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[Angel Fire] [The Deadline] [The Obituary]
Twenty-four years after his beloved brother's death in Vietnam,
a lonely writer returns to his Wyoming hometown to face a harrowing
reunion with his past — and with the brother who has returned from the dead.
Angel Fire
"Reminiscent of Charles Frazier's 'Cold Mountain' ... (Franscell's) themes involve a fresh approach to our rural roots as a font for the elusive American spirit."
— USA Today
"A beautiful novel of family love and loyalty set in Wyoming ... Reminiscent of Robert Olin Butler, Ron Franscell has a wonderful command of the English language and a writing style that cannot fail to capture the reader's imagination. Recommended."
— Library Journal
"Tender prose ... a heart-wrenching story of love and loss and familial connections ...
Using richly descriptive, flowing prose and artful plotting, Franscell has woven together the quite impact of childhood in a small town and the complexities of adulthood. In the challenges of Daniel and Cassidy McLeod, we see our our problems and looming self-doubt. In their triumphs, we envision hopes all our own."
— The Denver Post
"Angel Fire documents [Franscell] as an author with an immense ability for language and for storytelling. Highly recommended."
— Midwest Book Review
"Dramatic, impressively crafted...an important novel of haunting and mythic proportions."
— Author Melissa Pritchard
"Like Ray Bradbury's 'Dandelion Wine,' though in a much harder and less sentimental vein, 'Anbgel Fire' has a dreamy, intoxicating quality, full of wistful nostalgia and melancholy ... Franscell's Wyoming is as close to the real Wyoming as I've ever read. There's nothing like a native's-eye view to get an accurate picture of that enigmatic place."
— Boulder (Colo.) Daily Camera
"Angel Fire is a coming-of-age story without easy answers or pat solutions to life's explained — and more often unexplained — circumstances. ... It may be simply in its approach, but it is also complex — as all stories about the human condition should be. While Franscell easily and wonderfully paints the idyllic small-town picture, he also delves into the human psyche, a darker and more intimidating proposition."
— San Bernardino (Calif.) Sun
"Ron Franscell's achievement is to provide us with deep insights and understanding of the human condition rarely seen in contemporary novels."
— Warren Adler, author of "Random Hearts" and "War of the Roses"
Excerpt
West Canaan, Wyoming, June 17, 1957
Mount Pisgah, the town
cemetery, was only a few blocks from their father's newspaper office.
For Daniel and Cassidy
McLeod, the route was every boy's idea of a proper path to the graveyard: a shortcut to
the Dairy Freez corner window, past the balky back door of the Wigwam movie house, across
the freshly sprinkled outfield grass, around the pond bank where flat rocks grew, racing
at last through the wrought-iron gates of Heaven's own parking lot.
And on summer Wednesdays,
the West Canaan Republican-Rustler was a hellish sweatbox. The overheated Linotype
clacked and clamored like a caged beast in the basement, simmering lead fumes up through
the floor. By suppertime, when the old letterpress was fired up and the sun braised the
broad brick facade of the building, the heat was almost unbearable.
And the fires of press day
were the genesis of their secret plan.
While his father worked,
Cassidy hunted for the coolest spot in the place. He rolled a swivel chair to the front
door, propped open with a pig, one of the printer's lead ingots, to air the place out.
He was only eight and his
summer haircut had grown out into a soft, sun-bleached thatch. His thin arms were still
red with the first sun of summer, peeling. Skinned knee-caps peeked through his ripped
jeans, but his bony legs were barely long enough to keep him twirling in a lazy circle,
like a leaf in the stream of air trickling through the newspaper shop and out the back
door.
The hot breeze off the
street tickled the nape of Cassidy's neck, like a big black dog breathing on him. He
watched his father working at his steadfast Royal typewriter, an enormous black
contraption that clattered like two, maybe three, sticks on a picket fence.
Archie McLeod's reading
glasses had slipped down on his nose, exposing little creases at the corners of his eyes.
Cassidy saw such things. He knew people sometimes died before they got old, like his
mother. But he also knew that growing old was another way to die, and he didn't want his
father, who was only thirty-seven, to grow old, ever.
Cassidy swiveled away from
the thought, toward the open door that faced onto Main Street, the dog's breath in his
face now. Across the way, in front of the Little Chief Diner, the ranchers' pickup trucks
were parked in a rusty row, like the addled mail boxes at the end of a county road. Half
of them had brooms stuck in their sideboard slots.
