Dancing at the Rascal Fair

Zusatztext Pamela Guillard San Francisco Chronicle Dazzling...I find myself filled With such high praise for this book that instead of relating paltry bits of it! I want to quote the whole glorious thing....Doig plunges right in and! while giving us a gorgeous story! simultaneously peels that tale back to expose! the nubbins of human despair -- injustice! failure! and that incalculable restlessness exemplifled by the immigrant. Informationen zum Autor Ivan Doig (1939-2015) was a third-generation Montanan and the author of sixteen books, including the classic memoir  This House of Sky and most recently Last Bus to Wisdom . He was a National Book Award finalist and received the Wallace Stegner Award, among many other honors. Doig lived in Seattle with his wife, Carol. Visit IvanDoig.com. Chapter 1 SCOTLAND AND HELENA Harbour Mishap at Greenock. Yesterday morning, while a horse and cart were conveying a thousand-weight of sugar on the quay at Albert Harbour, one of the cartwheels caught a mooring stanchion, which caused the laden conveyance and its draft animal to fall over into the water. The poor creature made desperate efforts to free itself and was successful in casting off all the harness except the collar, which, being attached to the shafts of the sunken cart, held its head under water until it was drowned. The dead animal and the cart were raised during the forenoon by the Greenock harbour diver. Glasgow Caledonian, Octobert 23, 1889 To say the truth, it was not how I expected -- stepping off toward America past a drowned horse. You would remember too well, Rob, that I already was of more than one mind about the Atlantic Ocean. And here we were, not even within eyeshot of the big water, not even out onto the slow-flowing River Clyde yet, and here this heap of creature that would make, what, four times the sum total of Rob Barclay and Angus McCaskill, here on the Greenock dock it lay gawping up at us with a wild dead eye. Strider of the earth not an hour ago, wet rack of carcass now. An affidavit such as that says a lot to a man who cannot swim. Or at least who never has. But depend on you, Rob. In those times you could make light of whatever. There was that red shine on you, your cheeks and jawline always as ruddy and smooth as if you had just put down the shaving razor, and on this largest day of our young lives you were aglow like a hot coal. A stance like a lord and a hue like a lady. You cocked your head in that way of yours and came right out with: "See now, McAngus. So long as we don't let them hitch a cart to us we'll be safe as saints." "A good enough theory," I had to agree, "as far as it goes." Then came commotion, the grieved sugar carter bursting out, "Oh Ginger dear, why did ye have to tumble?" and dockmen shouting around him and a blinkered team of horses being driven up at full clatter to drag their dead ilk away. Hastily some whiskered geezer from the Cumbrae Steamship Line was waving the rest of us along: "Dead's dead, people, and standing looking at it has never been known to help. Now then, whoever of you are for the James Watt, straight on to the queue there, New York at its other end, step to it please, thank you." And so we let ourselves be shooed from the sight of poor old horsemeat Ginger and went and stepped onto line with our fellow steerage ticketholders beside the bulk of the steamship. Our fellow Scotland-leavers, half a thousand at once, each and every of us now staring sidelong at this black iron island that was to carry us to America. One of the creels which had held the sugar was bobbing against the ship's side, while over our heads deckhands were going through the motions of some groaning chore I couldn't begin to figure. "Now if this was fresh water, like," sang out one above the dirge of their task, "I'd wager ye a guinea this harbor'd right n...

Product details

• Authors: Ivan Doig
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 15.09.1996
• EAN: 9780684831053
• ISBN: 978-0-684-83105-3
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature