Excerpt from Buckeye by Patrick Ryan, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt

Buckeye

Cal Jenkins was born in the spring of 1920 with one leg shorter than the other. Just two inches shorter, but that was enough to make plenty of things difficult. Balancing on a bicycle took twice as long for him to learn as it did for other kids. Track and field was out of the question. So was walking without a pronounced limp or going up and down a set of stairs without securing himself on the railing—until his father, amateur carpenter and junk collector, improved Cal's condition by carving a new, thicker sole out of tire rubber and nailing it onto his left shoe. At school, boys made fun of the way Cal walked, then made fun of the shoe with the extra-thick sole (someone noticed within an hour of the first day he wore it). But one boy—flush-cheeked and small for his age—pulled Cal aside during morning assembly and told him he was unique in God's eyes. "I know," the boy said, "because I am too. I can't touch my toes, you see. I have unusually tight hamstrings." He bent over to demonstrate, and his fingertips barely reached his kneecaps. "We're each meant for a special thing," the boy said, and when Cal asked what his special thing was, the boy shrugged and said the two of them would have to wait to find out.

What they found out—separately, and years later, after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and threw the country into a panic, after young men stopped waiting for their numbers to be drawn and began to volunteer—was that having one leg two inches shorter than the other was enough to make a person unfit for military service, while having unusually tight hamstrings wasn't. That boy, Sean Robison, was sent from Ohio to Mississippi for basic training, and was then sent to Tunisia, and from Tunisia to Sicily, and from Sicily to Germany, where he was shot through the neck in the Hürtgen Forest while reloading his rifle and reciting the Lord's Prayer. Cal remained in his hometown and got a job in a concrete plant. He read comic books and adventure novels into his twenties. He married a local girl named Becky and eventually went to work in her father's hardware store. Sometimes he wondered if he would ever discover what his "special thing" was—his purpose, he'd decided—especially in the face of a world war that wouldn't have him. He was so conscious of not being overseas that he found his limp worsening all by itself. He told people about his leg, people who hadn't asked and didn't care. Sometimes he even pointed to his shoes, ordered now from a medical supply company in Dayton. "My condition causes hip problems," he'd say. Which was true, though he had yet to experience any.

Bonhomie had been founded in a northwest pocket of Ohio in 1857 by a small group of merchants and their families, on land transformed by the Last Ice Age, when a glacier nudged its way down from Canada and melted, creating not only Niagara Falls and the Great Lakes, but also a vast swamp across the top of Ohio and Indiana that took thirty years to drain and left behind soil densely ripe for farming. The town was built with local lumber, shale, and limestone, and with granite from North Carolina, marble from Vermont and Colorado, and steel from Pennsylvania—all of it brought in by rail. For a time, the town was a grid of nine streets, four running north–south and five east–west. The population grew from within as much as it could manage, and from without as much as it needed to. It swelled with migrant workers and their families during harvest time—corn and wheat and tomatoes and sugar beets—and shrank again when the workers moved on. Others moved into the area for the jobs created by the factories that sprang up around Hancock County. Immigrants from Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and many other countries were processed through Ellis Island and absorbed by the cities and towns of the east, though some went west—and some of those stopped and settled down in Bonhomie, which seemed as good a place as any. Over time, the original grid became known as downtown, and what wasn't downtown became known as neighborhoods. Not sections, which would have suggested clear dividing lines and the need for those lines, but general neighborhoods that took shape as people found their people. There were well-to-do neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods, and there were all the neighborhoods in between. There was a neighborhood called Tiller's Flat, where several Mexican families and nearly all the Black families in town—less than a dozen—lived, many of whom had moved from the South for the industry jobs (and to get away from the South). There was a neighborhood of apartment buildings and bungalows called Chesterton that was made up mostly of migrant families from out west, and a neighborhood situated between the two synagogues that was thought of as mostly Jewish. When people wanted an Irish neighborhood to point to, they could always refer to the block with St. Catherine's and Good Shepherd School as Vatican City. And scattered throughout these neighborhoods were all the people who didn't think they belonged to any group, most of them Protestant.

Buckeye copyright © 2025 by Patrick Ryan. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. Cannot be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.