In the National Museum of Ireland, there is an exhibit of bog bodies called Kingship and Sacrifice. When you enter the exhibit, the space grows dim. You have to slow down your walk to let your eyes adjust. The air is clinically quiet. Voices drop to a murmur then subside altogether as you reach the bodies, which have an amber glow in the limited light. The bodies are well preserved, sufficiently so that their fingerprints remain distinct. The lack of evidence of lives of hard labor and the grave goods that accompany them suggest that these were individuals of high social standing. One of the theories is that when times were difficult—drought, famine, plague—kings were held accountable and were ritually sacrificed to the bog. Of the bodies, one seems to have been bludgeoned. One strangled. But one in particular has remained in my memory. All that remains of Old Croghan Man is his upper torso and arms. He was decapitated and his body was cut in half. You can see inside him and, though his skin and shape remain, his organs and tissues look like masses of leaves and soil. The bog has colonized him.
We enter Kay Chronister’s The Bog Wife on the precipice of a similar ritual. Prodigal daughter Wenna Haddesley, the middle child of five, is called home to West Virginia after a decade away. Her presence is required so the family may complete the ritual sacrifice of their dying father to their bog. Each generation, the patriarch is given to the bog, and in exchange the bog grants the eldest son and heir a bog wife to carry on the family line. This compact, according to their family lore, has existed since time immemorial when their ancestors lived in the Scottish Highlands. The compact was made anew when the first American Haddesley came to West Virginia and was led to the bog where they remain. But this is literature of the Anthropocene—the Haddesleys of the present day have a bog that is sick, disappearing, changing. The land does not honor the compact. Their father is sacrificed, but no wife is given in his place.
The four parts of the book correspond with the four seasons. The Haddesleys’ extreme social and geographic isolation mean that their survival depends on living in sync with the natural rhythms of the year. Beginning in summer, the story is told through the alternating perspectives of the five Haddesley children: Eda, the eldest daughter who wants everyone to appreciate how dutiful she is; Charles, the reluctant heir who was badly injured by a fallen tree, which he takes as a dark omen; the aforementioned Wenna, who ran away after the disappearance of their mother and forged her own identity; Percy, the second son who wishes he were the rightful heir; and Nora, the infantilized and desperately lonely youngest daughter. The Bog Wife is about the fallout of the failed ritual to birth a bog wife. But it’s also about the cosmology of family: the roles we play in the day-to-day rituals, the inescapable obligations, the myths we tell ourselves about ourselves.
Without giving more of the plot away, suffice it to say that the Haddesley patriarchs have not been entirely honest with the myths they have told about themselves. In the various revelations that come to light about the Haddesleys and the bog wives, Chronister is also doing clever work to draw attention to the mythology built up around Appalachia. It’s an old place. Trace a raised relief map and know a bit about plate tectonics and you can see how the Appalachians, the Atlas, and the Scottish Highlands used to all be part of the same Central Pangean Range. You’ve likely seen some claim on social media that parts of the mountains are older than Saturn’s rings, bones, the first trees. Add in more modern phenomena like the Centralia mine fire that’s been burning underground since 1962 and it’s easy to see why the Old Gods of Appalachia podcast and don’t-answer-the-voices-in-the-woods-Tok thrive.
But that history lends itself to more pernicious myths. The Haddesley patriarchs’ assertions that “Our ways are noble; they are ancient” and “Purity has been the way of our progenitors” are not only incestuous Gothic tropes; they speak to a tendency of white mountain people to erase the violent legacy of settler colonialism and slavery. If a person can claim a heritage that stretches back to the Scottish Highlands, those hundreds of millions of years and thousands of miles of ocean don’t feel so far because a settler can just say it looks like home. It’s where they belong. But if that’s not enough, they can find another tie to the land: The Haddesleys do this in a more literal sense with their bog wife; white mountain people in real life (and in a surprising amount of Appalachian literature) make do with a distant Cherokee matriarch. Chronister pokes at this common trope when we learn, during Charles Haddesley’s clandestine trips into town, that he is puzzled by mentions of Native Americans in library books and invectives against immigrants on talk radio.
