For sixty years the three willows along the Buckwha had been weeping. This August they began, very quietly, to bow.

In the first chapter, Mike O'Donnel rises at five to a valley wearing its mist like a second coat, and counts the wrong things one by one: the willows leaning down-valley toward the village; a child half-hidden in a photograph he has walked past for eight months; six cats fixed on a place at the foot of the largest tree where nothing, quite, can be seen; a stranger in a long coat for August walking the old rail bed; and a white stone, dew-fresh, with a Celtic cross cut into its face. A man does not, in eighty years, learn to read the difference between a stranger and a returning man. Mike has it in him anyway — and what walks the village's way this week has been waiting a great deal longer than sixty years.

Chapter 1 of  ...