Excerpt from The Fruit of Stone by Mark Spragg, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

When the pastures are eaten short, and winter-blanched, and drifted with snow, they'll feed the hay and some feedstore cake until the grazeland starts back green in May and they can begin the cycle of their farming once again.

McEban hears a door slam and turns to the sound and watches Ansel stand out on his cabin's porch. The cabin is two hundred yards down the creek. It is the original homestead and is tucked to the back of a stand of old-growth cottonwood. Its corners are dovetailed and snug, and its sides weathered gray as the cottonwoods' bark, in places gone white as Ansel's hair. The tops of the big trees are all trained prairiewise, curved eastward by a hundred years of pruning winds.

McEban wishes he could have seen the building of the thing. He wishes he could conjure the homesteader, Barhaug, at work with his broadax and slick and adz. Hear the sounds of the mules skidding the lengths of lodgepole in. But when he thinks of the cabin it is only Ansel he imagines.

He tries to remember any part of his life without Ansel and cannot, and now the old man is what's left. Just him and the old man.

On the third Wednesday of every month Ansel walks up to the big house and sits on a kitchen chair with a dish towel safety-pinned at his neck. McEban clips his ivory-white hair back to an inch-long bristle, leveled flat on the top. The old man leaves a dollar bill on the counter when they're done. McEban cuts his hair for twelve dollars a year.

When he drives to town for groceries Ansel rides with him, and when they're in the store the old man pushes a separate cart. He puts his tobacco, and sardines, and Tabasco in the cart. A loaf of rye bread, a Western Horseman magazine, or a Time, a tin of psyllium husk powder, and on holidays they stop at a liquor store for a bottle of schnapps. Ansel won't put the groceries or the booze on the ranch account, and McEban doesn't argue with him. If the old man couldn't buy his haircut and a few groceries he wouldn't care to draw his pay, and if he didn't work for money he would believe himself done.

McEban prays that the old man is a long way from done, but has recently imagined him dead; sees him in daydreams held upright by his shovel, or a strand of wire, or the squeeze chute, in a stall, sometimes leaning against a patient horse. McEban doesn't know what he will do then--when he discovers the old man dead.

He watches Ansel shoulder a dozen canvas irrigation dams, three at a time, away from where they stand rolled against his porchrail. He tilts them down into the bed of his truck. He throws a shovel on top of the dams and idles the two-track that runs the south side of the pasture and stops at the headgate and steps out of the truck. He draws a cloth sack of tobacco and cigarette papers from a shirt pocket and rolls a smoke. "Can I make you one?" he asks.

"I quit," McEban tells him.

Ansel nods and strikes a wooden match with his thumbnail. He lights the cigarette and spits a flake of tobacco from his tongue.

"Just allowing for backslide," he says. He leans against the fender, smoking, looking east. "I thought maybe you might've broke down and done something else last night you're going to regret."

McEban stands from the wheel-valve, and his shadow stands with him, and holds steady at his back. "What is it you think you know about what kind of night I had?"

The morning has come still, and the smoke rises and curls from under Ansel's hatbrim and slides into the open air above the hat's crown. He doesn't turn. "If you want your company to stay a secret," he says, "tell her to turn off her headlights when she drives past my place. I haven't lost my eyesight." He hooks a bootheel up against the tire's tread and looks back at McEban. "Or my imagination, either."

McEban turns full against the sun. "I'll tell her about the headlights," he says. "If it looks like it might happen again I'll tell her."

Copyright © 2002 by Mark Spragg. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, Putnam.