The ignorance and poverty of all the siblings manifests itself in grotesque ways. Their crumbling mansion is Gothic at its core, but it’s also a hoarder’s nightmare, filled with National Enquirers and wild animals that Nora has taken under her wing. Meals are mostly cream of mushroom soup, cocoa, goat milk, undercooked meat. Their grime and strangeness are described so thoroughly that one can imagine quite clearly the things that shopkeepers and other townspeople whisper about backwoods inbreeding when they encounter the Haddesleys. Yet Chronister keeps the hillbilly sideshow elements in check by giving all the siblings a full inner life. At one point, Eda takes it upon herself to continue the family line and introduces herself to a man at a bar by immediately telling him she has to get pregnant. Chronister navigates the farcical and tragic elements of this encounter skillfully, fully articulating the kind of worldview that allows someone like Eda to make the choices she does:
She had been strict with herself as she bathed and dressed that afternoon, not letting herself wonder what it would be like or how it would feel. It was only another ritual, and invariably rituals were in some way strange and naked and painful, and if they were not then they were ecstatic in a way that could not be acknowledged after they were over; and sometimes they were painful and ecstatic both, like lowering your father into a bog after helping him to drink poison. (p. 151)
Like Eda, the Haddesleys all try in their own ways to understand a world that no longer makes sense to them. They do not necessarily grieve their father, who was cruel and distant in various ways, but they grieve the order that he gave to their lives. As a reader, it would be easy to see the Haddesley patriarch as a villain, given his twisted worldview and how he left his children unequipped for an existence without him; but you are also left to wonder how much of a victim he was in his own right, what legacy of isolation and ignorance his own father left for him.
The bog wife herself, the Haddesley siblings’ mother, disappeared under suspicious circumstances prior to the novel’s events. But in the Haddesley siblings’ memories, we get a picture of an unwilling mother, someone who, like them, lived in service to a compact that she never agreed to herself. Wenna describes the family tip-toeing around their mother as “the anxious ritual-logic of her half-mothered adolescence, when she and Nora used to try to do everything just right … in hopes of getting some response from their mother in the interstices of her long tiredness” (p. 271). When second son Percy contemplates the ecological state of their land, coming to realize that “everything he ever did in the bog had an accidental effortless tinge of violence,” it becomes clear that the bog wife had to navigate constant reminders of the violence inflicted on her by births to which she could not consent (p. 292). While the siblings could turn to ritual in hopes of striking upon the right set of actions to make their world right, to make their mother love them or their father bearable, the bog wife was stuck in the wake of rituals orchestrated by others. Ritual is ultimately a very human way of approaching the world and creating order and comfort. But a bog wife is not human.
The state of the bog, though, and the failure of ritual, are not merely illustrative of the disturbing family dynamics at play. The bogs of the Appalachian region are increasingly endangered, threatened by development and encroachment of trees and shrubs. Natural controls on the ecosystem like fire and beavers have decreased. The bog wife tells her children that “anything that lives and does not live alone makes compacts” (p. 274). The Haddesleys have for too long operated under the assumption that they live alone, that they and the bog are a country unto themselves. In ignoring the effects of modernity, mining, deforestation, and pollution around them, however—in ignoring other humans who have their own compacts with each other and the land—they have rendered themselves sick. The Bog Wife is ultimately not only the story of how the Haddesleys forge a new compact of what it means to be family but a reflection on the necessity of creating new interactions with nature that take us from a position of dominion and ownership to one of participation and attention. Ritual is bound by a set time and place and rules, offering a sense of meaning and control. Yet it is only through transcendence of the boundaries of ritual, when we allow that same care and intention to inhabit our every action, that ritual may achieve its sacred, transformative purposes.