The Long River Home (Working Lives Series) - Hardcover

Smith, Larry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1933964308 ISBN 13: 9781933964300

Publisher: Bottom Dog Pr, 2009

Synopsis

This is a novel set in Southern Ohio's Appalachia area covering four decades of the McCall family. It moves from rural hills to the industrial Ohio River Valley and treats the struggles of joys of a family or working people. Particularly in focus are the silences of men.

About this title

From the Back Cover

In this fine Appalachian novel, Larry Smith chronicles four generations of McCalls, their joys and sorrows, their sins and their nobility?.Such regional fiction has always been about people: their connections with one another, their home place, their struggles to survive and to prosper. It?s all here, set, in the grand tradition of Wendell Berry and Conrad Richter, against the Ohio landscape: its hills and its rivers, its frontier beginnings and its later industrial development. We care about the place and its people. Finishing the novel, we understand ourselves and our nation with a deeper knowledge.

-Annabel Thomas, author of Stone Man Mountain

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Andy was only six when his father came in from the fields at dusk and disappeared from his life the next morning. There were few words between them but enough, ?Boy.? Silent looking up. ?I?m goin? off to this war. Take care of your ma and the farm.? That spoken, he disappeared into the shed leaving the boy to stare at the side boards.

The next morning, his father shook his hand for the first and last time and walked off down the fence row, out onto the trail that threaded through the trees and out of sight. Andy stood there a long time in morning fog looking out onto the field of stubble corn, the ragged patch of cabbage and squash, the low-lying trees before the hills. The morning mist was lifting, and there was hoeing to do. Inside the cabin, his mother was sleeping the sleep of the sick and weary. She?d been that way for over a year now since she lost baby Davey at birth.

Andy was in the first year then at the wood-frame school house down in Dog Holler. Now gazing out in solitude and abandonment, he remembers the day of his being called out of class? his father standing in overalls and mud caked boots on the school stoop, a look of pain on his face as though he?d just broken an ankle. He had taken Andy by the arm and walked him down the dirt road the half mile to home. Nothing was spoken till they stood a yard?s length from the house.

?Baby come dead,? fell upon his schoolboy head. ?Go in to your ma.? And he did, a young boy receiving her cries and tears like a man, the same cries and tears he received now that his father had gone off, down the same dirt road to the train east. Only now his mama lay there in tortured blanket calling out her sorrows to him and the air, crying out at the least moment?a change of wind, a thunder cloud, the coming of day or night?asking right questions that no one could answer. ?Why? Why? Why?? was the sense of it all, echoing a fear and doubt that filled the darkened room where they lived.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bottom Dog Pr
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1933964308
• ISBN 13: 9781933964300
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Ellison Elizabeth
• Number of pages: 240