A Country Called Home

by Barnes, Kim

• ISBN13: 9780307389114
• ISBN10: 0307389111
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-10-06
• Publisher: Anchor

Summary

From the author of the acclaimed memoir "In the Wilderness" comes a luminous novel of youthful idealism, faith and madness, love and family.

Author Biography

Kim Barnes is the author of the novel Finding Caruso and two memoirs, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country—a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize—and Hungry for the World. She is coeditor with Mary Clearman Blew of Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers, and with Claire Davis of Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty. Her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, MORE magazine, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She teaches writing at the University of Idaho and lives with her husband, the poet Robert Wrigley, on Moscow Mountain.

Excerpts

Chapter One

1960

The druggist waited, whistling, looking out the window, nodding to each person who passed along the Main Street of Fife. It was early, the bank not yet open. The warming September wind wafted through the door seams. On the north hill, he could see the sun just hitting the flat metal roof of the Clearwater Mental Hospital and, across the shared parking lot, the high school. Dr. K often joked that the children of Fife could look out their windows and see their future before them.

“How much?” Manny asked again. The boy was tall enough to meet the older man eye to eye, but he kept his gaze on the faded counter as though some miracle might transpire there.

“Same as last time.”

The cola sat between them, dripping condensation. Manny laid out three pennies, pretended to search for more.

“Don’t got it, do you?” The druggist was not an unfriendly man but brusque and burly, built more like a butcher than a purveyor of medicine. Dr. K, the locals called him, his full name, Kalinosky, too much to mess with. His role in the town went beyond the filling of prescriptions and the dispensing of antiseptics: he diagnosed strep throat, checked children for lice, scoured the wounds caused by pitched rocks, chain saw slips, bicycle wrecks.

“No, sir.” Manny freed his hands, let them drop to his sides. He peered at his shoes, the seams stretched and frayed.

Dr. K sighed, shook his head, pointed toward the door. “Broom’s just outside. Make yourself useful for an hour.”

Like others in Fife, Dr. K knew the details of Manny’s life: his parents’ move from California to the isolated Idaho land they believed a more honest place; the strange little canvas hut that inspired the town’s curiosity and contempt. His father’s insistence on learning the dying art of horse-logging from an old man who stank of sweat and juniper berries. Manny’s birth just a few miles up Itsy Creek, and the death of his mother twelve years later when his little sister, born already dead, was followed by the blood they could not stop flowing. The father, once admired for his native ingenuity and his matched team of Percheron geldings, had headed south to find work and never came back. The good women of Fife had proceeded with a kind of communal adoption, passing the responsibility for Manny’s care from one to the other, each week a different mother, father, cast of siblings, and then the cycle repeating. Dr. K remembered the morning he’d opened the drugstore to find Mrs. Keasling wringing her hands, repeating again and again thatder boy, der boywas missing. Dr. K had found Manny where he thought he would, asleep in the fair barn, his father’s auctioned draft horses snuffling his hair, placing their great hooves gently beside him.

Manny stepped outside with the broom, scattering the cats that had gathered for their morning meal. Too many toms, Dr. K thought. Too many litters, but he couldn’t turn away a single one of them. He watched as Manny worked the windows clean of cobwebs, pleased with the care he took with the corners. Despite everything, or maybe because of it, he’d grown into a fine young man: tall and strong-shouldered, more handsome than he needed to be. Thick dark hair, dark eyes, skin like an Italian, Dr. K thought. He looked like he might be broody, but wasn’t. When Manny ran the broom a final time along each crack of the sidewalk and knocked the bristles clean before stepping back into the store, Dr. K opened the cash register and pulled out a dollar bill.

“Here. Buy yourself somerealfood.” Dr. K slipped the pencil behind his ear, wiped a hand the length of his face. “Listen. You need to get out there and do something. Ray Coon’s logging outfit might need a swamper. Or what about the railroad? Didn’t

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Excerpted from A Country Called Home by Kim Barnes
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