Gary S Brayshaw

Gebundenes Buch

Repechage

Beschreibung

Five years after he left, vowing never to go back, Abe Weir returns to the family farm in the spring of 1967. Abe's mom, Abby, has asked him to help her get the crops off the field, his father, Isaac, being deathly ill. Abe agrees, despite hating farming, and his father. Abe returns intent on keeping to himself his tour in Vietnam as a decorated Marine Captain. Abby has a secret of her own: Ruth Cummings, the owner of the neighboring farm, is now running their farm as well, placing Abe under the thumb of the girl he ran out on five years ago. Abe visits his father's bedside, giving Isaac a chance to utter to his son how sorry he is for bringing into Abe's childhood the very cruelty his hardness was trying to protect him against. When Abe's father dies, Abe finds Ruth kinder than she has been since his return, a courtesy he misconstrues, encouraging him to dare asking her out. The lioness-like ferocity with which Ruth responds to this, paralyzes Abe, as she lambasts him with the ruin he caused when he left, still incredulous that he saw as some kind of betrayal her decision to take over her dad's farm. Abe subsequently spends the night walking the tractor paths among the farm's pastures and runs into Ruth who is doing some walking of her own. Abe decides Ruth deserves to know where he has been, imploring her to keep it to herself. Once he does, he leaves her side, apologizing for the extreme pain he now knows he so thoughtlessly caused her. That fall, Abe is hired as a high school English teacher. One particular underachiever, Tommy Armstrong, responds to Abe's challenges and his coaching, and by spring is writing "A" essays. Then Tommy tells him his dad, Del, wants him to quit school and fight in Vietnam. Now Abe knows, if he is to save Tommy from Vietnam, he has to tell Del that he has been there, ultimately exposing himself to unwarranted adulation, arousing memories he fears could still destroy him.

Autor

Gary taught English for sixteen years and quit to become a financial advisor so that he could pay the bills. Still, whatever he was doing on stage, he was writing in the wings. It had become his most satisfying work, born of the fact that he did not talk until he was five or read until he was fifteen. His schoolwork never suffered because it turned out he could remember everything. So, when he took his exams, he just gave the teachers back whatever they had given him in class. When he did begin to read and write it was at Kent School his fifth form (junior) year. His English teacher didn't know what to make of him. He could hardly write a complete sentence, no less an entire 400-word essay due each class period for the first two weeks he was there. Fortunately, after being accepted the June before, he had received a list from Kent's English Chair of "all the books a young man attending Kent has read by his fifth form year." Since he hadn't read any of them, with the prospect of attending Kent on the horizon, he happily spent the entire summer reading, eight hours a day, five days a week. At the end of each day, he would walk to Wantagh, take a bus to Jones Beach, and plunge into the Atlantic Ocean. So, he did a bit better at the reading than the writing for some time at Kent, but he got the hang of it well enough to pull him out of the fifth quintile by the end of his sixth form year. From there it took him four years at Cornell, three years as a Navy Journalist, two years at Oregon State, three summers at Bread Loaf School of English, and two summers at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, before he earned an "A" on all his essays, including his doctoral dissertation on Moby-Dick. All the while he was messing up sheets of paper writing stories and collecting rejection slips. Sixty-three years from the day his dad drove him across the bridge onto the Kent School campus, he published The Machination Trilogy: My Friend Billy, The Consummate Fix, and Repechage.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Gary S. Brayshaw
• Seitenzahl: 362
• Erscheinungstermin: 17. Februar 2020
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 235mm x 157mm x 26mm
• Gewicht: 753g
• ISBN-13: 9781087867748
• ISBN-10: 1087867746
• Artikelnr.: 58760223