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Back The Cloud Chamber Save as PDF
Chapters (35)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Acknowledgments
  5. Author’s Note
  6. One
  7. Two
  8. Three
  9. Four
  10. Five
  11. Six
  12. Seven
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. Sixteen
  22. Seventeen
  23. Eighteen
  24. Nineteen
  25. Twenty
  26. Twenty-One
  27. Twenty-Two
  28. Twenty-Three
  29. Twenty-Four
  30. Twenty-Five
  31. Twenty-Six
  32. Twenty-Seven
  33. Twenty-Eight
  34. Twenty-Nine
  35. Thirty

I chose to write this novel in part for the opportunity of working with an editor I deeply admire, Anne Schwartz, and though doing so proved to be one of the more demanding experiences of my writing life, it was also among the most rewarding. To Anne, deep thanks, deepest respect.

Finally, this book would never have been written without the courage of Ken Munn and his sister, Jeannine, who were brave enough to revisit their own story so that I could tell this one.

Author’s Note

Although I have based this story on the experiences and stories of ranch families in Montana, the town in which it is set—Lonetree—does not actually exist. Like the characters in this novel, Lonetree and Chance’s Dairy Farm, and the Chance family itself, are products of my imagination, though it is my belief that the feelings they experience and the kinds of hard times they live through are ones many others have known.

One

EVEN IN THE PITCH DARK, NATE FIGURED HE COULD walk this particular stretch of gravel road from the two-lane blacktop to his family’s farm, he knew it that well: the barn, the implement shed, the pond where his sister, Junie, liked to launch her little homemade boats, and beyond it, the four hundred acres that made up Chance’s Dairy Farm. Their land—just a small piece, compared to the ranches on all sides—stretched out almost perfectly flat as far as the eye could see, except for a single rise, at the far corner, where a stand of poplar trees marked the spot his father called the animal burial ground. Off at the farthest end of the property, the skeleton of a long-abandoned windmill pierced the otherwise-unbroken sky.

A long time ago, when he was little, Nate and his dad hiked to the edge of their land together to watch the total eclipse of the sun. They’d buried a time capsule under the poplars that day, with a Matchbox car inside, along with the wrapper from the Mounds bar they’d shared, a handful of plastic Indians, and his dad’s old baseball cap.

Today, as the school bus made its way along the dirt road that curved around the barn to where his family’s house came into view, an unfamiliar sight greeted him. A police cruiser was parked out front, and in the yard stood two officers in uniform. One he recognized as the umpire from last summer’s Little League games. The other was the dad of somebody from school, a kid a few years younger than he was—sixth grade, maybe. He was one of those regular-looking dads you sometimes saw, manning the grill at the annual baseball picnic, that Nate used to wish, guiltily, his own father resembled—his father, as everyone knew, being different from the others.