Excerpt from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"You have a fine head," said Bertha Truitt. She gave him a look of admiration.

"Ought I become a doctor?" he asked.

"Heavens, no," she said. "No, you're not suited for that at all. I meant the shape of it. I was speaking phrenologically." She touched his temples with the gentling tips of her fingers. He would have done anything she suggested.

It was the early years of American sports. She weighed the ball in the palm of her hand; she got Jeptha Arrison to set up her single pin, thin as a broomstick, all the way at the end of the ward. Again and again she knocked it over. "You have a problem," she would say. "Bowling can take it away like this." Knock it over again. It was impossible, the floor tilted to the south, the agitated footfalls of the sick sent vibrations through the boards, yet she managed it every time. Bertha Truitt told her visitors that the pharaohs bowled, of course they did, the pharaohs did everything first. Martin Luther bowled, before he was devout; Henry VIII had lanes built at Whitehall Palace. Rip Van Winkle was watching his neighbors bowl at ninepins when he fell into his famous sleep.

"As for me," said Bertha Truitt, "I'll build a bowling alley. What is this place."

"This place?" Jeptha asked. He pointed at the bed he sat on. "Salford, or—"

"Salford," Bertha Truitt said. "Massachusetts, then. Yes."

The Bowling Alley Under Glass

Salford was a city hard north of Boston, with a sliver of coastline just big enough to ramshackle the houses and web the occasional foot. Like Rome, it had been built among seven hills; unlike Rome, it was a swampy place, a city of fens and bogs. Eventually the founders knocked over most of the hills, shoved them into the bogs, declared them to be squares, and named each for the former hill at its heart. Pinkham Hill became Pinkham Square; Baskertop Hill, Baskertop Square. As for the bogs, they were nameless, then gone.

Former bog dwellers were left to wander the municipality. Prosperous beavers in their beaver coats muscled around Gibbs Square, looking as though they meant to withdraw their funds from the local banks; nesting birds lamented the coarse new immigrants in their neighborhood, like them bipedal but unwilling or unable to fly. Frogs hopped like idle thoughts past the saloon. Sometimes they went in: you had to check your bucket of beer before you poured. Animals, flushed from Salford's pockets, were everywhere. Perhaps the Salford Devil was only some Yankee platypus whose habitat had been replaced by the dime store.

A whole colony of little bogbirds had been ousted from the swamp that became Phillipine Square. In their place was a vaudeville house, a grocery store, and a trolley stop, though the whole demesne still smelled of bog: damp and up-to-no-good.

Here Bertha Truitt declared she would build her alley.

"I am at home in a bog," she said. "A bog is a woman by its nature."

"And hills?" asked Jeptha Arrison worriedly. Jeptha of the Hospital! He had a sack of a head, damp eyes an eely gray, and a face that altogether seemed something caught in aspic. He stood next to Bertha on the new sidewalk of Phillipine Square, though the road wasn't yet paved, and looked down at his shoes, frilled at the edges with mud. "That'll make me sick."

"What will?"

"Filth," he said. He asked again, "What's a hill?"

"Also a woman. There is no part of the earth that isn't. Yes," Bertha Truitt repeated, "I am at home in a bog."

Hire Irish to lay brick, a doctor had told her in the hospital, and now she believed it like a superstition. The Irish called her Truitt, which they made a single syllable, Troot, and so she was known by most people: not Bertha Truitt or Miz or Mrs., not The Truitt Woman, not Mrs. Sprague once her husband arrived. The lack of honorific was the honorific: Troot. Troot runs a good house.

Excerpted from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken. Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth McCracken. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.