Excerpt from The Fruit of Stone by Mark Spragg, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Our women, too," she said. "Naked. Naked as the day they were born. They fought naked with their men. They died at their men's sides."

She stood in front of him and flapped her apron to cool his face and laughed, and when she laughed her body ran heavier with sweat. Her gray hair came undone from where she'd gathered it at the back of her head, and it hung about her shoulders, and matted to her forehead and at her temples.

"The women whose time it was to bleed smeared the blood on their bellies and on their thighs." She leaned into him. She gripped her breasts and her voice rose. "Imagine it, boyo," she said. "We ran naked in the night. In the forests. We howled. We threw ourselves against the Romans' wall. That's who you are. That's the blood that's come up strong in your head."

She held her face close to his. She whispered, "Do you know what happened then?"

He shook his head. She smiled and straightened.

"The Romans pissed down their legs and ran like children." She pressed her hands to her hips. "That's what happened then."

She walked to the living room and returned with the framed photograph of her wedding day and held it beside her face, the photograph facing out. The picture glass flashed cool and began to cloud in the steam.

"This was a day," she said.

She pulled a wooden chair in front of his and sat with the photograph in her lap. She leaned back and pursed her lips, and they listened to the pots boil on the stove.

"Two years after this photograph was made your grandfather and I were on Ellis Island. 1917," she said, "and both of us only twenty-two. We brought a trunk of clothes, a Bible, a bar of soap, a box of buttons, our burrs, and this picture wrapped in a woolen vest. Think of it, boyo."

She propped the picture against the bulge of her gut. Her wet thumbs worked along the frame-edge.

"It was ungodly hot in the receiving hall," his grandmother said, "and we stunk from the weeks of passage, but we were in love and we kept our eyes sharp. We stood on line. I stood behind the man, and he reached behind and took my hand. We never stepped away."

She leaned forward, the wedding picture still in her lap.

"Your grandfather was an even-spoken man. Even then. He didn't say what he didn't mean. When we got to the front of the line, I stepped to his side. He told the immigration officer that we were from a farm east of Coldstream. Southwest of Edinburgh. That our farm was sold. He told the man that we had some savings. He said we'd save more. He said we'd come for a new life. He told the man we were moving west. He told it all twice. I heard it both times."

His grandmother righted herself in the chair and turned the photograph and pressed it to her heart. She closed her eyes.

"We told them all we'd come to take up this new country. We told them our arms were young and our backs were strong. We told them we'd hold America to our hearts."

She opened her eyes and looked to her sides and lowered her voice.

"We didn't tell them we'd kill them," she said. "Kill every last mother's son of them if we were turned away."

She stood all at once and steadied herself against the chair and walked the wedding photo back to the mantel in the living room, and returned. She stood the chair under the table.

"Get up," she said. "We've had our rest."

He got up and leaned into the double sink and took up a paring knife and cut the stalks and leaves to length for the compost bin.

"When did Ansel come?" he asked.

"Later," she said. "Almost thirty years. 1947. It was after the second war and your father was just old enough to be of use."

He nodded and scooped the rootcrop peelings out of the sink basin and sacked them.

She spooned whole plums from their flats and eased them into the boiling water and set a timer to know when they were blanched.

Copyright © 2002 by Mark Spragg. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, Putnam.