The asphalt cooked in the
midday heat, and only a few people passed by. But just around the corner from the
newspaper, among the crackerbox houses kept up by the widow-ladies and the retired
shopkeepers too poor to move away, Cassidy knew the smell of sweet lilacs masked the oily
pungency of the blacktop in early summer.
Daniel sat on the front
counter and dangled his feet. He was almost eleven, lean and tall. Days at the creek had
burnished him brown, which only made his perpetual smile more appealing. His tanned arms
were just beginning to show signs of coming manhood, smooth suggestions of young muscle
against his white T-shirt. Already he could hit a baseball out of the sandlot, clean over
the Johnsons' clapboard house, something the town boys never imagined possible. After the
first time, when the high arc of the ball carried it over the peaked roof, when Daniel
came to the plate, the outfielders backpedaled through the snake grass, the infielders
shuffled out of harm's way and the catcher just sat in the dirt. Daniel was a sandlot god.
But to Cassidy, Daniel was
also a little-boy prophet, a maker of myths and a master rock skipper who would never grow
old. His dark eyes saw great cities where there were only clouds and sunlight. And he knew
secrets about people that maybe they didn't know themselves. He saw into them.
Then again, there wasn't
much else to see in a little town like West Canaan, where a good imagination was as
precious as a thousand acres of this grassy, high plain known as the Powder River Basin.
Cupped in the smooth palms of the Black Hills to the east and the Big Horn Mountains to
the west, Cassidy could stand on Mount Pisgah -- being the highest point in the
municipality, site of the town's gravity-drawn water tank -- and see the thin, blue line
of mountains on two horizons. The cemetery took its name from the Biblical mountain slope
where Moses first saw the Promised Land. The town's pioneers, the "Old Ones,"
knew their Bible better than they knew the promise of this particular land.
Three roads led out of
West Canaan, but one, amazing grace, just ends. So three signs marked the town limits
without regard to where the roads began. All roads led to: West Canaan Pop. 3,312.
Still, the calm sea of the
surrounding plains permitted the good townsfolk a roomy life, safely secluded from evils
that are best kept distant: Temptations, distractions and dilutions. In some places, men
shape geography; in others, geography shapes men.
That's what Cassidy heard
his father say from time to time. Archie McLeod had grown up in West Canaan, too, the only
son of Darius McLeod, a feed store operator who dreamed of inventing something fantastic
but never did. The only thing Darius McLeod ever created that was worth a tinker's damn
was the son he named after the man he believed to be history's greatest thinker,
Archimedes.
Young Archie McLeod grew
up during the Depression, a time of dreamers. While his own father dreamed up fantastic
new gizmos that nobody would buy even if they could, Archie earned a dollar a week as a
printer's devil. Mucking out ink buckets and cleaning wooden type blocks at the weekly
West Canaan Rustler, he dreamed, too: He wanted only to become a newspaperman.
And so he did. Except for
the time he spent at the University of Wyoming wooing and marrying Annie MacKenzie -- a
luminous girl from the great basin on the other side of the mountains -- and a few years
as a Marine officer in the Pacific during World War II, Archie's heart never strayed very
far from this place, even if his mind occasionally wandered far away. That's how the
landscape of Wyoming shaped Archie McLeod: It held him close forever, and it made him
dream.
In his weekly columns,
Archie was the conscience of his town, as well as its clarion and curmudgeon. He was
plain-spoken but erudite, a country philosopher who could out-think and outcuss --
sometimes at the very same moment -- almost anybody in town.
Cassidy watched his father
from his circle of moving air. He knew better than to interrupt his furious two-fingered
typing, especially on a Wednesday, when Archie McLeod and the Republican-Rustler's
deadlines grew short.
Cassidy wanted to control
time. Every day would be a summer day. His two front teeth would come in quicker. He'd
keep his father from growing old. Daniel's stories would never end. And he'd let his
mother live forever.
Cassidy was only four when
his mother died.
When Annie McLeod knew she
wouldn't survive the cancer that was filling her body, she baked one pie every day. Apple,
lemon meringue, pumpkin, blueberry, mincemeat, pecan, strawberry, plum, sweet potato,
huckleberry, crabapple, rhubarb, sour cream and raisin, raspberry, peach ... every one in
six neat slices, one for her husband and two young sons at lunch and dinner.
She was thirty-three when
she died. They buried her on the south side of Mount Pisgah, where the sun would keep her
warm. Sometimes, Cassidy visited her there.
Cassidy remembered what
every boy is born knowing about his mother: Her touch, her kiss, the sound of her voice as
she hugged him to her breast. And he came to know the smell of her pies.
