Fury of the Wind

excerpt

Home on the Range
They had travelled some four miles over a narrow gravel highway
before turning onto a rutted country road. Ben drove at what Sarah
considered a faster than comfortable speed over the gravel, nor did
he slow down for the rough dirt road. With one hand she clutched
the tattered leather seat, with the other she held tightly to the door
handle as the pickup truck bumped and ground its way for mile
after endless mile.
He hadn’t said a word after she climbed into the cab at the railway
station, nor had she tried to start a conversation. But the silence
between them began to jar her nerves as much as the road
jarred her bones.
“How far do you live from town?” she asked suddenly, shouting
to be heard over the roar of the motor.
“From Nimkus? ’Bout twelve miles.”
“Oh,” she said, surprised, “that’s not very far.”
“’Tis when it rains.”
She was about to ask him what he meant but at that moment
one of the truck wheels fell into a pothole, answering her unspoken
question.
“Long way in winter, too,” he said, his tongue now loosened,
“’specially when we get as much snow as we did this last one.”
“Oh? Was there a lot then?”
“Piled up over the phone wires.”
She glanced sideways at him. In profile his sharp features were
not unattractive but it surprised her to see that, beneath the hat,
his dark hair hung in untidy wisps. He had not even bothered to
get a haircut. But at least he had recently shaved. And his overalls,
although in need of a patch here and there, were clean.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073530

Savages and Beasts

excerpt

He stopped again and gazed at the darkness outside the
window; only some light glints of a reflection here and there
changed the pitch black to the half lighted.
“Anglos and Indians will never reconcile unless the Anglos
stop seeing them as savages; there will never be a world into
which both Indians and Anglos could co-exist unless the Christian
Anglos stopped seeing them as savages and start to truly
believe deep in their hearts that the Indians are as great human
beings as them, something totally impossible for the racist man,
the typical North American Anglo who will never come to that
point of acceptance of the other and embracement of the other;
they simply continue to see them as savages. And the Indians
will never trust and embrace the Anglo since they look at them
as nothing more than occupiers, abusers, suppressors, enemies.
For this they all dig in and wait for the moment, for the opportunity
to strike back and to strike back with vengeance; it’s the
law of nature and the Anglos do nothing but perpetuating that
ugly side of the natural coin.”
“Isn’t there any hope then that things might get better
someday?”
“Not any time soon, look at the conditions under which
the Indians live; the North American Indians suffer in more
ways than one: look at their decrepit housing, their substandard
health coverage and medical care, their substandard financial
opportunity, they subsist using the government handouts,
which the Anglos make sure such handouts are just enough
to keep them alive, but with no chance for improvement or
future beneficial outlook; thus the Indians live in constant fear
of what tomorrow brings, since they have no saying in their
affairs, beyond their rare cases of a federal Government politician
who might show up come election time and sit down …

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763602

The Unquiet Land

excerpt

Mother Ross looked again at what was left of her cottage. A clump of smouldering thatch fell from the roof-beams, and a cough of smoke and dust filled the doorway. Her grandfather, Cain Hogan, had built this wee house from stone cut in the stone yard, a typical Drumard cottage with low roof, low door and tiny windows.
“Satan finds more mischief for idle tongues than idle hands, Jinnie.” Finn felt anger swell within him. “Did you save anything at all?”
“A torn nightie.”
“Nothing else?”
“Not a stitch nor a stick, Finn.” Then a smile brightened Mother Ross’s face like sunlight between clouds.
“What’s so funny about that?” Finn was unable to see anything in the situation to make a body smile.
“Well, he didn’t either,” said Mother Ross. “He bolted out the door like a whippet with a rabbit, his shirt tail flapping and his front tail flopping. The last I saw was his bare arse disappearing into the dark outside.” Mother Ross was grinning like a three-day moon.
“Finn, I shouldn’t talk this way,” she went on with more contrition. “But you know what I am. He was one of them. As big a hypocrite as the rest. Obviously I don’t want to name names. He’s stayed with me before. His wife is one of those frigid women who think that men are only to be used in bed for making babies. All else is dirty and sinful. So she deprives the poor man of his marital rights. God, what a way to live. What an attitude to life. I felt sorry for him when I first met him. I did my best to play wife for him. A real wife, with love in my heart, not stone. He’s been coming more and more often. And I suppose that was his ruin.”
“And yours, Jinnie.”
“Ach, I didn’t have much to ruin, Finn.”
Mother Ross glanced again at the wreckings of her home. She had gone back to live there with her widowed mother after her own husband and six crewmen had drowned at sea when their long-line fishing yawl went down in a wild January storm.
“It was a pretty cottage, Finn, but there wasn’t all that much in it to fret over. A few old pictures I’m sorry to lose. Some savings I’d put by.” She shrugged her shoulders. “But why worry?”
“What will you do now?” Finn placed his right foot on the boulder behind Mother Ross and leaned forward with his arms crossed on his knee.
“I don’t know, Finn. I’ve a widowed sister in the city.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562888

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763203

Ken Kirkby – Warrior Painter

excerpt

I Wonder, I Discover
“If I had influence with the good fairy … I should ask that her gift to each child in the
world would be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.”
(Rachel Carson, A Silent Spring)
~~
Ken lives life with both eyes wide open, and that began as a youngster;
he insists, still, he’s fortunate that he never felt the need to dispense with
wonder. Whether stories or sensations or the boundaries of the universe, his
curiosity is unlimited. He is open to all information. And if it doesn’t come
on its own, he goes searching.
In Portugal, he chased down anyone who could add to his store of
facts about the far and mysterious northland of Francisco’s stories. The boy
developed a fast and lasting friendship with the Canadian Ambassador to
Portugal, Monsieur Desjardines, a neighbour who summered in Parede.
I never missed a chance to try to convince the Ambassador that the
best thing he could do would be to arrange some way whereby I could
become a Canadian. I would insist, “As a country, it isn’t finished yet.”
My reasoning was that Canada was a large country with few people
so there must be a great deal of space between each of them and that
idea was magic to me. He seemed to accept my odd obsession, but
perhaps our relationship was cemented by our fishing expeditions. He
had a passion for fishing and years later set me on my course to live in
Bowser.
One of our favourite secrets was a cave known as the Mouth of
Hell. Essentially, it was a blowhole with an opening at the base of the
cliff facing the ocean. The cave was a gigantic dome, completely dark
inside except for whatever light filtered through a hole in the rocky
roof. When storms raged at sea, the water surged into the mouth of the
cave with such force the vapour would spew out of the opening in the
ceiling, but when the sea was calm, it was possible to scramble over the
cliffs and crawl down through the opening.
Inside, the pool of salt water held an abundance of mussels, clams…

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562902

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CB8W4CG

Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Volume V

The Dead House (excerpt)

We now walk around this huge house, alone. We the
two young sisters, young as the saying goes, since we have
aged a lot; we are the alone and youngest of the family
who survived. We don’t know what to do with
this house, how to settle in it; it’s not right to sell it,
we’ve spent all our lives here; this is the space of
our dead, you can’t sell them; besides who wants to buy
the dead? Then again to carry them from house to house,
from one neighbourhood to the other is very tiring and
dangerous; they have settled here, one of them in the
shadow of the curtain, the other under the table, one
behind the closet or the glass windows of
the bookcase, one in the glass of the oil lamp, so
polite and frugal as always, the other smiling discreetly
from behind the two thin crossed shadows which are
outlined by my young sister’s knitting needles onto
the middle wall.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763726