Fury of the Wind

excerpt

Humph, he thought, what’s the matter with me? The heat must
be softening my brain.
She gave him a grateful smile. “No, thank you, Mr. Andrews.
That’s very kind of you and your … missus. But Ben … Mr. Fielding
could be here at any moment.”
“Suit yourself.” The agent turned back to his desk.
She crossed the room and resumed her position on the bench,
this time with her head lowered. Several minutes passed but she
did not look up. Will could not keep his mind on the weigh bills in
front of him. His eyes continually strayed to the waiting room.
Something about the woman disturbed him – something about
her appearance. Or could it be the slight whiff of perfume he had
detected as she stood at the wicket? But what on earth was he thinking?
He had never been one to feel attracted to a pretty face or carried
away by the whiff of a lady’s scent – not like some he could
name. In any case, he didn’t feel that kind of attraction to her. He
was, after all, old enough to be her father.
What would he do with her if Ben Fielding didn’t show up soon?
He couldn’t get in touch with the scoundrel, and he sure didn’t feel
like driving her all the way out to the Fielding farm. He could imagine
what kind of reception he’d get from Ben, anyway.
As the minutes ticked by, Will’s concern for his aching feet and
parched throat subsided in the face of his growing anxiety over the
young woman. He couldn’t begin to guess her business with Ben
Fielding but he had the urge to tell her that, if she had any sense,
she would take the fastest way back to wherever the deuce she had
come from.
Suddenly there came the sound of a motor and the crunch of automobile
tires on the gravel outside the window. The young woman
jumped to her feet, both hands gripping her handbag in front of
her, eyes fixed on the door which burst open to reveal a tall man in
bib overalls and a battered straw hat.
For a moment they stared at each other, the woman’s lips parted
in a tremulous smile. No answering smile appeared on the man’s
face. His dark, aquiline features were inscrutable, his lips set in a
thin line. He opened them only enough to say, “Sarah.”
“Hello, Benjamin.”
Bending over to pick up the two large bags that Will had dumped

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073530

Savages and Beasts

excerpt

though his mind got stuck on the last event at school, before he
came home: so powerful it was, so fulfilling, so satisfying, so
content that he couldn’t think of anything else; then he took the
diary. He opened a page at random.
“October 16th, 1957. Influenza has spread in the school. A lot of
kids are sick. Two members of the teaching staff caught it as well. The
children, being almost malnourished and weak can’t resist the strength
of the virus. We buried eleven of them today, eight yesterday. We placed
them in one big grave same as we did yesterday. The only medicine the
School has is aspirins; officials came from the hospital and demanded that
all the children get inoculated. The skunk thought it wasn’t necessary
since the children and teachers will be protected from the virus by the
grace of the Lord.”
Anton’s mind ran wild. He turned a few pages, read the
entry.
“May 24th, 1961, the skunk released to all personnel that the Federal
Government funding was again reduced therefore all extra expenses
were suspended immediately and food rations would take effect; all
unnecessary purchases were canceled and each proposal for purchasing
any item would be at the discretion of the administrator.”
Anton felt as if someone was tightening his hands around
his neck, someone was choking him, he felt out of breath which
he couldn’t replenish. He got up. Put the diary aside, walked
to his window and gazed at the western horizon that was shifting
colors from the purple to the dark red and from the softly
lighted to softly darkened and then the occasional glints of the
sun falling on tree tops or hill sides, interchanging with patches
of dark airy matter flooding nature from the hillsides to the
houses of Kamloops such as the effect it had in the heart of
Anton, heavy and burdened at this moment as he recollected
the diary entries.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763602

The Unquiet Land

excerpt

FOUR
Mother Ross was washing dishes from the previous night’s party. Humming an air she had learned long ago, she washed the last greasy plates in a basin of hot, soapy water on a wooden bench that ran the length of one wall of the scullery. The scullery opened off the kitchen at the back of the house, and while she fussed over the dwindling pile of dirty dishes Mother Ross could look through the window and see, above in the gap between the barns and the stable, the mountainside rising steeply to the rocky tors on Donevan. Loose frills of swiftly driven cloud swept across the black rocks, but the cloud was patchy and the sky was mostly blue. Halfway up the hill Mother Ross could just make out the tall, round-shouldered figure of Finn MacLir in his dark-blue jacket and tweedy, grey jersey. She paused for a moment and watched the old seaman and his favourite dog slowly climb the hill. A gloomy foreboding, a mixture of fear and sorrow, shuddered through her breast.
“Your days on the mountain are numbered, old man,” she murmured. “You just don’t have the wind anymore.”
Her mind drifted back to that day long ago, that early morning in June, when Finn MacLir, tall and straight and in his prime, had come upon her, sitting on a granite boulder outside the smoking, blackened ruin of her once neat cottage near the Tamnagh Bridge. The air stank of burning. Smoke drifted slowly upwards into the limpid sky from the charred roof-beams and the smouldering cling of thatch. The windows were broken. Half of the door had burned away, and flames still flickered along its black, crackling edge.
“Jinnie, are you all right?” Finn shouted, as he approached with that long, determined stride of his.
Her real name was Sinead, but few ever used it. When her mother died, the name of the former village midwife had passed to her, and she had been known as Mother Ross by everyone ever since. Even after her brief marriage to Jimmy John O’Neill, she was still known as Mother Ross. Finn MacLir had always called her Jinnie.

