eBookDigital Original (Digital Original)
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
The police call on David Hook at his farm in Illinois, telling him his son Chris has committed suicide. But David knows something else must have happened in California to lead to Chris’s death. Diving into his son’s life, David discovers political corruption, immorality, and evil that shocks him to his very core. But it also awakens something lurking within, something David enjoys . . . something that poses an even bigger threat to those who hurt his son.
“One of the truly great American writers of the 20th Century.” —The Guardian
“Has an instant grab.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A born storyteller.” —St. Louis Post Dispatch
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781626817456 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Diversion Books |
| Publication date: | 02/06/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Though he was looking down through gusting snow at a box holding the body of his firstborn son, David Hook's eyes were dry. His heart was dry. He might have been some stranger who had absently wandered in upon this gathering among the gravestones and now found himself standing in the very center of it, and with eyes not only dry but cold too, a reporter's eyes. He missed nothing, not even the simple antique beauty of the scene, its evocation of an America all but dead and buried itself now: these neighbors of his, these countryfolk in their shiny Sunday best, the hard vital weathered men and their drab women and cool longhaired young, who had gone to school with his son and made hay with him and maybe even loved him too, for there was weeping among their ranks, tears falling from some eyes anyway if not from his own.
As much as it was possible to love a cemetery, Hook loved this one, mostly for its rows of small ancient stones and the messages they bore, their litany of pioneer hardship and loss and courage. But he also liked the remoteness of the place, its quiet hilltop serenity and its shabby grounds from which one could see for miles, an experience all too rare in the flat farmland of southwestern Illinois. Now, though, in mid-December, that same view made for poor shelter against the wind, which blew Reverend Hodson's words at him in gusts, like the snow:
"I shall not want. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He restoreth my soul."
The Reverend's squat figure facing him across the coffin obscured Hook's view of his wife's grave, but he was able to see the first Hook family marker in the cemetery, that of his great-grandfather James Hook. The modest stone was no less laconic than the man himself was reputed to have been, giving only his name and dates, 1855-1904. When Hook was a boy the place still had been known as the "old Baptist graveyard," having been the burial ground of a country church that had burned down on this same hill around the turn of the century. But in recent years, in fact ever since the Second World War, people generally had called it Hook's cemetery, possibly because his farm had grown to surround it on three sides or maybe because they knew that it was he who kept it up after a fashion, swinging in with a tractor and sicklebar a few times each summer to mow down its ever-flourishing crop of weeds.
So in effect this day Hook was burying his son in ground that touched his own and bore his name as well. Yet as he stared at it now, at the sandlike snow whipping under the coffin into the black pit beneath, he felt as if he were placing his son not in some familiar ground of home but in an alien, almost lunar soil. He had his arm around his two surviving children, sixteen-year-old Bobby on the outside and the year-younger Jennifer in between, both hugging each other, trembling and crying in the desperate grip of his arm. He himself would not cry, could not cry. He knew that if he allowed himself that luxury for even a moment he would end up falling on the casket like some poor sobbing peasant mother and that it would take men, it would take farmers like himself, to pull him free. So he held on to all he had in the world now, his two children and his rage — for there was still that, of course, and it had become his spine now, his blood and breath, his tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. As long as he had it, this treasure of rage, he could go on.
The Reverend Hodson's voice gusted at him again, puffed and preening now, for these were the man's own words and not his deity's. "And O, our dear heavenly Father, our blessed Jesus, we pray that Thou wilt grant eternal peace and life everlasting to the soul of this young man, whom, as we all here today can testify, truly lived his life according to the golden rule ..."
Hook, who despised bad grammar in anyone pretending to eloquence, did not hear the rest of the man's prayer. The solecism, like a thrown rail switch, sent the train of his attention wandering off into the trees, the cemetery's graceful old maples and dead-leaved oaks, and he observed that the wind was shifting, was southerly now. If it held, the temperature would rise in the next few days. The thin snow would melt. Christmas would not be white after all, not that it would matter to him, for where he was going it would be green.
On his left his Aunt Marian suddenly cried out and Hook, feeling Uncle Arnie struggling to hold her, realized that it was all over, the ceremony finished. The Reverend was coming around the coffin toward him, his stocky figure properly bent and condoling, though Hook thought he could see in the man's doughy face a look of muted triumph. See? it said. You finally needed me. In the end you all need me.
