: Otis Bulfinch
: Pursuing Daisy Garfield
: Publerati
: 9798986617817
: 1
: CHF 10.50
:
: Belletristik
: English
: 408
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
The beautiful and enigmatic Daisy Garfield occupies the center of this tale about a woman's search for meaning in the 19th century Ozarks backwoods. Resourceful beyond her years, Daisy fends off the predatory advances of a teacher, a preacher, and a corrupt lawman in strikingly violent ways. Her resources come to an end when her husband John accidentally splits his shin with an axe. When gangrene sets in, she asks a passing trapper, William Crawford, to end John's suffering. In the vain hope that Daisy will give herself to him, William consents to kill her husband, an act that plunges him into guilt and self-recrimination. Crawford's misgivings take an unexpected turn when a group of hardscrabble homesteaders enlist him in their search for John's killer. When they discover not just one, but two rotted corpses, the mystery deepens for them all. Meanwhile, Daisy undergoes her own search for peace and security as she navigates alone the dangers of the Ozarks. As intelligent as she is beautiful, Daisy struggles to reconcile the claims of religion with the evils inflicted upon her. Pursuing Daisy Garfield is at once a mystery and a profound meditation on the hope that 'beauty will save the world.' Written in the backwoods vernacular of the Ozarks, readers will be reminded of the gritty and elegiac writing found in the novels of Cormac McCarthy.

CHAPTER ONE


SYCAMORE BALD

THE MISSOURI OZARKS

MAY 19, 1890

The road was rutted by the wheels of mule wagons and washed out by the annual torrents of spring. The wallows jarred the wheels pretty rough, and the mule had to be encouraged with whip and reins, but the wagon trundled on, and the trail led upward into a mystery of green that looked very like the mystery left behind. The waggoneer cursed, as well he ought, for cursing comes natural in desolate places. God is in nature everyone insists it is so but He is shy and unpredictable as a hummingbird, and you ve got to look obliquely and quickly at that, and even then, He has probably already flown. Maybe if God were more Jove-like, standing tall and majestic as an oak with mistletoe hair and the doves of Aphrodite twittering and coupling in his branches, the waggoneer might have been gentler in his admonitions. But Jehovah God is not an oak. He is a hummingbird or a beetle iridescent with green, scuttling for cover under leaf mold.

The waggoneer was not old, not yet forty the prime of life for many. His beard was carefully cropped and still coal black, and what wrinkles he had were gained by squinting in the sun; his eyes were brown, almost black, and he wore his hat pulled down to his brows. In fact, he was a plain man of common height who fastidiously tended what God and nature had bestowed. The crazy pulse of youthful desire had settled into a kind of throbbing of perpetual pursuit, and he could not pass the Garfield place without some hope of seeing Mrs. Garfield scattering corn to the chickens or pinning laundry to the line. Once she waved at him through the window, but he wanted more than she could or would consent to give.

Mr. Garfield was not dead. A week ago, his axe had sheared away from the chopping block and delivered a bone-splitting gash to his lower shin. The leg had been doctored by an old woman who applied mayapple pap and slipped chicken bones in his pockets, but in a matter of days, the gash became a stinking wound, and either the leg would go, or Garfield would. And it was a shame. Garfield had shot dead a ruffian who raped a girl over in Notch and was threatening more mischief; it was a fair fight with a just conclusion, and Garfield had never wavered. He had simply shot the ruffian thrice through the gut and that was that. And now here Garfield was, stinking of gangrene because of a goddamned knot he failed to see while swinging an axe as he had done ten thou