The talk about her cancer
was beyond him, even now. Cassidy only knew that something had consumed her. Maybe it was
him. Maybe, he thought, he'd needed her too much and it was his dependence that ate her
away.
Not long after she died,
Archie took her pie tins out to the tool shed, unable either to part with them or see them
every day. Sometimes, the boys sneaked out there at night and Cassidy would sit there in
the dark listening to his brother tell stories about her, among the tools and scrap lumber
and dusty Mason jars.
Daniel felt her presence,
but Cassidy bore the burden of her absence. So it was, always, between them: One searching
for something that wasn't there, the other always a little empty.
Often Cassidy wished that
home would smell like home again, like baking pies and his mother's dresses in the back
closet. Cassidy never wanted to lose someone close to him again, nor to be so close that
he might consume another loved one. He was not a sad little boy, but by his eighth summer,
he'd grown quiet and sometimes distant.
That's when Daniel started
telling stories.
And they were fantastic
stories about faraway places and adventurers and magical times. From them, Daniel
fashioned his own solace in a world that wasn't beyond his control, and Cassidy listened.
Their life was best when
they were with their father, the master storyteller himself, playing checkers on a
Saturday afternoon or fishing on Dead Horse Creek or sharing jokes around his cluttered
desk at the newspaper. Sometimes they helped him till the clay soil in the garden, where
they grew huge tomatoes despite Wyoming's ephemeral growing season.
That's when the circle was
mended -- perhaps only with a single, frail stitch -- and they were almost whole again.
Miss Oneida Overstreet,
their housekeeper after Annie died, cooked two meals every weekday and did their laundry
for a paltry wage. Archie rarely missed one of Miss Oneida's country suppers with the
boys.
Secretly, Cassidy studied
his father's hands at the supper table almost every night. He saw tiny lines where black
ink could never be scrubbed off, and they were growing deeper and longer.
Many nights his father
would get up from the table and walk back down to the newspaper, where he could write.
When he was writing, he
wasn't sad. He was dreaming.
The Royal's rapid
thwacking stopped, and Cassidy's daydream was interrupted by the sudden quiet.
Archie tilted back in his
chair and peered over his glasses at his two sons. His jowls were taut, his lips thin. He
rolled a mossy cigar stump between his teeth, and a blue haze encircled him, curling
gracefully toward the lazy blades of the ceiling fan.
Whatever he'd been writing
had him mildly agitated, so Cassidy guessed it was about the Damned Mayor, as he was known
in the McLeod house. Cassidy didn't even know his real name. Hizzoner was just a stuffy
banker who seldom failed either to provoke his father or to provide plenty of copy for
every week's new edition, one way or another.
"Boys, never wrestle
with a pig," Archie said in his most fatherly tone. "You both get dirty and the
pig likes it."
They all laughed. Cassidy
settled back into the squeaky chair, relieved. But only for a moment.
"So what trouble are
you stirring up today?" Archie asked as he shuffled toward the backshop with his
fresh copy.
Cassidy bolted upright.
The swivel chair rocked a little more vigorously. He fixed his eyes on the floor as he
scooted forward on the leather seat.
His father knew everything
that happened in West Canaan. Cassidy feared for a moment he knew about the secret plan,
too. He glanced nervously at Daniel, who hopped from the counter and stood ramrod straight
as his father passed in the close quarters of the Republican-Rustler's front shop.
"We're going to
wrestle a pig," Daniel said.
Archie stopped in the
doorway to the smelly backshop and turned toward them. His pants hung loosely on him,
cinched up by a belt he'd taken in a couple notches since Annie died. The tails of his
wrinkled shirt, now two sizes too big, bloused around him, threatening to float free from
his waistband at any moment.
He pushed his glasses onto
the top of his head and pretended to be annoyed at Daniel, then smiled.
Then Archie glanced at his
watch and grumbled. Cassidy watched another deadline ripple across his father's troubled
forehead. He fished one of his inky hands in his gabardine workpants and produced a shiny
Franklin half-dollar. He flipped it to Daniel.
"Be home early,"
Archie told them. "We have a guest for dinner, a young writer from the East named
Jack Lazarus, who's just passing through town. I expect you to be on your best behavior,
understand?"
Before he finished, they
were halfway out the door.
