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The author’s name 393 Martha Bennett Stiles from Lonesome Road In 1933 Martha Bennett Stiles was born a Virginian. She finally made it through the Cumberland Gap into the promised land of Kentucky in 1977, where she lives on a thoroughbred horse farm in Bourbon County and writes delightful stories for children and adolescents and novels for adults, including Lonesome Road (1998), a sinister story of a little boy who quietly disappears one morning as he starts to school and the horror that builds inside his family after his disappearance. The reader enters this mystery on its very first page. h April frost glitters where the shadow of the mailbox and its post paints a gallows on the hard earth. A boy stands where the shadow almost touches his toes. He is considering climbing the fence that separates him from the field where a gray mare quietly grazes. She is due to foal soon; he would give his baseball not to be leaving her. Suddenly his head turns. From the field a killdeer cries out. The boy’s mother loves these boomerangwinged birds who, like her, were once creatures of the shore. The boy scarcely hears them; he is listening for danger. The boy imagines that the mailbox is a tree which he has planted, and that at any moment men with axes may drive their Jeep into view over the rise where the big yellow Bourbon County bus appears at that hour every school day. The men will want to chop down the tree. He hears them shout first orders, then threats. He knows what they want, though they speak only Korean. When he stands resolute between them and the tree, they try to kill him. There are five of them. With his book bag he knocks their axes aside, one after another. When he gets his hands on one of these axes, the men scramble back into their Jeep. The car that slows to a stop beside the boy is a 1980 Chevrolet with the battle flag of the Confederacy—the flag of half his great-great-grandfathers—fluttering from its antenna. The boy has stopped signaling base camp with his walkietalkie . The Chevrolet’s idling engine is even louder than its radio. Born to lose, the radio whines with belligerent self-pity. Despite the chill, the driver has rolled down his front windows. His car sits out at night, and he doesn’t fool with wiping off the damn condensation. 393 394 The Kentucky Anthology The driver is in his twenties. His jaw is lean and winter reddened; it has a sullen slackness. He wears a blue shirt faded from many launderings, none recent. His sleeves are rolled up, revealing muscular forearms, their hair too light to obscure the work of the Panama City tattoo artist who was probably the only person in that country who gave him his money’s worth, though he spent all that he had. He eyes the boy through kinky bangs. “Hey Lang,” he asks, “you talking to the mailbox?” Lang’s best friend Breck’s bus stop is just around the corner. Lang chafes at his parents’ rule that he may not walk there unescorted. Offered a lift, he barely hesitates. Breck is still inside. He is telling his mother that he doesn’t need his jacket and she is zipping it up on him when the rusty Chevrolet drives by without stopping. ...

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