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Day One
February 17, 1926. Bingham, Utah
Each day is a story, whether or not that story makes any damn sense or is worth telling to anyone else. If you live a long time, and your memory doesn't completely crap out, you end up with enough stories to fill a library; it's nearly impossible to pick and choose a mere handful to write about—a stupid, arbitrary stricture I've been cowed into accepting by a dead bully. Why I lack the testicular fortitude to just say no is a vexing question, but what aggravates me even more is the fact that I have no idea where to start.
Okay, I'm lying.
I actually do know, but it irks me beyond belief to give Aggie the satisfaction of following her advice. That she now only exists in my head is beside the point: I'd like to maintain at least a smidgeon of autonomy in my own skull, for God's sake.
Is that so much to ask?
Sadly, in this case, it is.
You're very unattractive when you whine, Isaac.
That's what she'd say, of course, if she were still here. I find it both irritating and oddly comforting that I can hear her voice so clearly, without even trying. She may as well never have died, given that she's every bit as exasperating in my imagination as she ever was in person.
Just get on with it and tell them about the giant.
Agnes and I were getting ready for bed—and fighting, of course, about whose turn it was to stoke the woodstove—when our mother lifted her head and told us to shush. Agnes was my twin sister, and Mama always claimed we came out of her womb mad as weasels, screaming hell and death at each other, same as every day afterward. (The midwife hauled me out only a few minutes ahead of Aggie, who no doubt thought the whole sordid business was my fault, and something I should have warned her about.)
"Shush, both of you," Mama repeated. She was nursing Hilda, our baby sister, by the woodstove. "Did you hear that noise?"
"What noise?" Agnes asked.
"The giant," I said.
"Don't be ridiculous," Agnes said. "Giants aren't real."
"Shush!" Mama insisted.
I was eight and had just read Jack and the Beanstalk. I was a timid kid with a perverse imagination, and long before the story of Jack and his magic beans came into my life, I was jumping at phantom faces in every shadow. I believed the large rock beside our house was a troll turned to stone, waiting for the next dark of the moon to become flesh; I swore I could hear nymphs and demons battling for dominion in the restless water of Bingham Creek; I dreamt almost every night of warty, jaundiced witches, lumbering ogres, and pallid ghosts with milky eyes. Yet the old fairy tale about Jack the giant-killer—a murderous, thieving boy who not only got away with his sins, but
was actually rewarded for them—unsettled me in a way few things did. Whatever my mother may have heard that night, I heard a vengeful relative of Jack's slain giant, rousing to wrath somewhere up the canyon.
Agnes and I had just finished bathing in the claw-foot, castiron tub Father bought for Mama at Christmas. There was no privacy in our one-room house. Agnes and I shared a cramped bed on one side of the room, next to Hilda's crib; Father and Mama's bed was on the opposite wall, a few feet from the kitchen table. It was the only home Agnes and I knew, and we couldn't imagine not bumping into each other every time we hunched over to tie a shoe. The two of us used the same towel to dry ourselves before slipping into our matching nightshirts—cut and sewed from the same bolt of blue flannel by Mama—and the smell of rye bread, fried onions, and boiled cabbage was still in the air from supper, three hours before.
"Oh," Agnes said, cocking her head. "I hear it now, too, Mama."
The winter cold was slithering like rattlesnakes through every crack in the walls and floors that night, and I tugged on gray wool socks and listened to the strange rumbling in the dark world beyond our walls. The only light in the room aside from the fire in the woodstove was from two candles on the kitchen table, flickering in the frigid draft blowing through the house. We lived in the Carr Fork area of Bingham with all the other Swedes, and nobody in Carr Fork had electricity. (Nor indoor plumbing, for that matter: For baths, Aggie and I had to cart in a few buckets from the outdoor water pump that Mama then heated on the stove.)
Excerpted from The Very Long, Very Strange Life of Isaac Dahl by Bart Yates. Copyright © 2024 by Bart Yates. Excerpted by permission of A John Scognamiglio Book. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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