The half dollar, as
always, was for Robbie, the sweet-faced, big-bosomed high school girl who wore red
lipstick and dipped soft-serve in melted chocolate at the Dairy Freez. She was among the
teen-agers who pursued clumsy romances on Friday nights on the far side of Pisgah, in the
back seats of cars parked in the midnight shadow of the silvery water tower. Cassidy and
Daniel had sneaked up there a few times to listen to the girls giggle and to throw pebbles
through open backseat windows.
Now they waited
impatiently in the hot sun while Robbie tittered about boys with two friends at the
walk-up counter. Her pretty face glistened in the afternoon heat roiling off the sidewalk
through her tiny screened opening.
Daniel sidled up so close
Robbie either had to wait on him or include him in the conversation. She finally turned to
him.
"Two dips,
please," he told her.
Robbie spared a smile for
the boys, who got a whiff of lavender as she leaned through the sliding screen window with
a few napkins. Daniel handed her the fifty-cent piece.
"You boys stayin' out
of trouble?" she asked.
"Yeah, we're going up
to ..." Cassidy blurted, before Danny stepped on his talkative little brother's left
foot.
"Goin' to the pond to
look for salamanders," Daniel said, grinding his heel into Cassidy's left
"Chuck" -- an age-darkened, hand-me-down, high-top sneaker ironically named not
for a great basketball star, but a legendary shoe salesman named Chuck Taylor. Chucks were
the only thing they wore in summer, their canvas nearly impervious to the everyday ordeals
of little boys.
Cassidy flinched, but kept
his mouth shut.
"Thanks for the
dips," Daniel said as they walked around the Dairy Freez's eye-aching white stucco
wall toward Mount Pisgah.
"I wasn't gonna say
nothin'," Cassidy defended himself. His voice was heavy.
"Yeah, like the time
you accidentally snitched about the chickens in the suitcase?"
"That was
different."
Daniel always told
stories, but he seldom lied unless there was a good reason. Since climbing the water tower
was an offense against both the town's and their father's laws, Daniel believed he had two
good reasons.
They walked down the shady
alley, past backyard gardens and coal-ash bins, to the ball field, looking for a little
courage in melting vanilla ice cream.
They could see the water
tower looming above the thick, old cottonwoods whose roots surely entangled what was left
of the Old Ones. In the shade of Godbolt's Market billboard on the left field fence, they
sat quietly and wiped their fingers in the cool grass.
"What do you think
we'll see? Could we see our house from up there? Maybe we'll see Shadow, you think?"
Cassidy chattered. He was fortifying himself for the delirious climb, painting a thin coat
of eagerness over his dread.
"Maybe," Daniel
reassured him, as he always did. He stood to size up the tower, shading his eyes against
the afternoon sun glazing its shiny skin. "Hey, maybe we'll see Pledger Moon comin'
in, who knows? C'mon, let's go."
Pledger Moon.
He was another daydream
shared by two brothers. Daniel conjured Pledger Moon from a zephyr on the banks of the
Crazy Woman and gave him life: A railroad gandy-dancer who enlisted to fight the Civil
War, and has wandered from adventure to adventure on his endless road home. Someday, when
other stories needed telling, Daniel would bring him home, but Cassidy hoped the story
would never end. Moon was very real and precious to him, a gift.
Running through the
cemetery, past the Old Ones' mottled headstones under the cottonwoods, they clambered over
a fence around the base of the tower. They caught their breath and their courage on the
rusty first step of the ladder, bolted precariously to one of the tower's four steel legs.
"You first. Hold
tight and go slow," Daniel warned. "I'll be right behind you."
Cassidy looked straight up
the dizzying steel stairway into the big afternoon sky. Beyond the narrow catwalk that
girdled the tower's rotund belly, the clouds looked as if someone had stirred them with a
spoon.
"Danny ..." he
whined.
"I mean it, I'll be
here for you," Daniel said. "Just don't look down."
Cassidy took a deep breath
and started up. The rusty handrails stained his trembling palms, still sticky with ice
cream and sweat. He could hear Daniel behind him. Nothing bad could happen while he was
with his brother.
They rose through the
trees, above the roof lines of their squat little town. Creaky bolts and sagging steps
only grudgingly forgave their trespass. They shimmied through a trap door and crawled onto
the catwalk. They dangled their feet bravely through the railing, clinging white-knuckled
to its dirty balusters.
The quiet, freshly mowed
cemetery lay far below them. The gravedigger's sprinklers spurted in lazy pinwheels of
light. They could see the newspaper's flat gray roof past the electric poles on Third
Street. Their two-story, white house on Ithaca Street was just two blocks farther, and
Cassidy could see his own bedroom window on the second floor.
