Excerpt from The Poet of Tolstoy Park by Sonny Brewer, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Henry drank the last swallow of his tea, now cool, thinking that even on a third cup it still had a bright good taste. He lifted a napkin to the corner of his mouth. "I'll travel with only a few possessions, but this volume will go with me. And I will take the Russian," Henry said, speaking of Leo Tolstoy, "for whither I goest," he smiled at Will as he spoke in the silence within his kitchen, "thou, Leo, also goeth, making thy path before me in that Great Southern wilderness."

"Would you stand over there, a bit away from me, Henry? I don't want to be charred when the lightning comes to strike your blasphemous head," said Will, and though a smile played on his face, his voice had a definite scolding quality. "You know his church had excommunicated him. Tolstoy died a heretic."

"He died with a mind unshackeld by dogma," Henry said, and got up and walked to the windowed back door, its curtains drawn back with linen ties in big looping bows just as Molly had fixed them so many years ago. Looking out at the season's last vestiges of his carefully tended garden, he placed his forehead to the glass, the breath from his nostrils blooming frost on the pane. This is not supposed to be an easy passage, he reminded himself.
Casting about for some reconciliation of illness and justice, he thought, oddly, that he was glad his working life was finished and there was not a college class of students to tell that he'd not continue his teaching through to the end of the term. His plants in the yard, the flowers and shrubs, some fruit trees, a grape arbor, objects of his care and keeping, they would seek of him no apology, require of him no reason for his absence. These green and growing things would face whatever was their fate without Henry James Stuart and without complaint.

Then Henry straightened his head, his eyes lighting up like shattered blue ice. "A sketchbook," he said.

"What?" asked Will.

"I must take to Alabama a sketchbook. That new leather-bound, shirt pocket-size volume of blank pages Thomas gave to me on my birthday. I'll stop in those foreign woods and put down my knees upon the soil and carefully, precisely draw with a pencil this and that leaf and branch and berry and stalk that I don't recognize."

Henry told Will that from a book in the library in that town of Fairhope he would identify the name of the species he'd drawn, and make brief notes on the page with his drawing. Henry marched right past his visitor, back into his study and opened his center desk drawer and found there the sketch diary. He smacked it against his palm. This and some good pencils, he thought, will brighten a portion of my hours while getting to know my new home on that hill in Baldwin County, Alabama.

Excerpted from The Poet of Tolstoy Park by Sonny Brewer Copyright © 2005 by Sonny Brewer. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.