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“The state people might not let her come back,” Dave says about Sarah Jane. “Those government people don’t like inconvenience. “

“Nothing to feel guilty about,” Sally tells Christine. She touches Christine’ s hand, kind of sympathetic, then holds onto Dave’s arm.

I set the pup on the ground. Sarah Jane has her own personal grocery cart that she pushes four blocks to the store. The store manager puts up with it. I wonder if 911 returned the grocery cart. Meanwhile, Mitchell heads toward his house to get money for the kid. Sally and Dave and Christine sort of drift away. Sally leans a little on Dave, her red scarf a spot of color on this gray northwest afternoon. Skylarking starts up between pup and kid. A breeze comes by, promising the temperature will hit sixty.

It looks like all of us will make it through another spring.

I look at the heap of wood, knowing that winters and woodpiles and lives never come out exactly even; but the red and golden fir is beautiful to see. Young creatures are beautiful. I watch the kid and pup. The kid throws a stick. The pup knows exactly what to do. It’s easy to understand why Sarah Jane goes crazy, but I’m not sure my reasons and her reasons match.

Jack Cady (1932-2004) won the Atlantic Monthly “First” award in 1965 for his story, “The Burning.” He continued writing and authored nearly a dozen novels, one book of critical analysis of American literature, and more than fifty short stories. Over the course of his literary career, he won the Iowa Prize for Short Fiction, the National Literary Anthology Award, the Washington State Governor’s Award, the Nebula Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the World Fantasy Award.

Prior to a lengthy career in education, Jack worked as a tree high climber, a Coast Guard seaman, an auctioneer, and a long-distance truck driver. He held teaching positions at the University of Washington, Clarion College, Knox College, the University of Alaska at Sitka, and Pacific Lutheran University. He spent many years living in Port Townsend, Washington.

Resurrection House, through its Underland Press imprint, is publishing a comprehensive retrospective of his work in a project called The Cady Collection.

Nathan Ballingrud was born in Massachusetts in 1970, but has spent most of his life in the South where he studied literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at the University of New Orleans. In addition to writing, he’s been a cook on oil rigs and barges, a bouncer at a strip club, and a bartender in New Orleans. His first collection, North American Lake Monsters from Small Beer Press, won the Shirley Jackson Award, and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Awards.

An exceptional writer.

[Jack Cady is] a lasting voice in modern American literature.

Jack Cady’s knack for golden sentences is an alchemy any other writer has to admire.

Jack Cady is above all, a writer of great, unmistakable integrity and profound feeling. He never fakes it or coasts, and behind every one of his sentences is an emotional freight that bends it both outward, toward the reader, and inward, back to the source.

A writer whose words reverberate with human insight.

His structural control and the laconic richness of his style establish Cady in the front ranks of contemporary writers.

When Cady settles into yarn-spinning, his stories have the humor and comfortable mastery of Faulkner or Steinbeck.

The Hauntings of Hood Canal

Inagehi

The Jonah Watch

McDowell’s Ghost

The Man Who Could Make Things Vanish

The Off Season

Singleton

Street

Dark Dreaming [with Carol Orlock, as Pat Franklin]

Embrace of the Wolf [with Carol Orlock, as Pat Franklin]

Phantoms

Fathoms

Ephemera

The American Writer

The Hauntings of Hood Canal is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used in an absolutely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2016 by the Estate of Jack Cady

Introduction © 2016 Nathan Ballingrud

All rights reserved, which means that no portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is U026, and it has an ISBN of 978-1-63023-034-0.

This book was printed in the United States of America, and it is published by Underland Press, an imprint of Resurrection House (Puyallup, WA).

Always before, bad men took the hint.

Series Cover Design and Art Direction by Jennifer Tough

Cover Layout by Darin Bradley

Book Design by Aaron Leis

Collection Editorial Direction by Mark Teppo

First Underland Press edition: June 2016.

The first edition of this novel was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2001. “Welcome Sweet Springtime” first appeared in Connecting: Twenty Prominent Authors Write About the Relationships That Shape Our Lives , published by Jeremy P. Tarcher in 1998. “Flying Home” first appeared in Western Edge in 1977, and was later collected in Tattoo , published by Circinatum in 1978. Both stories are © the Estate of Jack Cady.