When ranchers allow Shantytown residents to scavenge the ditches for meat, a gang led by town bully Conrad Ellis, whose family meatpacking business is threatened, terrorizes scavengers and ranchers alike. Drought-impoverished cattle farmers are being forced to sell their starving herds to a government program that dispatches the cattle on site, burying the emaciated carcasses in huge ditches. Despite his moribund condition and bouts of severe pain, he is a quixotic social activist. A prosperous former cotton broker, lanky, handsome Rainwater has decided to spend his final weeks at Ella’s boardinghouse. Rainwater, Kincaid’s cancer-stricken distant cousin. (Autism-spectrum disorders were then unknown.) Into Ella’s regimented life comes Mr. Her husband skipped town some time ago, and Ella’s ten-year-old son Solly is given to strange compulsions and fits that their family physician, Dr. With the help of her black maid Margaret, Ella serves three squares a day, handles arduous Monday washdays and keeps an impeccable house for her tenants, a travelling salesman and two spinsters. Gilead, Texas-1934, population 5,000, if you don’t count the unfortunates inhabiting the shantytown on the city limits-is reeling from the ravages of the crash and the drought, but Ella Barron’s boarding house is an enclave of efficient domesticity. Megaseller Brown ( Smash Cut, 2009, etc.) tries her hand at historical fiction in this slight tale of a Depression-era landlady and her mysterious boarder.
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