This is the opening of my novel: A Gradual Ruin published by Doubleday and available for download in the Kindle Store:
http://amzn.to/e5Jv6c
ONE
THE ONLY DOCTOR IN TOWN was Tailgate Smith. He rode his horse four miles through deep snow to deliver Shirley, who was a blue baby despite his efforts. Had he not turned his head against a gust of wind, he would have missed the kerosene lamp her father had left flickering in the kitchen window and would have arrived too late to save Shirley from the breech position. With some work, Tailgate turned her around and delivered her. When he held her up to the light, her mother gasped at Shirley’s colour—the other babies had been born without the least bit of trouble—but Tailgate put his mouth to Shirley’s lips a few times, and slowly she turned pink. While he rocked her, everyone watched, as if he could suck the devil out of any one of them and breathe something good in its place. When he finished, he pulled on his heavy fur coat, shook her father’s hand, and like a phantom finished with its earthly work, slipped back out to the snow and disappeared on his waiting horse.
From then on, whenever someone in the family needed a doctor, Wendell, their father, waited until it was absolutely necessary and then reluctantly yelled for one of his kids to get the Devil Doctor. To everyone else, he was still Tailgate Smith, the boy left by his unwed mother on the tailgate of his father’s truck.
For years, Shirley’s father called her the blue baby and said at first her colour nearly made his heart stop, no great feat since he’d had a heart attack at forty-two, only weeks after Alice’s birth, two years earlier, on the cusp of the Great Depression. He claimed that his second daughter brought the depression with her, and so he called her the depression baby. His eldest daughter, Claris, had had a nickname at one time, but Alice couldn’t remember it. As with Robbie, death protected Claris from their father’s teasing.
Shirley was a cranky baby who kept everyone up with her crying, and even when she grew older, she seldom sat still for long, as though what Tailgate had blown into her left her jumpy and anxious. In the summer of 1947, when she was sixteen, she ran off with the first boy from Dryden who took a serious interest in her. Every day, he drove up to her school in his old Ford half-ton, shirtsleeves nearly to his shoulder in a tight roll. Shirley watched for his dull red truck as she stood with friends smoking cigarettes, delaying the walk home, never in a hurry even when she knew she’d catch hell. She was accustomed to catching hell.
“Hey, Shirl,” he’d say, leaning out the window to smile at her.
Shirley would smile back. “Don’t he look good?” she’d say.
She liked it that Danny didn’t swear or yell lewd comments like the other men from the mill who drove by. He just revved his engine a few times to show off and drove away slowly as if he were in no great hurry to leave her behind.
The night before she left for good, Shirley didn’t come home at all. Without a phone to bring them news, her parents worried that something, everything, had happened, and Wendell paced the floor alternately raging and mumbling. Alice covered her ears and turned to face the moon, full and steady out the window.
Shirley showed up with Danny about noon the next day, not long after her parents and Alice had finished a tense, wordless lunch of sliced ham and tomatoes, Shirley’s favourite. Shirley slipped a cigarette from her mouth and said, more loudly than necessary, “This here is Danny, and we’re getting married.” Her father fixed a hard stare on her. Shirley took a drag on her cigarette, and for a moment it looked as if she would exhale in his face, but she held the smoke inside, daring him to say something, if not for her benefit, then for Danny’s.
Her father walked slowly up to Shirley and hit her full in the face with his fist. Alice heard something crack, and everyone froze as Shirley dropped to the floor. When her head clunked down on the linoleum, the cigarette fell from her hand and she let out a sharp cry. She kicked at her father’s legs, and before Wendell could move, Danny caught him full on the jaw and knocked him back against the kitchen counter. The lunch dishes crashed to the floor as her father thrashed to catch his balance.
Shirley rose to her feet. The left side of her face was red, the skin beneath her eye already swollen, and her makeup smeared. She wobbled a little and pushed away a handful of dishevelled red hair to see better as Danny helped steady her. They both watched her father and quickly backed toward the door. When they got inside the truck, they sat breathing heavily. Wendell soon followed them out of the house. He walked around to Shirley’s side of the truck and stared inside.
Shirley spat at him, and saliva spread across the closed window, then slid in sad streaks down the glass. She glared at his cold, stiff face, and Danny stepped hard on the gas. The truck spun gravel past the old grey barn. Danny didn’t ease off on the accelerator until the road curved east and ran alongside a row of wind-cut hazel bushes where Shirley and Alice had often hidden themselves in the fall, eating their fill of hazelnuts.
The dry summer day held the dust in the air until it drifted down and covered her father with a grey film. He didn’t move for a long time, just dug in his pocket for his handkerchief and wiped the dust from his face. Alice sat still, not daring to look outside while Helen, her mother, straightened the kitchen, picking up dishes scattered across the floor. Some were shattered into pieces, and as she lifted each shard, careful not to get nicked, the glass caught reflections from the window and gave hard shapes to the afternoon light.
