Buell

Buell is both a specific town in the Mon Valley and the point of gravity around which the novel’s departures, loyalties, and returns turn. Its old police station and newer one, its river approaches, and its shrinking workforce give the setting a lived civic texture; the closure of the mills and the people who left make that texture one of loss. For Isaac English, Buell is a place he can walk away from and still recognize as home. For Bud Harris, it is a community whose changing fortunes and tightly connected lives have become inseparable from his work.

Setting and Approaches

Buell sits within a landscape of steep hills, woods, farmers’ fields, ravines, and lowland swamps. From the higher roads, the land remains partly concealed: even a broad view cannot reveal everything folded into the valleys. The greenery and the hidden terrain contrast with the town’s industrial history, while the hills make movement through the region feel shaped by the landscape rather than laid out on an open plain.

The river and the railroad tracks are part of the routes by which people enter and leave this world. As Isaac travels downriver, he comes around a bend beside a retaining wall built to keep the hill from sliding onto the tracks. There he encounters two men with spray-paint cans, one of them Daryl Foster, who had been a year behind Isaac at school before dropping out and working at the Dollar Store in Charleroi. The meeting links Isaac’s journey beyond familiar ground to the local network of people whose lives have spread across nearby towns. A chance encounter on an isolated stretch of riverbank can still return him to someone from his earlier life.

A Town of Interlocking Lives

Buell’s social world is small enough for personal histories and official roles to overlap. Glen Patacki, twenty years older than Bud Harris, is the local justice of the peace and had previously spoken up for Billy Poe. He had also been chief during much of Bud Harris’s time as a sergeant and was among the first people Bud Harris met after moving to Buell. When Glen Patacki invites him onto his boat after eight or nine months without a social call, Bud Harris reads the timing as significant, against the backdrop of Billy Poe’s case.

The police station is another point where private relationships meet public authority. Bud Harris has Billy Poe placed in a cell overnight, expecting the experience to impress upon him what lies ahead, but after an hour of paperwork he cannot bring himself to leave the young man there. He brings Billy Poe to his office to talk. The episode presents the station not simply as an institution but as a familiar setting in which Bud Harris has dealt with Billy Poe before, lecturing him and trying to decide what kind of protection or discipline the moment requires.

The case quickly becomes public knowledge. When Billy Poe’s photograph appears on the front page, Bud Harris expects the story to spread through Buell and perhaps the entire Mon Valley by the evening. The newspaper frames the case as a striking reversal: a football star accused of murder. In a town where professional and family histories intersect, the public story cannot be kept apart from its effects on people close to the accused. Grace Poe works through her day while preoccupied with Billy Poe’s arrest and Bud Harris’s failure to answer her calls; the case reaches her even as she tries to keep her attention on her work.

Industrial Decline and Civic Change

Bud Harris has watched Buell’s industrial contraction unfold: the mills shut, and the Great Migration followed. He recalls people leaving for Texas in search of oil-rig work, only to find that the jobs were scarce and that some ended up broke in unfamiliar places. Others simply disappeared from the Valley. The outflow is not an abstract demographic change in his account; it appears in the altered prospects of workers who once earned thirty dollars an hour and later bag groceries for four dollars and fifteen cents.

The downturn also changes the work of policing. Bud Harris had moved to Buell hoping for a quieter life as a small-town cop rather than the more confrontational work he associated with Philadelphia. After the mills went under, he found that the job had become confrontational again. He learned to make the necessary use of force a calculated practice, even though he regarded it as something he had had to acquire rather than an instinctive part of himself. Buell’s economic history therefore enters the police station directly: industrial decline changes both the lives of residents and the daily demands placed on the town’s officers.

The police department itself has contracted. When Bud Harris became chief at forty, he was the youngest in Buell’s history and the youngest in the Valley; the department had fourteen full-time officers and perhaps six part-time ones. At fifty-four, with eighteen months remaining before his pension, he recalls that the staffing balance has reversed, with fewer full-time officers and more part-time ones. His memory of the department’s earlier scale makes the town’s changing capacity tangible, while the approaching pension places his own long service inside the same history of endurance and attrition.

Leaving and Coming Home

Buell’s importance becomes clearest when its characters move away from it. Isaac English travels far enough to lose the comfort of familiar places, but when he approaches home again, the distance becomes measurable in stages: after walking nearly twenty miles from Little Washington to Speers, he knows that Buell is only eight miles farther on. From a hill he considers whether to continue toward the Mon River by another route, then chooses the familiar way back. The return is not simply a reversal of his departure; it is a decision to approach the town through known ground.

Before reaching Buell, Isaac English stands on the I-70 bridge and looks toward the Mon River. He passes teenagers beneath the highway; when he realizes they have noticed his hunting knife, he removes it from his belt and throws it into the river. The gesture marks a change in how he will travel and meet the world. It takes place on the threshold of home, where the object associated with his former readiness for danger is relinquished before he enters the town again.

After speaking with Bud Harris, Isaac English leaves the office and walks toward town and the river. Only partway through town does he recognize that he has decided to trust Bud Harris and the others, and to see how that trust holds. A few blocks later he reaches the bank among the reeds, puts a hand into the water, and watches the light and birds on the river. Buell remains the place from which he may depart again, but the return has changed his relation to it: he has come back not only to familiar streets and landscape but to a fragile possibility of trust.

Narrative Significance

Buell is not presented as a refuge untouched by hardship. Its scenery conceals as much as it reveals, its industrial past has left people with diminished prospects, and its institutions have fewer resources than before. Yet the town’s close social connections make actions consequential: a case becomes front-page news, an old acquaintance reappears beside the tracks, and a former colleague’s invitation may carry significance beyond a social visit.

The town’s geography gives physical form to the novel’s tensions between escape and belonging. Roads, tracks, hills, and the Mon River offer routes outward, but they also furnish recognizable approaches back. Isaac English’s return makes that pattern especially clear: Buell is not simply where he began, but a place he must choose again, with a changed understanding of his own conduct and of the people who remain there.