Sublime

Of course Wes was a sandwich thrower. He probably opened beer bottles with his keys, took stairs two at a time, slid down banisters. Despite his smallish stature and elegant collarbone, he seemed manly to me in this particular way: that understanding of physical objects in space, and of himself in relationship to those objects.

When he died I had been away from home for a little over a year. In that year I had had time to become aware of the meaning of all my father’s bitter warnings, had discovered the secret of his proudly pursed lips and rigid carriage: I had discovered the weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my ancestors and now would be

An air altogether of occupying a time not his own – might he be more at ease in an Edwardian dining room, say, or on a pitching clipper’s deck? Very likely.

Nearly twenty years had passed since Roy had last seen The Captain: eight years in Boonville and another twelve on the farm with Harvey. And though his brother would be twenty-one now, Roy was no longer sure of his own age. It didn’t matter; Roy had died and was also born again in Boonville. Raytown, whenever that was, had been another lifetime. Th

Then his head started to become a little unclear and he thought, is he bringing me in or am I bringing him in? If I were towing him behind there would be no question. Nor if the fish were in the skiff, with all dignity gone, there would be no question either. But they were sailing together lashed side by side and the old man thought, let him bring

Strange to think of his voice still flying through the air, already a country away, growing weaker every mile.

But it’s Idaho, and when you spend all your hours with horses, your soul expands a bit until the ways of men reveal themselves to be no more than a costume party you’d be well advised not to take at face value.

“The town at the mercy of a deep loneliness during the day and, come night, of large cats. There’s a beautiful river running through it, and an old stone bridge spanning the river. But it’s not where we should stay.”

It was like a Nick Adams boyhood taken from the pages of Ernest Hemingway’s short story collection In Our Time. Indeed, Brand’s childhood was in many ways parallel to Hemingway’s. Several decades earlier Hemingway had grown up in the suburbs of Chicago and summered at Windemere Cottage on Walloon Lake in northern Michigan, less than a two hours’ dr