Excerpt from Instructions for a Funeral by David Means, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

You must never disregard your place in this world in relation to the way folks see you, Sutter's father liked to say. We've had good luck along the way but it was only luck, and to think of it as some God-given truth puts you in a dangerous position. To think you're in his good graces is to throw yourself off-balance, and to be off-balance is to open yourself up to the whims of those who have a better footing in the truth. (These words were usually spoken after dinner, with a damask of port glinting in candlelight.) I've done some of my best speculating with a full-blown awareness that luck was the only thing involved, and not some sense that everything I have here—his father said, sweeping his arm from one end of the dining room to the other—came out of Providence, but more out of the way I've been able to corral my chances into a formable stampede. And then his thoughts would begin to unravel because he was a man who theorized and speculated beyond his abilities and often found what at first seemed to be profound and weighty thoughts breaking apart into something lacy, gauzy.

Sutter held his arms up and kept his mind on his feet. The wind suddenly rose, bringing the smell of jasmine, dust, and gasoline. In his ringing ears, he could hear the faint, absentminded whistle Rodney made in the garage when he was working alone, concentrating on something—a saw cut, or getting a wrench into position, or when he was out trimming the box hedge along the back of the house. And he was hearing that sound as he unleashed the wild, flamboyant haymaker that had begun secretly, as he was stumbling, relieving the force of Bergara's punch back onto his heels, transferring energy as his shoulders rotated to his left while his arm, ambling in a wide arc, moved back to catch up with the rest of his torso (his fists tightening, fingers curled)—and then, in what looked to those watching to be one fluid movement, his arm moved on its own accord, landing his fist on the point of Bergara's chin, sending him sprawling back into the arms of his friends, who held him for a few seconds, saying, "Take his fucking head off, Bergara, do it for your brother."

The fight stayed inside the circle of light from the streetlamp. A daytime fight would have no such borders. A daytime fight would often move from the back of a bar all the way to the front; or into the field; or, in some cases, depending on those fighting, it would end with the blow of an implement, a scrap of lumber or a crowbar. Nighttime fights had the formality of the circle surrounded by night wind and the cool dark.

For a few seconds, as the two fighters stood and swayed, there was a silence that expressed a need for a larger narrative. It wasn't enough, the air said, to simply fight over the Okie comment. It wasn't enough to have one more Sacramento fistfight between a wealthy town boy and a ranch boy. The air begged for a deeper significance.

Then someone said, "Kick that silver fucking spoon out of his teeth, Bergara," and on Sutter's side, someone said, "Knock the clodhopper's jaw off, clean his yokel clock," while the girls remained silent—there were three or four of them—and pitted the elegant beauty of Sutter's dimples and clean jaw against the rough, blunt complexity of Bergara's face.

(With the exception of a young woman named Sarah Breeland, who worked the fountain at the five-and-dime store in town and had talked with Bergara once or twice, setting a milkshake in front of him, seeing in his eyes the sophisticated kindness that came from hard toil. Knowing, too, talking to him—he spoke carefully, his words barely audible in the din of the store, the cheep of canaries in the pet section, the popcorn machine popping—that he understood a certain type of quiet that came from living on the margins, not only of life but of the town itself, for she lived in a house not far from his ranch, tending her sisters while her mother went to the Sutters' home to clean. She had gone a number of times to the Sutter house to stand with her mother and watch as she worked the iron-press, the starchy steam puffing as she pushed the lever down and made tight creases while her nimble fingers lifted and readjusted.)

Excerpted from Instructions for a Funeral by David Means. Copyright © 2019 by David Means. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.