05 November 2003 BLIZZARD'S WAKE by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, Simon & Schuster/Atheneum, October 2002, ISBN 0-689-85220-7

"Inside the forlorn station a man in a wrinkled shirt studied Zeke from behind the counter. Zeke knew that even if Dwayne's phone were working, he wouldn't try calling him at eleven forty-five at night.

" 'What time do you close?' he asked the ticket agent.

" 'Long as the buses keep comin', I'm open,' the man in the wrinkled shirt said.

" 'Any objection to me waiting out the night in a chair over there?'

" 'What bus you waitin' on?'

" 'No bus. Had a change of plans, and my ride won't be here till morning.

" 'Well, you're welcome to a chair, but it can't be all that comfortable, seeing as how you just got off a bus. There's a hotel two blocks away--rooms half price after midnight. Real cheap and you won't get lice or nothing.'

"Zeke thought it over as the man gave directions. 'Out the door there, turn left, two blocks down, it'll be on the right.'

"A shower and a bed would feel good, Zeke decided. Why not?

"Once in the room, however, he could not sleep. He showered, put on his shorts and undershirt again, and crawled under the covers, but his body seemed restless, wired.

"At two thirty he got up, wrapped a blanket around him, and pulled his chair over to the window, looking out onto the street below--the neon sigh outside the hotel, the pool hall across the way, the occasional car, the stoplight at the corner, the little restaurant farther on, closed and locked for the night. He used to think of it as his town, but he didn't think like that anymore."

"As eager as [Kate] had been to look out the [school bus] window before, she did not want to look now. Yet out of the corner of her eye, in the periphery, where trouble begins, she could make out the single cottonwood tree, then the Norton's barn..."

As I tell my own children and our students, I was in the lucky fifty percent: There was a fifty-fifty chance I was destined to kill myself or someone else, back when I was a high school student, and then a college student, who often drank and drove. All those times, and I never killed anybody. In fact, I never even got pulled over or dented a fender.

But there were certainly some nights when I was so blind drunk that I wouldn't have been able to remember the next morning even if I HAD been pulled over. As they say, "There but for the grace of God go I."

Zeke, now 29, was not in the lucky fifty percent with me. It is March 1941, nine months before Pearl Harbor, and Zeke has just been released from prison early for good behavior, after spending three years incarcerated for a crime he cannot remember committing.

He was that drunk when it happened.

Kate is the still-bitter teenage daughter of the town's country doctor, whose mother was killed on the way home from choir practice when Zeke's car ran the stop sign near the Norton's barn. It took two hours to extricate her mother's body from the wreck. In Kate's mind, she would dearly love to give Zeke a couple of hours of his own medicine. And, as we can guess, Kate will somehow be given that opportunity. \

"Hadn't anybody else ever made a mistake? Hadn't anyone else in the jury ever run a red light? Hadn't the judge ever rolled past a stop sign? The difference, of course, was that his mistake has cost a life, and he was sure sorry about that. But the fact was that any of their mistakes could have cost a life too. They just hadn't, that's all. He wasn't one whit a better man for having been in prison than he was before. Just a little angrier, that's all.

The catalyst for bringing Kate and Zeke into close range is a violent winter storm that really did take place--and took a tragic toll--in March 1941 in the Red River Valley of North Dakota and Minnesota.

"To Kate, it seemed that the wind was on fiercely intimate terms with her, licking at her eyelids with an insistent tongue, probing under the edge of the red flannel scarf as though trying to uncover her neck, forcing itself up the sleeves of her heavy jacket, despite the sweater she wore beneath. Kate kept going."

It takes a killer blizzard for us to see the other side of Kate Sterling. This is actually a bright, observant, and courageous girl who--for a reason we later discover--has been unable to escape from the darkness that the unexpected loss of her mother has cast over her.

"Outside, in the blizzard's wake, life itself seemed frozen. No birds flew, no snow fell, no cars moved, no children played. Even the wind had lost its breath. The white earth lay stunned beneath a heavy white sky."

And in that blizzard's wake, Kate has to come to terms with the fact that nothing she does or doesn't do will bring back her mother.

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor has written a book that magnificently poses questions about punishment and revenge and forgiveness. There are entertaining details about country living sixty years ago. And there is just enough tension to make 10-14 year olds hold their breath, wondering what Kate is going to do next.

" 'So, what do you want to do, Kate? Kill him?' Jesse asked simply.

"Kate didn't answer."

Richie Partington

http://richiespicks.com

BudNotBuddy@aol.com