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Excerpt of Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos
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Several of them are plein air painters. Being submerged in the landscape has given them a new appreciation for it. Their awareness of color is deeper and more refined; after all, they themselves provide at least some of those colors: the robust burgundy of milo seed heads, the eerily dense green of emerging soybeans. Many are engaged in ongoing scientific experiments. Others are linguists.

To label their pursuits as hobbies would be misleading. The dead fathers of Emlyn Springs are not dilettantes. They work long and hard. They postulate formulas and equations with assiduity and then set about the long, slow, solitary business of proof. This makes them very happy. Eternally happy.

Meet some of them. Observe their labors. Tread lightly.

Mr. Merle Funk, farmer (1874–1930), is preoccupied with subtle differences in grasshopper physiology. Waldo Closs, insurance salesman (1930–1962), studies the fragile nervous system of the four-leaf clover. Obediah Purdy, pharmacist and bicycle enthusiast (1826–1899), transcribes dialectical variations in bee-speak. And leading the landscape artists is Dr. Gerallt Williams (1902–2000), family physician and specialty carpenter.

When it comes to the animal kingdom, their studies are focused exclusively on native birds. They’re done with cattle and hogs. They’re fed up with chickens. Ezra “the Egg King” Krivosha (1888–1982)—who put Emlyn Springs on the map by promoting it as the Fancy Egg capital of the world—no longer cares one whit about the inner lives of exotic laying hens, but he’s fascinated by the social interactions of snow geese. And since his death a hundred years ago, Fritz Bybee, Esq., has been recording the genealogical history of a single family of pied-billed grebes.

Other dead fathers are engaged in researching the impact of weather upon the underbelly of the Nebraska landscape—and, by extension, upon all remains that are there interred: Mr. Roy Klump, owner of Roy’s Roofing (1930–1998), records the varying sound waves produced by different sizes of hail and notes their effect upon postmortem hair growth. Myron Mutter (1898–1982), pastor, observes the way that electrical currents passing through the earth in advance of a thunderstorm affect hearing loss. And Mr. Ellis Cockeram, podiatrist and choirmaster (1903–1979), is devising a means of measuring tornado-force winds by observing the escalating sensations that occur in his left fourth metatarsal.

The dead are just as certain as the living that a storm is on its way today, and soon—not by observing the sky, but through a particular chemical agitation in the soil, along with various corresponding skeletal anxieties. (Thankfully, Mr. Cockeram’s toes are unaffected.) Their softer remains are growing incrementally more acidic, and the earthworms, preferring a sweeter cuisine, are burrowing away.

Dead fathers don’t ask for much: solitude and quiet and detachment from the emotional vicissitudes of the living. They don’t thrill to demonstrative mourners. They can’t abide recklessness. And nothing upsets them more than willful stupidity.

Ergo, as far as they’re concerned, Llewellyn Jones deserves whatever he gets for behaving with such reckless disregard for the rules of storm safety, rules that each and every one of them can tick off in their sleep. And now the mayor is at the country club, parking his ’89 Marquis next to Bud Humphries’ ’84 F-150, shouldering his bag and heading directly for the first hole tee-off.

What the hell is he thinking?

Decoding the motivating forces behind human behavior is the academic province of dead mothers. In contrast to their male counterparts (those curmudgeons, digging in their fleshless heels, barking out rules with a catechismal self-importance), dead mothers—ah!—they travel.

Excerpted from Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos. Copyright © 2009 by Stephanie Kallos. Excerpted by permission of Grove Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.