Long Man

Начало книги

In the summer of 1936 there was one woman left on the mountaintop where the river’s headwaters formed in rocks ages old and shining with mica, the sediment washing down to tinge its shoals yellow-brown. Most others with her last name had died or moved on decades ago. Though darkness came to her high place first she could climb to this limestone ridge overlooking the cornfields and see daytime lingering in the valley town below. She would stand shielding her eyes until her legs grew tired. Then she would lower herself to the rocky edge and take off her brogans to rub her sore feet. She would watch with her knees gathered up as the last light mellowed into dusk, falling down the piney bluffs. Before half of the homesteads were razed the lowering sun would stain the tin roofs of houses and barns, deepening the rust to oxblood. Gilding wheat sheaves and tobacco rows, shading red clay furrows. Last summer she might have heard a farmer calling in his cows. She might have heard workers on scaffolds calling to each other over the rumble of cranes and bulldozers, steam shovels gouging the cliffside above the river and dumping out rocks to be crushed for the cement mixer. But now there was only stillness and silence besides the tree frogs singing as twilight drifted toward night. This time next year if she came up here looking for a little more light she would see only miles of endless blue lake.

Читать дальше →