Excerpt from Life, and Death, and Giants by Ron Rindo, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Meg kept the comb, though she never used it again in Father's presence. When her hair grew back, almost as if in rebuke to Father, its curls were tighter and even more beautiful. In the sunlight, its golden sheen made it appear as if lit from within. Meg remained wary of Father thereafter, seldom spoke to him unless spoken to first. At her earliest opportunity, at age seventeen, she married an Amish man with family land in Pennsylvania. After she moved away, Meg returned home only four times, twice to attend to the birth of my children, once for Mother's funeral, and a final time when Father's body was laid to rest.

The summer I turned eleven, Father sold off our sheep and dairy goats and converted our barn into a sawmill, Absalom Yoder's Custom Hardwoods. For some time afterward, with almost no income as the business became established, we often relied upon the generosity of our people, and the ingenuity of our mother, to keep us fed and clothed. We ate a lot of soup, weak broth, sometimes nothing more than boiled farro and a little salt, the only spice Father allowed in our kitchen. Too much sweetness on the tongue, he said, distracts from the true sweetness of the Lord. In the winter, with candles too expensive and oil for lamps in short supply, we went to bed early, Meg and I together in one bed, doubling our blankets and piling raw fleeces over them to stay warm.

As is our way, we children helped to run the new business. It was noisy, messy, dangerous work, not nearly as pleasant as tending crop fields outside in the sunshine or caring for young animals, though I grew to love the scent of freshly cut wood. Because I was small, I was spared the most physical labor. I spent my days carrying scraps to the slab pile; sopping up spilled diesel fuel; sweeping the endless sawdust into waist-deep piles, with wads of merino wool jammed in my ears to muffle the fierce whine of the saw blade.

Mother begged Father to allow me and Meg to help with the housework instead, arguing that mill work was best suited to the boys. Father partially relented, granting the respite only to Meg. He said I worked harder, and took better direction, than Abel, Thomas, or John, and for these reasons he thought of me as a fourth son, rather than a daughter. I believe he meant this to be a compliment. It hurt me deeply, though I pretended to be flattered.

A tireless worker, Father toiled in the mill ten or twelve hours every day. Sometimes, in the throes of insomnia, he would work through the night as well. Quick to anger, he demanded a similar commitment to work from his family, and he let us know when we'd fallen short. Meg and my brothers feared him, as Mother did, I know, much of the time. Once, in a rage, he'd broken Abel's arm by yanking him from the table when Abel had refused to eat boiled brussels sprouts, bounty of the Lord's earth. Still, as the youngest, and shy, I was spared his Vesuvian rages. Sometimes if I were alone with him over lunch, he would give me the treat from his own lunch—an apple, sometimes a cookie Mother had made—winking at me as I savored it, as long as I did so quickly. "Don't dawdle, Hannah. The Lord didn't rest until the seventh day, and Genesis says nothing about a lunch break."

After a difficult year, Father's business grew and thrived. He custom cut hickory, hard maple, red and white oak, black walnut, and cherry, and he sold to furniture and cabinetmakers throughout the Midwest. His hardened steel, rough-cut sawblade was three feet across with over one hundred triangular teeth sharpened and oiled daily with Father's obsessive precision. Belt-driven by a rebuilt Cummins diesel engine mounted to the floor, that blade spun so fast it looked almost invisible, but it could slide through hard maple like a straight razor cutting flesh. "Don't get too close, Hannah," he once said to me. "That blade will slice through your skinny little neck so fast you will be looking back at your body while your head rolls across the floor."

Excerpted from Life, and Death, and Giants by Ron Rindo. Copyright © 2025 by Ron Rindo. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.