Excerpt from Go as a River by Shelley Read, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

So, yes, I changed my answer and accepted the invitation to stroll side by side down Main Street that October afternoon with a boy called Wilson Moon, who was no longer a stranger. 

Though the conversation was mere pleasantries and the walk short, by the time we reached Dunlap's and scaled the worn steps to the porch, neither of us wanted to part. I lingered with him in the splintered doorway, my heart racing.

Wil didn't offer much about himself. Even when I asked if Wil short for Wilson was spelled with one l or two, he just shrugged and replied, "As you like." One thing I did learn about Wilson Moon that day was that he had been working in the coal mines in Dolores, and he had run away. 

"I just up and had enough of that place," he said. "'Go,' I heard a voice inside me say, 'Go now.'" The coal cars heading to the Durango-Silverton line were filled and ready to be hauled, he said, and when the train's whistle blew, it sounded like it was calling for him, long and shrill and insistent. All he knew was that those cars were going somewhere other than where he was. As the train started its slow grind forward, he scurried up one car's rusty ladder and hopped atop a warm black bed of coal. The boss caught sight of him and chased the train a spell, hollering and cursing and furiously waving his hat. Soon the foreman and the mines were minute in the distance, and Wilson Moon turned his face to the wind. 

"You didn't even know where you were heading? Where you'd end up?" I asked. 

"Doesn't much matter," he replied, "One place is about as good as another, ain't it?" 

The only place I had ever known was Iola and the surrounding land along a wide, straight section of the Gunnison River. The small town huddled against the foothills of the Big Blue wilderness on the south side and the towering Elk Mountains to the west and north. A patchwork of farms and ranches unfurled like a long tail along the river's edge to the east. My brother and I had been born in the farmhouse my daddy inherited from his daddy, in the tall iron bed that took up half the pale-yellow room tacked onto the back of the house, the room that was just for birthing and visitors until Uncle Og came to live with us after the accident. Our farm was nothing special, nor was it very big, just forty-seven acres, including the barns and the house and a gravel driveway as long as a wolf's howl. But from the barn to the back fence line our land produced the only peach grove in all Gunnison County, where the fruit grew fat and rosy and sweet. The curvy banks of Willow Creek carved the east border of our property, its icy water fresh from the mountain snow and eager to spill onto our trees and modest rows of potatoes and onions. At night, the creek sang a lullaby outside my bedroom window, hushing me to rest in the spindle bed where I had slept nearly every night of my life. The sunrise over distant Tenderfoot Mountain and the long whistle of three trains per day pulling through the depot on the town's edge served as my most reliable clocks. I knew just how the afternoon sun slanted into the small kitchen window and across the long pine table on winter mornings. I knew crocuses and purple larkspurs would be the first wildflowers to emerge across the farm each spring, and fireweeds and goldenrods would be the last. I knew that a dozen cliff swallows descended on the river with every mayfly hatch and that this would be the exact moment a rainbow trout would rise to Daddy's cast. And I knew that the fiercest storms, dark and ominous as the devil, nearly always blew in over the northwestern peaks and that every songbird and raven and magpie would silence just before the sky unleashed. 

So, no, one place was not just like another in my mind, and I wondered why this boy didn't seem to know a thing about home. 

"And your belongings?" I asked, intrigued by the life of a drifter. 

Excerpted from Go as a River by Shelley Read. Copyright © 2023 by Shelley Read. Excerpted by permission of Spiegel & Grau. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.