Nodding, Hook thanked him but barely touched his proffered hand, for Jenny had collapsed against him and was holding onto his arm with all her strength — to keep him there, he knew, hold them both there, for to move away would be to acknowledge the finality of the thing, that their Chris, their shining splendid loved and loving Chris, was actually dead, actually lying there in that box about to be covered over with earth. To leave would be to accept that it was all not some fantastically detailed nightmare from which they would soon wake. Nevertheless Hook gently forced her away from the grave, moving slowly, holding her up, with Bobby on the other side of her — Bobby, who if anything had to feel even more bereft than they, for they at least had known where their lives had ended and Chris's had begun. They had not all their days played with him and gone to school with him and worked with him; they had not fought for their lives with him or lain together in the warm summer nights giggling at what scatological humor Hook could only guess at, smile at, from his room across the hall. Yet Bobby helped him with Jenny as they headed toward the gate and the cars lined up outside it, along the blacktop road.
On the way, friends kept stopping them, not so much to talk as to touch them with their hands, pat them, give them their twisted smiles of sympathy, which were genuine, Hook knew, for it was Chris in the coffin and not himself. Mrs. Corman, a neighbor and high-school English teacher as Hook himself once had been, tried to speak but had to give it up. He would have taken her hand and tried to comfort her but Jenny was still holding onto him, pressing her face against his shoulder. Even old Emil Strickler, whose last hundred acres Hook had bought at a fair price, and earned the man's undying resentment in the bargain — even Emil came up and put his hand on Hook's arm, squeezed him.
Others walked along with them. A weeping George Anderson cursed out loud. "It don't make no goddamn sense, Dave! Why him, huh? Why him? Why not us? Why not me?" Two winters before, when George had broken his ankle hopping down from a tractor, Hook and Chris had seen to it that the man's thirty-cow dairy herd went on producing through all the months of his mending.
They came to the cars and got in, Hook and his children into the rear of the first car, his aunt and uncle into the second. And it seemed ridiculous to Hook. They could have walked. A quarter-mile down the road, down the hill, was the gate to his farm; another quarter-mile back was his house. Yet he knew that they had to drive, that they had no choice, just as they had no choice but to suffer the presence of most of the mourners at his house for the next few hours, and for that matter just as he had had to suffer the absurdity of the whole ceremony, the rite of Christian burial. They lived here. They would go on living here. A man had to bend now and then. For himself, Hook would have preferred just the five of them, his family, bringing Chris's body here and lowering it into the ground next to his mother's with no more ceremony than the silence of their grief. And with this thought, as the mortician Rohmer discreetly closed the door of his prized Cadillac behind him, Hook felt the thing coming at him anew, and all out of control now. It was like being in a skiff on a fogged sea and out of nowhere there was suddenly this great dark shape slipping silently toward him through the mist, a ship's prow, a shape of death, of loss. And then abruptly it was gone, was past him, moving just as silently on. Someday it would not miss him, he knew. But now was not the time for it, not the time for grief. Now was the time for control.
Hook looked at Jennifer sitting between him and Bobby. Meeting his eyes, she put her hands to her face and Hook looked away from her, only to see his son whipping his head furiously back and forth. The boy's mouth was open; he was trying to speak.
"Some of them looked like they wondered," he got out finally. "Like they believed maybe he really did kill himself."
"We know better," Hook said.
"Why'd they have to lie out there? Why'd they —" But the boy could not go on. He began to pound his fist against his knee, slowly, but with brutal force.
Hook seized his wrist. "I don't know why. But we'll find out, son. We'll change it." The words felt good to him, good on his lips, like the cubed bread of a childhood communion, like the recitation that accompanied the bread's ingestion, a statement of faith and fact, solid, unarguable.
In the front, Rohmer started the car and they began to move down the narrow road toward the creek bridge and just beyond it the entrance to his farm. Along the creek bottomland stretching to their right about fifty head of Hook's Black Angus herd were placidly moving among the brokendown corn stalks, scavenging for any grain the picker might have missed six weeks before. It was a hobby for them, not a necessity; they got all the hay and silage they needed.
"I want to go with you," Bobby said.
Hook did not answer him. He would go alone, of course. The boy knew that. It was not a matter for discussion.
Except for the stretch of cleared ground along the creek, the rest of his land bordering the road was rough and wooded, virgin white oak and hickory with a sprinkling of maple and ash, and for Hook it was never anything but beautiful, the muted grays and blues of winter now, the black electricity of its barren limbs, just as important to him as the bright glory of its springtimes and autumns. And as always, he found it strange that such beauty was held against him, was somehow part of his neighbors' brief against him, along with his college degree and his unbelief and just his character in general, his cold unblinking inability to be or even pretend to be "just plain folks." That he, a farmer, a businessman the same as they, would leave this land along the road in a wild state instead of clearing it off and seeding it, making it work and produce — this, Hook knew, was one further heresy as far as they were concerned, further proof that he was not one of them. But as the Cadillac swung into his gravel drive now, leading the cortege over the cattle gate and up the long hill through the woods, Hook did not doubt the rightness of his decision. This strip of woodland was the stone wall of his castle. It was the moat between his world and that other, larger one outside, the one that had just cost him the life of his son.
