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

"Ansel hitchhiked down from Red Lodge, Montana," she said. "He carried his saddle and a GI duffel. He said his health was good and he was single. He said he planned for both to stay that way."

She ladled the plums into quart jars and poured boiling water and sugared syrup and a dose of Fruit-Fresh in after them and seated the lids.

"He claimed he'd killed enough perfectly good folks in the war to lose the right to raise any of his own. He told your grandfather he wasn't the type of man to require a vacation. He said two Saturday nights in town each month would get him by. He said he sipped his whiskey and only laid down with unmarried women."

His grandmother stood back from the stove.

"Can you imagine?" she asked. "That rail-thin boy stood there in front of your grandfather and made those claims for all the world to hear?"

"What did my grandfather say?"

"He said he guessed we'd find out whether the man was accurate, or just dull."

"Am I related?"

"To Ansel?" she asked.

He nodded.

"By work you are," she said. "It's the next step down from blood."

McEban comes off the ridge at an angle that brings him to the corner of the corrals. A barrel-chested bay, a roan, and a paint circle at the rails and nicker. The paint is belly-pinched and anxious. The barn, posts, poles, and sage cast hollows of purple-black shadow to the west. The barn-shadow cuts a clean edge through the corrals, and the bay stops in the shadow's border, halved light and dark, and stands spraddle-legged. He balances on the toes of his back hooves and pisses onto the manure-caked earth. The earth is nightcool and the kidney-warm piss steams. The smell of it rises sharply in the air.

He bends and slides between two poles and straightens and reaches the bay as the horse steps forward from its toilet. He grips a fist of mane at the horse's withers and catches what spring he can from his left leg and swings up and sits the big gelding. The bloodred horse steps forward and stands and steps again. McEban feels the familiar spread in his hips. The warmth of the animal rises into his trunk and holds there, in his body, like some accustomed odor. He slides his heels along its ribs, and the horse walks into the barn, and McEban ducks along its neck. He rides the horse into a stall, and when it noses at the feedbox he slides to his feet.

The roan and the paint enter the barn and nicker and bob their heads, and step, one after the other along the walkway, and stand in their stalls, stamping in anticipation. Their hoofstrikes on the barnboards rise against the loft and gather there and drop.

He pours half a coffee-can of grain into their separate feedboxes. The bay lips McEban's shoulder and yawns its yellow teeth bare and noses into the oats.

He returns to the corrals and fills the castiron bathtub he uses for a watering trough and squeezes between the south-facing rails. He wades through the barnweed grown along the side of the building, and when a thistle pricks his thigh he hops into the air, backpedaling into the dirt yard at the front of the barn. He'd been thinking about snakes.

He skirts the stockpond below the barn and walks the edge of the near alfalfa field and steps up on the concrete bulwark of the first big headgate. He sits on the wheel-valve and squints into the acreage directly east. The weather has been right this summer--hot early, the nights warm--and he and Ansel had taken a second-cutting from this pasture before the end of August. Both cuttings are stacked in a paling block at the fence corner where the land is slightly risen, standing dry, away from the sweep of irrigation.

It has frosted hard for two nights but now warmed, and they will irrigate until it starts to freeze regularly and then run a dozen horses and some breed cows in from the sage and wildgrass hills, and put them on this overgreened land. There is this pasture and the one below it, and the one farther down, on both sides of the creek.

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