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763203

Ken Kirkby – Warrior Painter

It was a body blow. He thought hard as he waited for her to return. She
arrived late in the evening, speaking little. She changed out of her business
suit, put her briefcase away and poured a glass of wine.
“We have to talk,” Ken said, sitting on the couch opposite her.
“There’s nothing to discuss. I’m tired.”
“Then let’s play the Ten Questions game,” Ken said softly. “Number
One: Do you want me out of your life?”
Without hesitation, Karen replied, “Yes.”
Ken felt alternately icy cold and feverish. He paused, then placed his
unfinished glass of scotch on the table and stood up. “I guess there’s no need
to ask the other nine.”
He put his coat on, and called the dog to him. Karen looked surprised.
“Where are you going? Can I come with you?”
Ken stared at her in disbelief. “You don’t want me in your life, yet now
you want to walk with me? No.”
That was the death knell.
Karen was rarely home now, and the only thing that took Ken out of
the house was the need to exercise the dog they had recently adopted. For
a number of months he’d done no painting. He ate next to nothing, existing
largely on cigarettes, coffee and scotch.
Ron eventually proposed a solution for his friend. “Get out of here
before this kills you. Pack up and move to Bowser. Go fishing at Nile Creek.
Good things will happen there.” Ron was familiar with Nile Creek. It was a
favourite getaway for both of them.
My friend Ron is as far removed from a New Age practitioner as
anyone could get, but this suggestion actually made sense to me. I was
as intensely unhappy as I’d ever been in my life. There was nothing of
value left to me—my health was broken and even painting offered no
escape from this infinite black hole.
When I was a child, my Auntie Helen committed suicide. She had
been a tall, striking woman with glossy black hair and startling green
eyes. She mixed very little with the family and always took the contrary
view in discussions. There was an aura of perpetual sadness around her
and I eventually learned that for each of the past fifteen generations,

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CB8W4CG

Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Volume V

Stairway
He was climbing up the stairs. Bit by bit the up and
the down was mixed up in his tiredness, they assumed
the same meaning, no meaning, just one point
of a swirling wheel. And he, motionless, tied to the wheel,
with the sense that he perhaps travels, he feels the air
combing his hair backward, observing his comrades,
successfully disguised into busy sailors, oaring invisible oars,
sealing their ears with wax, while the Sirens had already died
at least three thousand years ago.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763726

Titos Patrikios, Selected Poems

V
Who will answer to our cry?
Who’s left to share our vertigo?
The doors close one by one.
Yet people wait for us
in the streets of the north
in crevices with the errorless rifles
in neighborhoods that don’t kneel;
people with hoping faces
with vigilant eyes wait for us
to touch the sky
with these wounded hands of slavery

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08L1TJNNF

Kariotakis-Polydouri, The Tragic Love Story

Don Quixote
Don Quixote marches ahead gazing the edge
of his spear where he hangs his vision like a flag
short sighted visionary with but one tear
to humanly accept each curse and insult.
He stumbles onto the logic and staffs of others
ridiculously whipped mid of the road he crawls
Sancho said I told you so but the ones with great
plans remain calm and cry out Sancho my horse.
Thus if Cervantes wishes it I saw them
in their painless lives the knights of the dream
mounting their horses lamely and breathing bitterness
in tears ready to abandon the previous deeds
and I saw them returning — beautiful yet insane
archons who fought for inexistent kingdoms
and flowing like the armoured garment of the knight
they open their wound to show it to the sun.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562951

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763459

The Circle

excerpt

you’re barking up at the wrong tree. We’ll get this company with or without
you; it’s just a matter of whether you want to have a job or not. It’s a matter of
whether you want to be in the winners’ circle or the losers. You’re not the one who
can decide yes or no, I am.”
Robert Major gets hot all of a sudden. He sips his wine and he looks at
Peter, who turns away. He turns to Hakim, who is smiling and firm in his
composure. Peter is not Robert’s refuge at this moment and Robert feels that.
Who is this Iraqi asshole saying these words to him?He wonders and feels the
need to get up and run. Since when do these Iraqis come here and tell us what
to do and how to run our companies? Questions go through his mind and he
cannot find a way to settle down. Yet he knows there’s so much truth to
Hakim’s words that he just has to go along with him.
“Okay then, you bright stars, what’s expected of me?”
“Just one task, Robert, just one. But you have to promise that you’ll do your
best,” Hakim says.
“Okay, I promise. What is it?”
“You talk to your pal, Anthony, and get him to come along. That way we take
charge in a week’s time.We call a director’s meeting and effect the first change.After
that, the rest will fall into place piece by piece; and you may get an extra block of
shares in an option at the first setting coming right after the meeting, or even at the
same meeting.Not a word to anyone, though. I’d like us to announce a financing the
day after the meeting and lock it in at the current market price, okay?”
“So, you need me to deliver Anthony as well. What else is there for me?”
“A step up, perhaps even two steps possibly Vice-president of operations, but
don’t promise Anthony anything.”
“Who is getting Lorne’s job, you?” Robert asks, looking at Hakim, who smiles,
and in a cold voice, says, “No, Iwon’t, Peterwill.”This even takes Peter by surprise.
Peter knows Hakim has promised him the company, but he didn’t expect
him to give him the reins. He expected Hakim to take the top job and to see
himself elevated to a vice-presidency; this new idea changes things, so what
position is Hakim taking?
“We’ll talk about these things in detail the next time we meet Robert. You
make sure we have Anthony along. You have to go at it quickly. I’d like you to
have something for me by tomorrow or the next day?” Hakim says.
“It can be done. Leave it with me.”
When all three walk back to the office together, Lorne sees them, stops them
on their way into the office and asks, “Hey, hello guys, what’s going on?”
“Nothing, Lorne.” “We had lunch at Mario’s and a couple of drinks” Hakim
says with a laugh.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562817