They heard birds in the
cemetery trees and the softly pulsing sprinklers below, but the little town made no other
sound. They saw children riding bikes toward the park, and a few cars rolling through the
downtown, slowly and silently.
Beyond the trees, beyond
Sheeran's junkyard at the edge of town, beyond the Crazy Woman Creek, a velvety brown bolt
of prairie cloth unfurled west to the Big Horns, where storms lingered before they burst
onto the flats. Billowing clouds grazed across an endless blue sky like a herd of white
buffalo. The emptiness of the place fled away from the lonely little town in every
direction.
Cassidy was thrilled by
it. He imagined the breeze swirling to life in the distant mountains, sweeping over the
snow that still capped the highest peaks, and drifting down to soothe his sweaty face.
"Whoa, you can see
forever!" Cassidy marveled, resting his chin on the rusted rail, surveying the sweep
of land he'd never seen quite this way. Maybe it was the Promised Land the Old Ones saw.
He saw far-off ranch
houses, a web of washes and gulleys, dust chasing a truck on a dirt road, and off to the
west, a lumpish outcropping where he and Daniel often hunted for arrowheads and horny
toads.
"Look, that's the
Pumpkin Butte, Danny!" Cassidy said excitedly, scrambling to his knees. "It
doesn't look so big from here. Why do they call it that ... Danny? Stand up and you can
see the ..."
The railing shrieked as it
ripped free.
Cassidy had leaned too
heavily upon the old baluster as he angled for a better view. The decrepit metal whined, a
bolt popped, and Cassidy plunged forward into the empty sky.
It happened too fast to
scream.
Daniel grabbed for him.
Almost by luck, his left hand clasped a fold of Cassidy's T-shirt.
It tore away like wet
paper.
His right hand -- or three
fingers of it -- barely hooked the top of Cassidy's jeans. The dead weight of his little
brother's body falling over the edge slammed Daniel's face into the grate walkway ... but
he held on.
"Don't move!" he
screamed.
Sixty feet up, Cassidy
flailed grotesquely, desperately. He hung face down, powerless to grasp the walkway above.
He was connected to this
world, to life itself, only by Daniel's one-handed clutch. Below him, the dead of the
earth.
"Goddammit, don't
move!" Daniel half-grunted, half-yelled again.
Daniel flattened himself
across the narrow catwalk, jamming his foot into a tight space against the tank itself,
like an anchor. He tried again and again to grab Cassidy's arm with his free hand. He
couldn't reach it.
"Reach back!"
Daniel barked at Cassidy.
His little brother,
beginning to panic, tried to feel Daniel's unseen hand in midair behind him. He couldn't.
Daniel was losing his
grip.
Cassidy flung his left arm
back. Daniel intercepted it, heaving him upward and back.
Cassidy felt his arm
squirt-pop from its socket, like a drumstick yanked from an overcooked duck. The blue sky
flashed in his face. His skinny little rib cage slammed into the railing, knocking the
wind out of him.
Daniel grappled his
frightened little brother onto the catwalk, to safety. Daniel had saved him, and at the
moment, Cassidy thought of nothing else.
They hunkered on the
catwalk, tight against the tank, for a long time. Both were afraid to move, afraid their
perch might collapse under the weight of a sparrow now. Sparks of pain coruscated like St.
Elmo's fire through Cassidy's dislocated shoulder. He was too shaken to move. He couldn't
talk. He closed his eyes and trembled. Then he began to cry when he thought about the
trouble they faced at home.
Daniel nursed a seeping,
raw scrape on his arm and dawbed at his bleeding nose, where his face had smashed into the
meshed steel of the catwalk. He didn't talk either, and his face was empty.
His eyes fixed on a
distant place he could not have seen, even from the highest point on Mount Pisgah. He
stared down through the old cottonwoods upon their mother's grave.
Then he said something
that frightened his little brother, almost as much as the plunge off the tower. For the
rest of his life, it would be as chilling to Cassidy as the sound of hurtling into the
silent and immeasurable space between life and death.
"How far do you think
it is to heaven?"
Even then, so close,
Cassidy didn't know.
Buy now at Amazon's Kindle Store!
The original trade paperback edition published by Laughing Owl Publishing
Mass-market paperback edition published by Berkley Books (Penguin/Putnam)
Amazon Angel Fire
Amazon: Angel Fire MMP
[Delivered From Evil] [Outlaw Texas] [Sourtoe]
[The Darkest Night] [Outlaw Rockies] [The Deadline] [The Obituary]
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