"Pawns" resurrects a decade of family dysfunction on an isolated farm in northern Minnesota. In Wendell Affield's first book, "Herman: 1940s Lonely Hearts Search," the author explored his stepfather's life on a farm in Nebish and search for a wife. This second book in the Chickenhouse Chronicles conjures up memories as Affield pores over musty letters, documents, and seventy-year-old photographic negatives beneath a magnifying glass.
Those pictures transport him back in time—in some cases before his own birth. Some photographs evoke fading memories of his mother, a beautiful young New Yorker and accomplished Juilliard-trained pianist; others evoke images of puppies tied to a corncrib, a harrowing escape to a secluded mountain lake in the Cascade Mountains, and his brother Randy—now forty years dead.
Dark images on transparent plastic film transport Affield back: jumping from a second floor window to escape his mother's wrath; pleading with his stepfather not to kill his puppy, shinnying up trees with Randy, almost drowning in Lake Chelan.
Memory bits expand into images of fear and anger: a water trough Wendell angrily destroyed with an ax; long distant road trips with his siblings and mother in attempts to escape her abusive husband; hand-written notes on the backs of faded photos. His mother's fear of forgetting her children scattered across the country in foster homes after she was committed to a mental institution.
