FATHER TROUBLE.

Byline: Karen McCowan The Register-Guard

Burning Fence By Craig Lesley (St. Martin's Press, 357 pages, $24.95)

In this sweeping memoir, Eastern Oregon's best-known literary son (``Winterkill,'' ``The Sky Fisherman'') stands a classic parable on its head: Lesley's lifelong pursuit of a relationship with the man who abandoned him might be called the story of the prodigal father.

Rudell Lesley walked out when his son was just 8 months old, the first of a lifetime of rejections.

``Burning Fence'' is not just about the author's sporadic, painful encounters with his war-scarred father. Lesley subtitled the book ``A Western Memoir of Fatherhood,'' and it also examines his harrowing experiences as the son of an abusive stepfather and the adoptive father of a damaged son.

But the early rejection by Rudell shaped everything that followed, Lesley acknowledged - including his obsession as a novelist with father-loss and characters similar to his trapper/poacher father.

``Rudell's neglect motivated me to raise an alcohol-damaged Indian boy just to show the old man I could succeed as a father where he had fallen down,'' he writes. ``I stood trapped middle ground between a man who wouldn't communicate and a boy who couldn't. Tricky business, fathers and sons. In my case, a lot needed settling.''

Lesley's gift for descriptive detail places readers where they can understand the urgency and impact of his father hunger.

The buckaroo wallpaper in a favorite childhood room informs our understanding of a scared little boy's failure to tell on his new stepfather when the man reaches inside his pajamas and calls it their ``cowboy secret.'' We recognize the classic scent that convinces a semiconscious teenager that Rudell has finally shown up after Lesley is nearly killed by a mint chopper.

``I squinted at the tall, lean man sitting in the bedside chair. My father looked exactly like he did in his army photos, except his hair was thinner and his gray eyes glowed. At first I thought I was dead and this was the bad place. Then he took out a yellow stick of gum and unwrapped it. I smelled Juicy Fruit, not brimstone.'' The childhood smell fuels our outrage when Rudell quickly vanishes again.

Even in their later encounters, long after Lesley is a successful writer, the old man still inflicts damage. As a man who tracks success by the number of elk he's killed, Rudell disdains his son's soft life, routinely greeting him with, ``You've put on some weight, Professor.''

For those familiar with Lesley's fiction, it's fascinating to find seeds of those stories in this memoir.

His own farm accident provided the model for his short story "Mint." His own encounter with the father of a child who drowned in a suspicious accident near Lesley's emotionally disturbed son inspired a scene in ``Storm Riders.''

But, in many ways, Rudell is a character more proposterous than any a novelist could dream up. He was legendary in his neck of Grant County for killing five elk with five shots and for his rumored murder of a mining partner who cheated him.

He attracted women less than half his age, including a teenage bride who would raise four children in his one-bedroom shack without running water or electricity.

And Lesley has no illusions that his life would have been better, had his father not left his mother when he was a baby. For evidence, he must look no further than his half-brother, Ormand, whom Rudell worked like the broken down horses he turned out to starve in winter.

``My mother raised me, providing groceries, shelter, discount shoes, and most important, unconditional love," Lesley wrote. It was his mother who recognized he was "college material" and saw that he got there. Yet a yearning drives this story, keeps you turning pages until you finally read four little words from a broken old man - ``Craig, I love you'' - and they break your heart for coming decades too late.

Lesley is too hard on himself when he says they started to thaw his heart, but it "refroze to black ice, invisible and deadly."

He's only done a writer's job of telling truth, including his father's only purely praiseworthy legacy: his ability to build fence: ``At the gateposts and the attached jacks, the four legs were wired to the joints with both baling and barbed wire. I tried moving the legs, but they wouldn't budge. The quality of fencing, even after 32 years, was impossible to believe.''

READING

Craig Lesley

What: The Portland-based Oregon author reads from and signs his new memoir, ``Burning Fence''

When: 7 p.m. Wednesday

Where: Knight Library Reading Room, 1501 Kincaid St., on the UO campus

Information: 346-4331

CAPTION(S):

``Burning Fences'' is Craig Lesley's first book-length work of nonfiction. Craig Lesley now lives in Portland, where he is senior writer in residence at Portland State University.