Rust and Bone: Stories

Linda M. Bayley is a freelance writer based in Sudbury, Ontario. She is
the author of Estrangement: Poems.

Rust and Bone is a carefully wrought, in-depth study of grief. This may
not be apparent at first, because the grief is covered in machismo as
deeply layered as the handwraps under a boxer’s gloves, and served up
with a side helping of graphic violence. But I could find no other word
for the way Davidson’s characters reacted to the situations in which
they found themselves.

For example, in “Rocket Ride,” Ben has his leg publicly and
gruesomely torn off by a killer whale while performing a Marineworld
stunt. After several months of convalescence, he finds himself watching
a lot of porn, joining online support groups for everything from
albinism to breastfeeding to Gulf War Syndrome, and cynically attending
a regular meeting of fellow amputees. When he goes to the doctor to be
fitted for a prosthetic leg, he makes his mother cry by asking whether
the doc has anything in a peg leg. Eventually, too tired to do anything
else, he goes back to the whale to finish the job.

The other characters in this book are equally troubled: one man comes
to understand fatherhood but loses his marriage during a brutal
dogfight; a drunken, shiftless father tries to understand where he fits
into his superstar son’s life; a brother and sister go in search of
their father 25 years after he abandoned them during a magic act,
disappearing inside a trunk and never coming back. These are people you
could easily believe really exist, and that you could identify with more
than you might like.

These stories brought quite a few moments of recognition with them, and
a range of emotions not always pleasant or comfortable. Some passages
are unflinchingly graphic and brutal, and sensitive readers might find
themselves cringing as they read. But these passages are never
gratuitous, and the stories would have suffered without them. It was
worth pulling back the layers of machismo to find the truth Davidson
laid out underneath.