North Woods: A Novel

even for a region with a long history of underpaying for land that belongs to other people.

unless by “Russian” and “Indian” one meant third-generation Irish.

But then, standing in the bedrooms of such righteous people, he’d see the muslin drapes and calico skirts, and to his many hates, he added that for the pious who preached the slave’s equality, but wore cloth made with his sweat.

If life, as the man said, was a song, theirs was more refrain than verse. And yet to have claimed that a warm spring morning walking over earth carpeted with apple blossoms was somehow the same, substantively, spiritually, as a cold winter noon spent pruning, or a harvest evening heavy with the smell of juice and hay—this would have betrayed an ign