Prick of the Spindle: Reviews: McKnight: The Mule Shoe by Perry Trouche

The Mule Shoe by Perry Trouche

Reviewed by Erin McKnight

ISBN: 978-1-932842-33-3 (cloth edition)
ISBN: 978-1-932842-34-0 (paperback edition)
Star Cloud Press, 2009

In military parlance, a “mule shoe” refers to the outward-projecting angle of a vulnerable force. In early May of 1864, on the Civil War battlefield of Spotsylvania, Virginia, an outmatched Confederate side faced a dominant Union Army hellbent on rending its exposed fortification line. In The Mule Shoe, practicing psychiatrist Perry Trouche enters one man’s fractured mind and exposes an internal theater of war laying claim to injuries far worse than death. Expectedly brutal, blunt, and blurring, this work of Southern literature functions as a wartime meditation, the book’s dedication to “all those who have suffered during times of war, past and present” taken up by an author adept at coalescing historical and psychological trauma.

As a “new boy” member of McGowan’s Brigade, South Carolina native Conner Dumont is located in the book’s opening pages as a witness to the atrocities befalling those around him and a prisoner to the war fought within his mind. Cowardice, as established by the intruding and accusatory screams of his dead grandmother, will frame this soldier’s conflict, his “weak mind” responsible for the mental schism that spreads as the book’s pages are turned and men continue to fall.

Conner’s mental stability may have been lost to the battlefield, but it is within his breached consciousness that soldiers are relocated and memorialized. Forcefully offering disparate diagnoses and treatment advice, these contending voices join the cacophony of family members’ to include a venomous grandmother, drunkard father, blinded uncle, and childhood companions. Every harsh diagnostic confrontation further injures the protagonist’s splintered psyche, but it is his weakness of conscience that the psychic enemy batters with guilt—its artillery the words of a priest and black boy—over Conner’s Catholic upbringing and slaveholding past.

Mounting a disturbing and slow-building crescendo, the orders and pleas and curses of the voices Conner carries are silenced by his emphatic admission that he “was death to everyone.” It is perhaps the lucid acknowledgement of his own contagiousness that allows Conner to endure atrocity of mind and body. And it is Trouche’s confident delineation of contaminated internal and external scapes that arms his reader against the visceral language of war: “I dropped down and hugged the ground as a dirt clod blew up in my face. A red-bearded man a few paces to the right dropped with me. His forehead oozed brain and blood, but his eyes still watched in disbelief. He rolled over, his mouth coming to rest on a pine sapling as if trying to suck life from the earth.”

Drawing beauty from the most brutal, Trouche palpates the space between extremes; however, as multiple scenes and pages and characters fall victim to horrendous depictions, his reader may very well encounter desensitization. Trouche’s measure as a writer is most directly challenged by the redundancy of devastation, yet it is across this plane that his narration is most authentic—despite a pitch-perfect Southern dialect and harrowingly intimate first-person recounting—and his moment-to-moment portrayal of human indecency most effective in highlighting the cruel inanity of warfare. Yanks and Rebs calling temporary truces, only to lie together in death minutes later; the wasting of a young man’s mind; captured black soldiers casually shot; and the multi-generational, social, and geographical cleaving of families receive the treatment necessary to compel the reader to question, as Conner did: “Was this the end of it all? Punishment for what we’d done? For what others had done?”

The Mule Shoe , under the care of Trouche, achieves a victory in deflecting the nature of conflict as pointless. The book, then, might be considered a case study not in what it means to die for a cause, but what it means to fight for one. As a soldier diseased by his own experience, Conner is emboldened by his writer’s sensitivity toward the terrible nature of war and its debilitating physiological consequences; his weakness of mind may project, but it is Perry Trouche’s careful handling of a mentality lost to and forged on the battlefield that makes Conner’s reconciliatory conflict honorable and worthwhile.

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Prick of the Spindle fiction editor Erin McKnight is a Scottish-born writer now living in Texas. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Web, the Pushcart Prize, and W.W. Norton’s The Best Creative Nonfiction. Her collection of short short stories, To the Quick, was published by Recycled Karma Press, and her reviews of fiction and poetry titles can be found at Bookslut.com. Erin holds an MFA in creative writing and currently teaches fiction writing online and in the Dallas community college system.