Opposites attract in this unusual love story

For AP Weekly Features

New York debutante Virginia Price is pregnant from rape. Her mother reacts coldly and exiles the teen to a Wyoming ranch and a life of shamed obscurity in "Last Year's River" (Houghton Mifflin, 324 pages, $24) by Allen Morris Jones .

Ripped from afternoons of reading magazines, surrounded by her quilts and stuffed animals, and nights of sneaking out to Prohibition-era speakeasies, Virginia is forced into a seemingly stark world of stiff winds, self-foraging and heartbreak.

But all is not cold, as Virginia is quickly drawn to Henry, the ranch owner's son, a 24-year-old World War I veteran. Her saga is wrapped in language that has an Inuit quality, effortlessly tracking 100 ways of looking at love and death.

Henry's course is shaped by the elements of nature, snow and fire equally, and his methods altered by animals.

"Working with horses distills the world down to essentials. The necessary deliberate motions, the attempt to see yourself through an animal's eyes, the awareness of a coming conclusion. He has always found his truest satisfaction in work, in the imposition of order on a world that erodes order at every breath."

There's a pristine quality in Allen Morris Jones' literary command of nature, even if the specifics verge on the grotesque, far from glossy notions of romance: "She has been trying to isolate the odors of his shack. Gun oil and a dry, fetid meat smell from the box of skulls under his bed. Urine. Leather from the elk skin."

But Jones has a way of making the starkest elements, even pain, seem inevitably linked with beauty.

"He feels so old. So stretched and thin: each muscle in his arms, his back, like wool threaded across a loom. He tosses the dregs of his coffee into the snow. He should unpack and get back down to the house before another storm rolls in. Time and tide, he says, turning to get the saddles."

The story starts slowly and the naturalism is expected, given the setup. (Jones lives in Montana.) Yet the heart and muscle of this tale are surprising.

The narrative has the Western literary tendency of sprinkling ambivalent philosophical musings among the facts without definitive follow-through.

Henry has been skimming booze from his father's distillery. After he sells a jug and rides off on his horse: "Henry thinks that maybe his mother's got it right. It could be that fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom." Pieces like this fit loosely, their ambiguity saved by stirring images that drape and wisp around the elements.

The love story reinvents the old-time romantic notion of being drawn to one's polar opposite.

"Don't you think most of us are drawn to what we're not," says Virginia as an old woman, a supplemental perspective Morris adds sparingly.

"His (Henry's) father says, Give it a year or two and that girl down there'd be just like a wolf in a trap. ... She's goin a look up after a year or two with you and she's got that baby at her hip and she's poor as a church mouse out here in the boondocks and things ain't quite as romantic as they used to be and she's goin a hightail it back to New York."

Virginia is taken by Henry's alienation of everything she knows. What better American formula for opposites than a spoiled city girl and a roughed up, but not too hardened to cry, cowboy?

"Under her eyes, he is distilled. A pot boiled to its grits. In certain moods, he can feel her staring at him, the way a tongue works at a sore tooth: constantly, gingerly. He thinks of it like an excavation, a plundering. Every question, every curious glance a lifting of bandages. And her growing frustration at his reticence."

In the beginning of the story, Morris simply refers to the two as "the girl" and "the boy." There's even a competing suitor who comes to claim Virginia's hand. But despite these old-fashioned indulgences, there's nothing tired or cliched about this strong and quieting love story.