Excerpt from Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

What is the fool thinking? wonders Alvina’s dead husband, Waldo.

Rule Number Four! warns Pastor Myron Mutter, desperately. Never hold on to or be near anything made of metal!

Mayor Jones—whose first name is pronounced with a sound not found in the English language, a palatal push of air—breathes in the sight of his homeland, and then . . .

Llewellyn . . . Hope whispers, sending her breath into the double l’s the Welsh way, giving his name the sound of a reticent breeze.

He looks down, prepares, still as granite. Suddenly he swings: his club arcs up—forcefully, theatrically, with intent—and then down, slamming into the ball as the thunder roars again, swinging through, cutting a semicircular swath through space and then freezing momentarily, long enough to form with his club a straight vertical line, a perfect conduit between earth and sky, and then there is a crack and a sizzle and a sword of light.

The motion of the ball outlasts the living force behind it; it hurtles skyward with a marvelous ease, and even after the mayor’s heart is stunned into stillness by ten million volts of electrical current, the ball sails onward, upward, disappearing into the roiling clouds, moving in opposition to the hail that is now beginning to fall.

In the clubhouse cocktail lounge—where there’s a good view of the fifth-hole tee—the mayor’s friends are temporarily confused. They cannot see that the single hailstone that seems to be rising miraculously in resistance to the laws of gravity is really an ordinary pockmarked Titleist 100.

Then their eyes, losing sight of the ball, trace a line earthward and land upon the stilled form of Llewellyn Dewey Jones (1934–2003), physician, baritone, four-term mayor of Emlyn Springs, Nebraska, and now-dead father.

Hail is bludgeoning the clubhouse roof. Bud Humphries, the country club bartender, town council chairman, and volunteer paramedic, snatches up the defibrillator and rushes outside. Hail, obedient, downwardfalling hail, pummels his shoulders; he will be sore tomorrow and for weeks to come. This soreness will be fought with numerous applications of Bengay, which he will purchase from the town’s only drugstore, Lloyd’s Drugs, and here is Owen Lloyd now, pharmacist, war veteran, knocking over his martini glass in his haste to get down from the bar stool and call the fire station. The two other men in the clubhouse, Alan Everett Jones (no relation) and Glen Rhys Thomas, leave their peanuts and pitcher of beer and follow Bud outside, even though the storm is still directly, dangerously overhead. They go because they are men of Llewellyn’s generation, few in number, men who have stayed put as their sons and daughters moved away in all four directions, to bigger towns and even bigger cities.

They reach him, their fallen friend. Bud performs CPR, knowing that the mayor is gone, and yet still here, and so deserving of their best efforts. Llewellyn would have done the same for any of them. They could all tell a different story about a time they watched Dr. Jones labor over the body of some poor soul who had clearly passed on—and saw the look on his face when he couldn’t postpone that passage.

Owen Lloyd has finished his phone call and hurries outside—as best he can, with one good leg and one prosthetic one. He has remembered to bring a blanket.

These living men, fathers all, cover their friend, standing guard over him in the pelting hail, the pouring rain. They stand: waiting, witnessing. From town comes the sound of the firehouse siren. The volunteer firefighters, who they’ve known for years, known by their first and middle and last names, are on the way.

The storm subsides, passes. The air is cooling. Bud stops giving CPR. They might as well carry Llewellyn inside.

Excerpted from Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos. Copyright © 2009 by Stephanie Kallos. Excerpted by permission of Grove Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.