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0978186524

Small Change

A pacific force in the turbulent school yard. A smiling dunce who
took the swish and smack of the blackboard pointer even on his knuckles
with a placid smile. Because I had often committed the unforgivable sin
of using big words in public, I was picked on a lot. Sometimes a term I had
used in passionate argument, “contingent” for instance, would cause such
widespread ire even the altar boys who were already practising saintliness
found ways to make me pay.
We used to play a game called boxball. It was set up like the infield
of a baseball diamond, but, of course, smaller, and you had to hit the pink
rubber ball on one bounce with your hand. A good pitcher could make it
skid and jump and go any way but how you expected it to. A fly out of the
infield was an out, so you had to cuff it with enough topspin to keep it low,
and get it by the fielders. For some reason known only to God and maybe
Sister Violeta, I was a serious hitter. This, along with my adult vocabulary,
provoked a gang of eighth-graders to stand around behind me as I came
up to the home plate we had drawn with stolen blackboard chalk on the
concrete. (It was exactly the same size as the plate on the diamond in No.
5 Park where the triple A teams played on weekends and passed around
the hat.) As the ball hit the ground and bounced, they would grab my arm
then let it go, and everyone would laugh when I missed.
After three humiliating at bats, I figured out a way to fox them.
There was no rule that said which hand you had to hit with, so I cocked
my right, but let them take it, then slapped up with my left, backhanded,
catching the ball with my stiffened knuckles and blasting it, on one bounce,
through the hole between third and short. But when I took off toward first
base, one of the boys stuck out his foot, and I fell, scraping my knees and
elbows on the concrete. I got up and kicked him in the crotch. Further
developments were curtailed by the recess bell, but they caught me after
school, and Louis, the one I had kicked, was burning my eyelashes with
the tip of his cigarette when Danny Amoroso ambled across the school
yard, smiling that mild, empty smile as he slapped and chopped and kicked
them away from me.
When he’d beat them off, he looked at me with such a look, I could
hardly understand it. It scared me. But it made me feel good too.
“Pawsy,” he said, “You have to be my best friend now.”
He always called me that, and he always smiled when he said it. I
could never figure out why, so one day I asked him and he said he liked…

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763157

Wellspring of Love

excerpt

As he climbed onto the tractor seat, he took a deep breath, drawing
in the earthy smell of freshly turned sod. Robins, newly returned
from their winter home, danced over the furrows searching for earthworms
turned up by the ploughshares. A few crows hovered overhead,
disturbing the stillness of the spring afternoon with their raucous
cawing.
Ronald reached for his thermos in a metal box at his feet and took
a long drink of refreshing well water. He needed to stop worrying
about Rachael so much. She was Tyne’s and Morley’s responsibility,
and they had done a great job raising her and Bobby. Although the
children had been older – eight and almost five – when their natural
father had given them up for adoption, the Cresswells had loved them
as their very own right from the beginning. Even when the twin girls
had come along, Rachael and Bobby were as much a part of the family
as if they had been born into it.
Ronald knew it had been a challenge for the Cresswells. Rachael
had come to them as a disturbed child, distraught over the death of
her mother, emotionally bruised from her time in the home of her
aunt and uncle, and full of anguish about her part in getting Bobby,
Ronald and herself lost in a blizzard. But their faith in God, and
dependence on prayer, had given Tyne and Morley the wisdom and
compassion to bring about the healing that had to take place in the
child’s life and heart.
He put the John Deere into gear and engaged the plough. The
memories would not let him go today. Not only Rachael had needed
healing, he had needed it, too. And he had found it through the
patient love of Millie Harper – Tyne’s aunt – who had taken him in
when he was not quite twelve years old, still suffering from the effects
of the storm that led to his disfigurement, and terrified of returning
home to the Harrisons whom he had always thought to be his
parents.
He would never forget the shock of learning that Ruby and Bill
Harrison had taken him as a baby to raise as their own child.

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763327