West Virginia is a recurring home, refuge, and passageway in the novel: Willard Russell looks back toward Coal Creek as the place he hopes to return to after the war, and it later becomes the home where his son Arvin is raised. The state also holds the family history Roy Laferty has been separated from for years. Its importance lies less in a single set-piece than in how people move through it, flee from it, or try to begin again there.

Coal Creek as Home

Coal Creek, West Virginia, is Willard’s home in the hills. During his wartime journey home, he thinks that if he ever gets back, he will never leave Coal Creek again. The wish carries the weight of what he has witnessed while serving in the United States Army: the violence of war has altered him, and home represents a life he hopes will be different. But the return he imagines does not become a permanent settlement. Willard builds a family with Charlotte and Arvin, and the Russells eventually move across the state line to a farmhouse in Ohio.

That move follows news from Coal Creek about Helen Laferty. After Helen’s remains are found in the woods, Willard’s mother writes to him, and he reads her letter night after night. The report unsettles him, as does the continuing uncertainty surrounding Roy and Theodore, Helen’s presumed killers, who have been missing for years. Willard sends Emma Russell a hundred dollars toward Helen’s burial. Soon afterward, he tells Charlotte that they must leave their cramped apartment and find a place with woods where he can pray. The family’s Ohio farmhouse thus grows out of a crisis whose news reaches Willard from home.

Arvin’s Life in Coal Creek

After Willard’s suicide, Arvin is sent to live with his grandmother, Emma, in Coal Creek. Emma takes him to church with Lenora Laferty each Sunday, but does not demand that he pray, sing, or kneel. Having been told about the summer Arvin endured while Charlotte was dying, she does not want to force religion on him. Reverend Albert Sykes accepts her request that Arvin come to faith in his own time. The care is practical as well as spiritual: Coal Creek becomes the household in which Arvin and Lenora grow up together after losing their parents.

The town is not a clean break from Arvin’s past. He arrives carrying the effects of his father’s religious desperation and his mother’s death, but Emma’s approach offers a contrast to Willard’s insistence on prayer. Arvin attends church without being compelled to make a profession of belief. Years later, he lives with Emma and shares a home with Lenora, whom he regards as a sister. His return to Helen’s grave with her is not only a visit to a cemetery; he is also trying to understand the disappearance of Roy and Theodore, a mystery that connects his new home to the losses that preceded it.

The Fugitive Past and Roy’s Return

West Virginia is also the point of origin Roy and Theodore leave behind. They flee after Helen’s death and spend nearly fourteen years traveling with Billy Bradford Family Amusements, performing in the South from spring through fall. By 1963, they no longer bother to use assumed names, and Coal Creek seems so far away that they do not expect the law there to reach them. Their long absence gives the state a double significance: it is the place from which they escaped, but it remains the home Roy hopes to see again.

When Roy meets Carl and Sandy Henderson on the road, he tells them he is going to West Virginia to see his little girl. He has not seen her for nearly seventeen years. The simple destination reveals the length of his separation from Lenora and the hope that, after all that time, he might return to her. The journey is not presented as an easy restoration: Roy is exhausted, and his reunion remains only an intention in the scenes provided. Still, his stated purpose makes the route toward Coal Creek a return toward family, not merely a trip across the map.

Roads Between West Virginia and Ohio

The state is also a corridor in the novel’s chain of encounters. Carl and Sandy drive through southern West Virginia as they head toward Ohio, hoping to find another subject for Carl’s photographs before ending their trip. Hours pass without a hitchhiker. As they near Point Pleasant, Carl becomes increasingly doubtful that they will find what he wants; then he sees a young man with a gym bag standing on the walkway ahead in traffic. The route across West Virginia has brought the couple back toward Ohio and into proximity with Arvin, though the encounter first appears through Carl’s attention to the road and his search for a subject.

The connection becomes explicit in a telephone call about the killing of Preston Teagardin. A sheriff tells Lee Bodecker that the suspected young man, Arvin Russell, once lived in the caller’s area and now lives with his grandmother in Coal Creek. Arvin is eighteen and has been there for roughly seven or eight years. The information links the Ohio crime to the West Virginia household that has raised him, while also giving Lee a reason to recognize the Russell name. Coal Creek is therefore both Arvin’s present home and a piece of information that can draw the law back into his life.

A Place of Return, Not Resolution

West Virginia gathers together different forms of return without making them equivalent. Willard longs for Coal Creek after war, but his family’s life carries him to Ohio; Arvin is placed there after his father’s death and grows up under Emma’s care; Roy sets out for it after almost seventeen years away. Carl and Sandy, meanwhile, cross southern West Virginia on their way toward Ohio, where their road intersects with Arvin’s. The state’s role is consequently relational and temporal: it holds a home left behind, a refuge formed after bereavement, and a destination imagined by a father who has been absent from his daughter’s life for most of her childhood.