Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

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

Summary |  Excerpt |  Reviews |  Readalikes |  Genres & Themes |  Author Bio

The Fruit of Stone by Mark Spragg

The Fruit of Stone

by Mark Spragg
  • Critics' Consensus (4):
  • Readers' Rating (2):
  • First Published:
  • Aug 1, 2002, 304 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Aug 2003, 336 pages
  • Rate this book

About this Book

Print Excerpt


He listens to the buzz on the line, the patter of the receptionist's fingers on her keyboard.

"There is no Mr. Reilly," she says.

McEban spells out the name. First name and last. "He's a real-estate broker," he says. "He's there for a convention. You have a convention of real-estate brokers, don't you?"

"Yes, sir."

"Would you have another look?"

"There's nothing under Reilly."

He thumbs his sandwich open and pats it shut. "Try Alan Patrick," he says.

"Patrick?"

"They work together. Alan drove them over."

"There's a Mr. Patrick," she tells him. "I'll put you through."

He listens to the phone ring and looks at the wall clock, and it reads 6:12, and Bennett comes on the line after four rings and coughs and sucks at a noseful of snot and says, "Excuse me," and blows his nose, and then, "Hello," and then again, "Hello."

McEban listens to each word and after a pause realizes he's holding his breath.

"You're a prick, whoever you are," Bennett says, and the line goes dead, and McEban stands and hangs up the receiver and leans against the wall and stares into the grayed mesh of the screen.

When the dog whines he steps through the mudroom, swings the door open, hears it slap at his back. He stands unsteadily in the yard.

A gust of water-cooled breeze bursts up from the stockpond, and he leans forward and rests his palms against his thighs and inhales deeply through his nose. His gut fills and paunches with the damp morning air. He exhales the breath in a guttural cough, snapping his belly up tight. Air in, air out. Ten rounds of breath and he has completed nine months, and now one day, of this ritual huffing. Nine months and two days without a cigarette. He straightens, breathes evenly, totters forward a step. His eyes water. His skull feels brittle, nearly weightless.

Woody strikes out across the drive, snuffling in arcs, and McEban follows. They work through the yarrow, paintbrush, and sage and top a low rise opposite the house. The sun is hard and new. It deepens the red in the iron soil under their feet.

It is on this hill, in this red soil, that the bones of his family lie: the bodies of his father, his brother, his grandmother and his grandfather. He looks down at his hands. He flexes his hands. He thinks of his family's hands. He's been told he has his father's hands. The hands of Jock McEban. He sees his father standing behind those hands. A big man, sledge-muscled, blond and watery-eyed. A man of duty. A man who put his shoulder against the life God gave him and went to work. A man who should not have looked up from his work.

McEban turns and sits back against his father's marker and stretches his legs out straight. He flicks a woodtick from his thigh. He raises his hands before his face. The hands are long-fingered, thick, yellowed in callus, cracked, and now sunstruck. Hands meant for the land, he thinks, for animals. A waste on women, no doubt, short or tall.

He drops his right hand to the smallest stone marker. He traces the name chiseled there. He doesn't have to look. Bailey McEban is the name his fingers read. He closes his eyes and searches for some memory of his brother. His twin. They must have looked alike, but there are no photographs, and now he is all that's left. He thinks of Bailey; of the infant boy found dead at just fourteen months. He wonders if he was there, in the crib beside his brother, perhaps asleep when the body was found. He has never thought to ask.

He wonders about his brother's voice. He cocks his head. He listens. He believes his brother has told him something he cannot remember. He pictures Bailey's round mouth forming its first soft words. Perhaps his brother's ghost means to say it again, he thinks. Aloud. He listens harder.

The Bighorns rise beyond the ranch to the west. Their palisades of limestone and granite shimmer, opalescent in the dawn, reflective as thousand-foot stands of pearled glare. The mountains entire--rolling north and south--shouldered into patches of apple-jade meadow, their expanse come morning-bright, descending in waves of green pine, green fir, green aspen, gone to tar and emerald in the deep collapse of their separate drainages. Owl Creek to the south. Trail Creek farther south. Cabin Creek just north. And behind the ranch, the north and south forks of Horse Creek.

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

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket
    The Frozen River
    by Ariel Lawhon
    "I cannot say why it is so important that I make this daily record. Perhaps because I have been ...
  • Book Jacket
    Prophet Song
    by Paul Lynch
    Paul Lynch's 2023 Booker Prize–winning Prophet Song is a speedboat of a novel that hurtles...
  • Book Jacket: The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
    The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
    by Lynda Cohen Loigman
    Lynda Cohen Loigman's delightful novel The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern opens in 1987. The titular ...
  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
The Berry Pickers
by Amanda Peters
A four-year-old Mi'kmaq girl disappears, leaving a mystery unsolved for fifty years.
Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.