Excerpt
Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of
his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just
coming up. When the sun reached the top of the windmill, for a while he watched what
it was doing, that increased reddening of sunrise along the steel blades and the tail
vane above the wooden platform. After a time he put out the cigarette and went
upstairs and walked past the closed door behind which she lay in bed in the darkened
guest room sleeping or not and went down the hall to the glassy room over the kitchen
where the two boys were.
The room was an old sleeping porch with uncurtained windows on three sides,
airy-looking and open, with a pinewood floor. Across the way they were still asleep,
together in the same bed under the north windows, cuddled up, although it was still
early fall and not yet cold. They had been sleeping in the same bed for the past
month and now the older boy had one hand stretched above his brother's head as if he
hoped to shove something away and thereby save them both. They were nine and ten,
with dark brown hair and unmarked faces, and cheeks that were still as pure and dear
as a girl's.
Outside the house the wind came up suddenly out of t ... read full excerpt from Plainsong ebook
