Leah, New Hampshire
Thomas Williams
Language: English
Pages: 216
ISBN: 0688115446
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A posthumous collection of short fiction from an award-winning author—the majority of which appeared in The New Yorker or Esquire—exhibits his ability to touch the core of humanity and share it with readers.
With an introduction from John Irving.
they were both schoolboys; now a grown man, David confronts the silence that endures between himself and his best friend’s father. “We stood there in a kind of deadlock, looking at each other. Then, with tolerance and complicity, we slid our soft glances apart.” And several stories pursue the justification of hunting, or killing game; it is a subject that Williams worried over all his life. He never picks easy targets; he is not merely creating those knee-jerk Bambi-lovers who see the killing
ashtray near. In spite of his age, he smoked cigarettes. Back in the shadows, between a lacy, drooping vine and the narrow window, Nana’s older sister, blue dress and high black shoes, composed and fragile face, sat in a rocker and never spoke. Nana herself was seventy-nine. For forty years she had bossed the seven-mile trek down to Leah in the late fall, back up the mountain again to this high old house in the spring. It was Nana who dealt with the world, who shut the windows when it rained,
daughter, smiling too broadly and thus unlike her, her blond hair to her shoulders. And a photograph of his son, whose hair was long then too—another discarded fashion. Now both of them were in their own lives, needing little from him or from Nora. He remembered hitchhiking with his mother to the Twin Cities—a first hint that she was acting without his father’s knowledge. After the Horton Herald went broke, she worked for another newspaper. A man where she worked kept saying to her, “Hey,
leader around a rock—just to the limit of what he could do with a three-pound tippet, which was probably good for at least five pounds, except that it was old, so God knew what strength it had. He mustn’t get used to its holding. He had to see this fish. He wanted to own it, to have it. What a will it had, what strength! But the long minutes with his rod quivering, line in and out in desperation, might be too worrying for him. He’d deliberately put himself into a situation in which he felt
stop shaking.” “Tomorrow I’m taking you to a doctor.” She looked at him closely, squinting out of her mirror at him. In her fingers she kneaded a Kleenex—narrow red fingers, with her rings loose and twinkling, and the tissue pulped, with streaks of black mascara on it. He felt that it would be wrong for him to plead or argue any longer; he couldn’t afford to waste the strength of his position by using up his words. Although he could argue with her, and in the arguing feel that he had a point