Description
“At the last dusty town in a line of dusty towns Clementine’s story begins. In Oh My Darling, Cate O’Toole has constructed a winding narrative with many pathways, each road following the fifteen year-old miner’s daughter, immortalized in the American folk canon by her namesake ballad, through a journey laced with triumph and ruin at every turn. As Clementine navigates the perils and risks of the old West-from her father’s land claim in the California goldfields to a San Francisco boarding house to the promise of the mountains, the plains, the river-you decide where the story will go. With O’Toole’s sharp, clever prose as your guide, your decisions steer Clementine’s fate. Gone but not forgotten, Clementine shines at the narrative’s core, fighting for her future, aching to be more than “a tangle of bones, a handful of dust scattered by the wind.”
FROM OH MY DARLING
Clementine’s feet harden. Soon she can skip over the rocks, up and down the hills, easy as a goat. The sun tans her skin honey brown, fades her glowing yellow hair to the color of light on mist. She remembers what it was like to live in a house, but she misses it less. She doesn’t concern herself with those memories.
Over and over Clementine patches her last dress, her father’s tattered canvas bags. She sews for miners who have left their wives behind or had no wives to leave. She coaxes unraveled threads back into line and reinforces thin knees, thin elbows, thinner spirits. She learns their names. She earns a reputation. The miners shuffle onto her father’s claim, nod and mumble and pay her in gold dust or fresh meat or old fabric. She takes half a ragged quilt in trade and for a time patches holes with scraps of dainty flowers, blooming pink against the dirt and sweat of camp.
She has a place. If Clementine does not grow to love the mining life, she at least finds herself feeling a thing like happiness. She tries not to think hard on this feeling, does not want to crush it in her over-eager hands. She builds it inside herself like a nest, piece by fragile piece. If she works at it long enough and stays very quiet, something may squat down and settle there.
