and his parents to new horizons of love and what it means to be a family.
With Nate out of commission, and farmhands too expensive to hire, Pa must find another alternative in order to keep the farm working. “He’s bringing home a boy,” Ma tells Nate. “An orphan boy.”
Could’ve been neck deep in snow for how cold I felt right then. I’d heard tell of those orphan trains that brought in city kids to be picked out of a herd on a church stage and brought home like a new steer. The Campbells got a new son that way after their boy was taken by the measles, but I wasn’t dead.
“He adopted a son?”
Ma rushed into the room, her face shiny with tears. “No, Not a son. Just a boy to help around here.”
On the surface, of course, this appears to be an utterly inhumane situation for the boy, John Worth, who comes to live with the Peales. He is, in fact, relegated to a sort of “second-class citizenship” among the Peales, but working together with Pa causes the beginnings of a bond to form between the two. Nate, unable to help with the working of the farm, grows increasingly jealous of John, even as his inability to work gives him the opportunity to go to school and broaden his prospects for the future in other ways. His personal crisis extends to his relationship with God, for whom he now harbors deep anger. In church one morning, Nathaniel says,
The whole of it made me dizzy. Leaning back to clear my mind, I remembered just where I was. Just how I got there. Why’d God have to break me up inside? Why’d He kill John Worth’s parents? . . . I prayed God would hurt ten times as much as He’d hurt me. Let Him get busted up inside so He feels He’s worth no more than the bugs I crushed under my boots at school. See how He finds the life He’s given me. Spit on Him. That’s what I wanted to do.
Other dramas are unfolding as well. A Greek family in town is the subject of schoolroom ridicule, but their kindness to Nathaniel leads to his exposure to the great myths of their culture. And conflict between farmers and ranchers over grazing rights is the cause of a potential range war in which fences are cut and cattle allowed to trample farmers’ crops. These archetypal myths together with the local conflicts begin to provide chances for greater understanding between Nathaniel and John. They each come to understand the difficulties inherent in the other’s situation: Nathaniel shaken by his injury but even more by the loss of his daily working relationship with his father; and John, the only survivor of a tenement fire that killed his entire family, placed among strangers a world away from all that is familiar to him. The bond they begin to form is one that can best be described as brotherly, especially as they begin to share, with all due empathy, their stories of personal and familial loss.
I shivered, but we talked death all the way to the house. People in our families who met their ends by fire, choking, drowning, and the blade of an axe, like my Uncle Paul who cut his leg clearing land and bled to death right in the spot where he meant to build the curing shed. A funny way to introduce a person, but odd as it may sound, I felt like I knew a piece of John Worth when we stepped through the doorway into the house.
As the range war draws closer to its potential climax, so too does the need for the Peales and John Worth to come to terms with themselves as a family. The manner in which they overcome the tragic circumstances that have brought them together makes for a fine tale that is instructive to all readers concerned about family relationships, adoptive or otherwise. Alexandria LaFaye has created, in this small but full story, a group of memorable characters engaged in a compelling, page-turning plot. Worth is recommended for readers aged 8 to 12, but will reward all readers who are committed to the idea of family in all its shapes, sizes, and arrangements.
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