Low April Sun began as a flash fiction piece for the Rolling Stone 500: Telling Stories in Stereo. I was writing about the 1994 album Live Through This and thought about how the song “Doll Parts” had been on the radio a lot in Oklahoma City when the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building happened on April 19, 1995. Its meaning shifted with the disaster. I remember how it hit different, “someday you will ache like I ache” now seemed to refer to a whole new type of pain. The personal faded out and the world historical tragedy flowed in.
The novel leaves the song reference on the cutting room floor and tells the story in two timelines through the lives of several people still dealing with the trauma of the Oklahoma City Bombing when another wave in the ripple effect hits them. It starts the morning of April 19, 1995, in Oklahoma City and half-sisters Edie Ash and Delaney Travis are facing a surprising proposal of marriage from Delaney’s boyfriend, Keith Frayne, and yet another hangover for Edie. When Delaney leaves for the social security office for duplicate ID she needs to start a new job, Edie and Keith are left alone together. A few minutes later, when they hear the blast from the Murrah Bombing, and the day unfolds, they realize Delaney must have been in the building. Edie and Keith form a bond that, twenty years later, is a marriage that has withstood Delaney’s absence and all the unanswered questions they put behind them to follow Edie’s career with Landon Energy to London.
April 2015, the week of the twenty-year anniversary of the Murrah Bombing, Edie and Keith are back in Oklahoma City when they both receive Facebook invitations from someone claiming to be Delaney Travis. Chasing down the author of the Facebook invitation leads them on separate journeys to Texas and New Mexico searching for the truth about what happened to Delaney. Edie’s journey brings her into contact with August P., a fellow recovering alcoholic who pulls a cross on roller skates down the highways of the metro, seeking absolution for something he has never told anyone about his encounter with Timothy McVeigh at Elohim City, the white separatist compound where August was taken as a child by his mother and her new extremist husband. August, Edie, Keith, and others continue to live in the aftereffects of the Murrah Bombing as the earthquakes shake the ground of their city anew, the twenty-year anniversary of the disaster approaches, and everyone looks for answers.
The fiction always starts by asking what lens is going to filter reality? This story needed a kaleidoscope of lenses, shifting realities mostly bodied forth through the voices of the characters who alternate POV chapters. The answer almost always comes to me through music. Songs as lenses. I made a soundtrack for the book while I was working on the final edits, partly to help me immerse in my final chance to work inside the book and partly out of impatience to embody the story though there was nearly a year to wait before the book would be released. The soundtrack aimed for a chronological movement through the story, and I found that the main voices in the book showed up in the soundtrack as different genres of music.
“If You’re Ever in Oklahoma” by J.J. Cale carries the threat of a dangerous world full of people with the desire to do harm. The song seems to be singing to one of these people but the voice may be a fellow outlaw warning about the traps and disregard for due process to be found when passing through the Sooner State. It’s a road song played at a gallop and sung by Cale in a sort of rushed whisper (which was how he sang most things but is particularly good for matching the song’s energy here). The book features characters who know Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, hapless unwitting characters and those who share his beliefs, and this song is for that dark thread as it weaves through the book, especially in the character of August P., a victim who thinks he’s a perpetrator, whose name for me evokes Light in August and the way Faulkner had characters whose external mien and symbolic significance jar. August does that kind of work in Low April Sun.
“Year of the Tiger” by St. Vincent brings the sounds of the sisters, Edie and Delaney, into the story. “Living in fear in the year of the tiger” has a double meaning since the narrator seems to be the one living in fear, but also tells us “When I was young, coach called me the Tiger.” Like the narrator in “If You’re Ever in Oklahoma,” she’s on both sides of the line. The surprising chorus, “Oh, America, can I owe you one,” captures the mood after the Oklahoma City bombing, the “I just can’t” feeling of grief and exhaustion, the voice acknowledges an inability to meet the moment—the American moment—and claims some space. The two sisters, whose relationship shatters early in the book, live in this moment and try to find a way out.
“Message in a Bottle” by the Police for the initiating event of the novel, the Facebook invitations received by Keith and Edie twenty years after the Oklahoma City Bombing from someone claiming to be Delaney. All of the characters are sending out an S.O.S., though—every single character in the book is trying to be heard and felt as much as they hear and feel. The novel is an S.O.S.