As they reached the top of the hill the woods ended abruptly and the main part of Hook's farm stretched out before them, some three hundred acres of rolling pasture and hayfields, with his house and farm buildings lying among an island of trees almost in the center of the cleared expanse. Back on the other side of the blacktop, beyond the kindred strip of woods there, he owned a similar piece of ground, only twice as large. And two miles east, toward the town of Banner Hill, was the hundred acres he had bought from Strickler, flat rich land he planted to corn to fatten whatever cattle he did not sell to other feeders around the state. It was a large operation, one of the few big farms in the area, and it was almost wholly his own creation. When he had taken it over from his grandfather fifteen years before, there had been just the old one-hundred-sixty-acre nucleus, the house and barn and a small herd of pampered unproductive Jersey cows the old man kept because the high butterfat content of their milk consistently won him prizes at the county fair, if not much of a living. The new buildings, the added land, the three-hundred-head beef herd were all his own doing, with the help of Uncle Arnie and Bobby and especially Chris, who daily after school and each summer had worked like a man, or even better, like a man who cared. So there was no part of the farm, no fence or field or animal or building or piece of equipment, nothing the limousine drove past on the gravel road to the farmhouse now that did not carry with it, in Hook's mind, the image of his son.
They entered the island of trees and came to a stop at the house. There were already a few cars parked alongside the drive, transportation for the ladies of the Bethel Baptist Church Philathea Class, friends of his Aunt Marian here to "help the family," which meant serve the mourners all the cakes and casseroles and sandwiches and salads the ladies had brought with them in the first place. Yet Hook was not ungrateful for their effort. Nor did it bother him that some of the women would be in an almost festive mood, that as far as they were concerned one church function was pretty much like another, a social gathering, a time for fun and gossip. He could accept this, did not expect humanity to suspend its grossness for even this one special day. But he wanted desperately to be by himself now, just him and the children, or ideally just him alone, if Bobby and Jennifer felt anything as he did, aching for privacy, wanting to put his suffering beyond the reach of another's eyes.
As Rohmer opened the car door and they got out, Hook gently herded the children and Aunt Marian and Arnie into the house ahead of him. Inside, a half-dozen Philathea ladies were standing about the food- burdened dining room table like sentries at attention, and in uniform too, all with the same tightly curled blue-rinsed gray hair and the same soft stout bodies stuffed into rigid girdles and Sunday dresses off the half-size rack in Sears. Aunt Marian went straight to them, crooning over the food, accepting their embraces, returning them with a vengeance. But all Hook could do was nod to the ladies as he and the children moved through the dining room into the new part of the house, which contained their bedrooms and the family room. Jenny pushed ahead, running to her room and falling onto her bed. Following her in, Hook sat down next to her and put his hand on her head, on her long blond hair. Bobby, coming in too, stood inside the door looking down at the two of them.
"Well, it's over," Hook said. "This part is over."
Bobby nodded. "It's over."
Jenny turned her head away from Hook's hand. "I don't believe any of this," she said. "I don't believe this is happening."
From the doorway Aunt Marian intoned: "The Lord moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform."
Hook looked at his aunt, his father's sister, rangy like most of the Hooks, but heavy now after all her years in the kitchen, nibbling, testing, cleaning up leftovers, a good kind proper Christian lady on the outside, yet all saddle-leather toughness underneath, tough enough to have kept her Arnie working all this time against all his better instincts, and tough enough to have stepped in and saved them all seven years before, when Hook's Kate had lost her life in the head-on crash near Alton and Hook for almost a year afterwards had spent his days like a man wandering in a battlefield searching for a death of his own. This same morning he had watched Marian salt her coffee and place the sugar in the refrigerator, and later he had seen her standing in the pantry shaking with grief, yet here she was now, so quick and easy with the mindless platitude. She was not a simple woman.
"I'm not going in the living room," Jenny said now. "I'm staying right here."
Her eyes filling, Marian looked at Hook. "Tell her, David. Tell her she can't. She has to come out."
Hook got up and put his arm around his aunt, patted her beefy shoulder. "You cover for us for a while, okay? You and Arnie."
"You're not coming out either? But you have to, David. You just have to. For a while anyway. A few minutes."
"Maybe later."
Uncle Arnie had come to the door now too. "Let 'em do what they want," he told his wife. "Me and you can handle it. All it takes is sittin'." Small and light for a Swede, Arnie Bergman at sixty was considerably outweighed by his wife, and usually out-maneuvered and out-opinioned too, but every now and then, when he cared, he would prevail. He prevailed now.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "To Die in California"
by .
Copyright © 1973 Newton Thornburg.
Excerpted by permission of Diversion Publishing Corp..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.