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

"Go find your father," she said. "He might still want your help with those bulls."

It was just early afternoon, and he walked to the corrals and couldn't find the man. He walked up to the cemetery rise and shaded his eyes and couldn't see him in the pastures along the creek.

He circled the house and stood at the screened back porch and peered in at his mother in her rocker where she napped.

When the stepboards creaked she opened her eyes.

"Who's there?" she asked.

"It's me," he said.

"It's just the headpain," she said. "If you mean to walk there, take your boots off."

He stepped into the yard and pulled his boots off and tiptoed up through the screendoor and eased it shut and sat down cross-legged at her feet.

"Did you take your medicine?" he asked.

"For all the good it does," she said. "My mind just feels smeared." She blinked at him. "Maybe a glass of cool water would help."

He went into the house and came back with the water and stood by her while she drank. She handed him the glass when she was done.

"How bad is it?" he asked.

"How bad have you ever been hurt?"

"In the head?"

"Anywhere."

"This spring," he told her, "at branding time. When I got kicked by the all-red cow." He shifted in his stocking feet. "When the cow kicked me between my legs."

"That's how bad," his mother whispered. "If the Lord packed my skull tight with boy testicles and had it kicked by a mother cow. That's how bad."

He nodded in appreciation and sat on a bench and hunched over where he sat and felt his mother's pain low, and spreading, in his body.

When her rocker settled away from its creak and stood quiet, he watched her while she slept. She slept with her eyes open, and when he stood and took up his boots her eyes followed him. He could see his reflection, wholly, in the dark mirrors of his mother's eyes.

Woody growls and McEban turns to the sound and finds a bull snake come out of the coolness of the windbreak for the early-morning sun.

"Sit," he says, and the dog sits and they eye the snake.

It lies motionless, shining yellow and brown, wrist-thick at its center, four feet in length, its unlidded eyes reflecting man, dog, horizon, and the white islands of cloud that have come loose against the dome of sky. It tastes the air and the dog whines, and the black forked tongue quivers.

"Stop now," says McEban and Woody swallows his whine, and McEban lifts himself away from the ache in his legs.

The bull snake raises the front foot of itself up stiffly and exhales the air of its single lung in one long rush of guttural threat. It is an unsnakelike sound, and the dog steps back and looks at McEban and sits again, but nervously.

"Isn't that something," says McEban.

An ancient sense of unease pricks across his shoulders, his neck, at the base of his skull. The snake sucks full of air and issues the same rasping threat. There is no hissing. It is the sound a large lizard might make. McEban looks along the snake's body, searching for legs, some vestigial reminder of legs. There is only the smooth overlap of scales.

"Enough of this shit," he says and stands completely and kicks a spray of dirt and gravel at the thing.

The snake coils in bends of slender muscle and turns and ropes away, flashing in the overgrowth of damp grasses. McEban sits again, his legs stretched before him. He shakes the tension from his trunk. Woody sits against him, leaning along his ribs, nuzzling at his armpit. A pair of ravens glide in low over the windbreak and circle, cawing. It is a lonesome and piercing and familiar sound. McEban drops his head back to watch. Above the pair, high on the morning thermals, a mob of half a thousand ravens lift and joust, swirling in the air. At this distance they look to be just chips of obsidian against the sun. McEban wonders if it is God who's littered the sky. He imagines a god squatted at work in his heavens, knapping black bolts of lightning from a bedrock of volcanic glass. He imagines his god to have workingman's hands.

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