“Complex Female Characters” by Sleater Kinney—Keith, one of the main characters, proposes to Delaney on the morning of the bombing and in the second timeline twenty years later is married to Edie, complex and containing multitudes. His memory of proposing to Delaney right before she heads to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and disappears haunts him, the worst case of foot-in-mouth syndrome imaginable. He matures and grows but gradually over time by sharpening himself against the honest awareness of his own discomfort with these complex female characters. He wants to be cool enough for them, and he keeps at it.
“Sway” by the Rolling Stones and “Black Sun” by Death Cab for Cutie are both needed for the bombing itself within the narrative. “Did you ever wake up to find/a day that broke up your mind/destroyed your notions of circular time?” The bombing on April 10, 1995 hangs over every scene, and the events of that day take up many chapters, but there’s only one chapter where the characters are down at the site in the immediate aftermath of the bombing. Notions of circular time are what the novel is about, really—the ripple effect of the disaster rolling out through time.
“God Bless America (Pat MacDonald Must Die)” by James McMurtry addresses the oil business mixing religious imagery with the subject of commerce like oil and water. Edie’s central moral dilemma involves being the spokesperson for an energy company denying the link between wastewater disposal and the two-hundred-plus earthquakes shaking central Oklahoma every day in 2015. She doesn’t even care about the “diamond ring” aspect of it, just trying to take care of the people she loves and pretending to herself she doesn’t have a choice, until she makes it.
“Runaway Trains” by Tom Petty carries a committed mood of surrender to a mystery that is what I was feeling when I wrote a part of the book set in the panhandle of Texas one dark night after Keith, driving to New Mexico, has a life-changing gambling relapse, ends up praying for a second chance at the historical marker for Adobe Walls, site of a couple battles he (a historian of all the ways Manifest Destiny was B.S.) had written about. The song goes deep into a sadness that doesn’t collapse into hopelessness, somehow shoots all the way up into the promise of a new song, not to be handled in that song but it’s as if you can feel the rest of the album clamoring to be heard as the song fades out. So to with these chapters about Keith. He’s absolutely wrecked, but I have hope for him and the book has a ways to go yet at that point.
“Panic Switch” by the Silversun Pickups gives off the panic it describes and is just how it feels in a chapter where Edie loses her seven-year-old son in a highway travel center. It’s her breaking point, the fulcrum of her moral arc where the stakes finally get higher than the muck and mire of her ambivalence and she gets a clear view of what she must do to change.
“They never care if it’s true/as long as they got something to prove/and they’ve always got something to prove.” Yeah. “I Hope This Whole Thing Didn’t Frighten You” by the Hold Steady captures a major vibe in the novel. The sense of being startled by the path the crowd you grew up around have taken, especially as it looks to a normal person, the need to protect people from it, and the explicit reference to a stupid and dangerous ideology: “I guess Shepard came out of St. Cloud with a little ideology/it’s a new way of thinking, man.” The whole song reminds me of August P., who grew up in Elohim City and is exposed to Timothy McVeigh’s thoughts on The Turner Diaries.
“Counting Backwards” by the Throwing Muses works for a major development I can’t talk about without giving it away. But there are two stepsisters at the heart of Low April Sun, so it’s extra-spooky-nice-symmetrical that a song that speaks to a fairly nuanced and (I think) heretofore untried storyline should show up in the works of another set of badass stepsisters, Kristin Hersch and Tonya Donnelly.
“Death Trip to Tulsa” by the Mark Lanegan Band. I love this song even though it terrifies me. There’s a scene where one of my main characters, August, is taken from Elohim City by a couple of skinheads he has caught being intimate in a place where that could get them killed, so he knows he’s in real danger as he rides with them to Tulsa one night. I don’t write horror, but this chapter skirts it, and this is the perfect song.
“Lilacs” by Waxahatchee conjures, I expect on purpose, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” by Walt Whitman, mourning song about the death of Abraham Lincoln that puts that huge tragedy in the context of the big unstoppable reality of spring and the passage of time and eternal return in an ode to the moon. Low April Sun goes out in its own way with a similar energy that moves also through the Waxahatchee song and lines like, “I’ll fill myself back up like I used to do.”
Constance Squires’s playlist for her novel Along the Watchtower