Excerpt from The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Don't got no money!" Ed shouted back.

Emerson began digging through his pockets for change while Ed and Horace got the stretcher situated in the back of the van.

Horace took the clothes from around the dead boy's head and handed the bloody clump to the mailman, who knelt in the gravel, his face gone blank.

"You don't want to get sunburned," Horace told him.

Ed shut the heavy rear door of the van and Emerson said, "Damn, I only got thirty-five cents."

Off in the mesquite bushes, Grandma Paul's praying got even louder. She prayed to Jesus, and to Yusen, god of all living things, and to the ghosts of the dead. She prayed not that I would survive, but that I would find my way through the perils of the afterlife, that I would be free from the wily clutches of the devil and make my way home to Jesus. Grandma Paul wailed and prayed and paused only for a second to watch as Ed and Horace got into their seats, slammed the van's big black doors and started out over the damaged reservation roads, carrying me away into a strange new life.

THE RESURRECTION OF EDGAR

FOR ME, IT'S a little hard to accept—my own death and I have no recollection of it. Like most of what occurred in the first seven years of my life, I'll have to take someone else's word that it ever happened.

All I can say for certain is that at some point between the time the tire flattened my head and I was wheeled into the tiny emergency room of St. Divine's Hospital in Globe, I stopped living. My ravaged brain threw in the towel and my other vital organs gave in shortly thereafter. My heart quivered to a stop, my lungs shut down and I became an inanimate object; just as alive or dead as a cereal bowl or a park bench.

Excerpted from The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by BRADY UDALL. Copyright © 2001 by Brady Udall. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.