Excerpt from The Bully of Order by Brian Hart, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The Bully of Order
An excerpt from the novel by Brian Hart

Bigness required boundaries but this water had none save the shore we stood upon and the end of my eyeball's reach.

Fourth of July, 1895

The ferry was coming special because it was the Fourth of July. Some of the kids from school were there but I stayed apart from them and threw handfuls of sawdust into the water and watched it drift and spiral and sink. Ben and Joseph McCandliss showed up and no one wanted to play with them, either. They were orphans now since their father had been sent to the penitentiary in Seattle. I remembered when my father left me and Mother when I was little. He came back but he still wasn't around very often. Mother sometimes called him the boarder. Ben and I were both eleven years old and would be in the same class if Ben went to school. Joseph was fourteen and had already, more than once, spent the night in jail. Miss Travois had taken them in but I'd heard they didn't sleep there, they just did whatever they liked. Wharf boys, we'd all been warned against them.

"We ain't waitin' for the boat," Ben said to me, climbing up into the lumber cribs to be with his brother. I was too scared to go up there with them so I went back to the water and threw some more sawdust.

It'd been an hour at least already and everyone had cleared off somewhere to sit among the shingle stock. The mill was shut down for the holiday. I'd never seen it like that, and it was like when I saw the dead horse because I'd never seen that either. The doorway was filled with the smell of my father, grease and kerosene and sawdust. He wouldn't be here today, off working, always. Didn't see him much but I'd got used to that.

My mother called to me but I stopped my ears with my fingers so I couldn't hear her. I took one step forward, waited, and then kept going. The blood was pumping in my ears against my fingertips like I was under ­water. The mill floor had been swept and I could see the broom marks and where they piled and scooped up the dust. It was cool and silent inside and crammed with machinery. I'd heard the mill sounds for as long as I could remember. It was strange, it being so quiet. I thought: I'm a little machine and when I go silent I'll be silent and I'll be dead.

A drive shaft connected to the ceiling followed the main roof beam the length of the building. Attached to it were flywheels of various sizes, all six­-spoked. I counted them twice. Drive belts a foot wide stretched like taffy to the machines below. The wheels on the pony rig were caked with resin and didn't want to spin when I tried them. I touched a steam pipe but it was cold. The boiler was far off, all the way on the other side, visible from the road but not from where I was. Someone was moving around in the back of the building, banging on something. There was the weak light of a lantern climbing up the wall behind the edger. I went forward to hide and put my hand on a flywheel that was taller than me and kind of hugged it and put my feet in the spokes and it felt good in my arms, big and solid, heavy and round and perfect. I scraped my fingernails over the belt and felt so peaceful, so content.

"What're you doin' there, boy?"

I jumped down at the sound of the voice and ran for the door, ran right into my mother's legs. She had me by the shoulder and led me back to where her bag was and sat me down on a bolt of shingles. And there we stayed. Bored as I'd ever been.

Each time I looked up there were more people. Most of them were fam­ilies with fathers carrying the burdens of a picnic, but there were bach­elors too; roamers, mill workers, loggers, and they filled in the cracks in the crowd and bunched up in knots around bottles and the few lonesome women with no families. I'd never been on a real steamship before, an oceangoer. I'd heard their birdy whistles and watched them move up and down the river but I'd never even touched one up close. The other children at school hadn't been born in the harbor so they'd arrived by steamship and knew all about them and how fast they went and how far, to China and everywhere.

Excerpted from The Bully of Order by Brian Hart. Copyright © 2014 by Brian Hart. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.