To Die in California

Newton Thornburg

Contents (18)

To Die in California

Newton Thornburg

Copyright

Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

For more information, email [email protected]

First Diversion Books edition April 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62681-745-6

Also by Newton Thornburg

Cutter and Bone
Dreamland
A Man’s Game
Eve’s Men
Valhalla
The Lion at the Door
Beautiful Kate
Black Angus

To Mark and Douglas,
My Sons

1

Though he was looking down through gusting snow at a box holding the body of his firstborn son, David Hook’s eyes were dry. His heart was dry. He might have been some stranger who had absently wandered in upon this gathering among the gravestones and now found himself standing in the very center of it, and with eyes not only dry but cold too, a reporter’s eyes. He missed nothing, not even the simple antique beauty of the scene, its evocation of an America all but dead and buried itself now: these neighbors of his, these countryfolk in their shiny Sunday best, the hard vital weathered men and their drab women and cool longhaired young, who had gone to school with his son and made hay with him and maybe even loved him too, for there was weeping among their ranks, tears falling from some eyes anyway if not from his own.

As much as it was possible to love a cemetery, Hook loved this one, mostly for its rows of small ancient stones and the messages they bore, their litany of pioneer hardship and loss and courage. But he also liked the remoteness of the place, its quiet hilltop serenity and its shabby grounds from which one could see for miles, an experience all too rare in the flat farmland of southwestern Illinois. Now, though, in mid-December, that same view made for poor shelter against the wind, which blew Reverend Hodson’s words at him in gusts, like the snow:

“I shall not want. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He restoreth my soul.”

The Reverend’s squat figure facing him across the coffin obscured Hook’s view of his wife’s grave, but he was able to see the first Hook family marker in the cemetery, that of his great-grandfather James Hook. The modest stone was no less laconic than the man himself was reputed to have been, giving only his name and dates, 1855-1904. When Hook was a boy the place still had been known as the “old Baptist graveyard,” having been the burial ground of a country church that had burned down on this same hill around the turn of the century. But in recent years, in fact ever since the Second World War, people generally had called it Hook’s cemetery, possibly because his farm had grown to surround it on three sides or maybe because they knew that it was he who kept it up after a fashion, swinging in with a tractor and sicklebar a few times each summer to mow down its ever-flourishing crop of weeds.