All of life is a mystery
High Hawk by Amy Frykholm. University of Iowa Press, 2024. 242 pp., $19.00
Amy Frykholm’s debut novel begins with a mystery: the appearance of an infant, left at the doors of St. Rose Parish in a cardboard box and found by its priest, Father Joe Kreitzer. A handwritten note tucked in the box provides the first clues. The baby’s name is Bernard; he needs help and a home. Also: The note appears to be in “mission school handwriting,” Father Joe’s friend, Alice Nighthawk, notices.
“Nun-trained,” she says. “Look at the B. It’s too perfect.”
As Frykholm’s novel unfolds, the search for the infant’s birth mother becomes one narrative strand, which quickly becomes entangled with multiple others. The result is an evocative, compelling story that boldly explores the harms done by systems and institutions, often in the name of protecting the vulnerable. Turns out, Bernard (whom Alice names “Little Bear”) is not the only vulnerable person in High Hawk. Even Father Joe is victim to the seemingly impetuous whims of those with power.
Set primarily in the early 1980s at the Windy Creek Reservation in South Dakota, Frykholm’s story also explores the human capacity for complicity in perpetuating harm; how the choices we make continue to reverberate for good and for ill; and how “the progress of souls” requires that all that encumbers us be burnished away (shout out to Walt Whitman, whose “Song of the Open Road” informs a leitmotif in the novel).
What really makes High Hawk sing are its characters, especially Father Joe, whose self-doubt, isolation, and longing make him a wholly empathetic protagonist. Father Joe’s compassion for his community, a reservation parish facing imminent closure, is made clear through his interactions with his parishioners. This includes Alice, a middle-aged woman whose home welcomes those in need physically and spiritually, Father Joe among them. He calls Alice “his one-woman altar guild and his rare invitation into Windy Creek’s deeper life, a life that, without her, he would never even glimpse.”
Alice becomes mother to Bear, albeit without the documents that would officially codify this relationship. When Bear is thirteen, he allegedly stabs a man, Vincent, the only person who had witnessed Alice’s oldest son’s death and is a new domestic partner to Alice’s youngest daughter. Officials must decide whether to charge Bear as an adult or a juvenile, and whether he should face justice in county or tribal courts. This is a quandary that could be solved by a birth certificate.
Thus begins Father Joe’s quest to find a birthmother and a birth certificate, and just as assuredly, a quest to find himself. Father Joe is facing the closure of his parish by a bishop intending to relocate him to Hastings, Nebraska, away from the people whom he has served and loved. In the process of looking for documents that might help uncover Bear’s maternal line, Father Joe begins a physical excavation of files from the church and its mission school, an excavation that ultimately becomes spiritual as well.
While the identity of Bear’s mother is a mystery, so too is the provenance of Father Joe’s angst, though as the novel unfolds, one object of his torment becomes clearer. A bishop’s seemingly facile decision to close his parish and relocate Father Joe to Hastings reflects an institutional disregard for the priest’s long-time dedication to Windy Creek and its people. A tranche of letters and other documents Father Joe discovers in the parish basement reinforces his sense that the church cares little for the reservation, a place to which priests might be exiled because of abhorrent behavior in other parishes—most notably in the abuse of children.
The violence toward children at the school, part of a horrific effort in the United States and Canada to “civilize” native people, becomes another significant axel on which Frykholm’s story turns. The book’s acknowledgments note that the novel is “based, in part, on historical letters that former students and survivors brought to light in 2011 from the St. Francis Mission School on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.” (These letters are preserved by the Boarding School Healing Project.) The fictional Father Joe is emblematic, to some degree, of church leaders’ complicity in this abuse; he justifies his own inaction, his initial lack of intervening in the children’s abuse, by reminding himself that a bishop’s power would override Father Joe’s concerns.
In trying to help Alice, Bear, and potentially Bear’s birth family, Father Joe must contend with what his reticence has wrought, and what taking control of his life might look like. Should he continue his orders in Hastings, or might he pursue another life, one that might include Veronica, a woman with whom he has corresponded for decades? “All parts away for the progress of souls,” Veronica writes in a postscript to a letter, a call to Father Joe to consider what pieces of his soul need burnishing in order to find himself and a pathway to his future.
Frykholm’s gifts as a writer and thinker are fully present in High Hawk, though she is perhaps best known for her nonfiction, including Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America, and her work on church mothers, like Julian of Norwich and Mary of Egypt. She is also a contributing editor at Christian Century.
High Hawk ends as it begins: with a mystery, about the path Father Joe will pursue. What remains settled in the novel is its powerful exploration of love, belonging, the connection we have to every living being, and the moral duty we have to others—especially the vulnerable who need our care. In other words, High Hawk is the perfect novel for such a time as ours.
Melanie Springer Mock is Professor of English at George Fox University. Her books include Finding Our Way Forward: When the Children We Love Become Adults (2023), Worthy: Finding Yourself in a World Expecting Someone Else (2018), and If Eve Only Knew: Freeing Yourself from Biblical Womanhood to Become Who God Expected You to Be (2015). Her essays have appeared in Christian Feminism Today, Literary Mama, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Brain, Child, and Runner’s World, among other places. Much of her work focuses on her experiences parenting, feminism within Christian context, and social justice.
