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  I can always come back, I thought. There is no leaving so permanent that it cannot be undone by coming home again.

  An image came to me then. It was the same image I’d had when I was seven years old, riding the lawnmower up the hill to the Simpson house to save Grandpa’s life. It was an image of my father. He was tanned, as always, and shirtless, and grinning his bewitching grin. He flexed his arms, spit contemptuously on the ground, and slapped his palms together.

  “Let’s get to it,” he said.

  And he rubbed his hands in anticipation of the difficulty of the task ahead of us.

  From where I was standing at the mailbox, I could just see Annie’s house. The broken windows stared dumbly at the horizon. From the second-floor bedrooms, I knew, one could see far across the Lake, and on clear days Canada was visible, a thin black line on the horizon. For a moment I thought of going to her again; I had so much to tell her, and I wanted to take her in my arms and let her know that everything would be all right.

  But the same small voice in my head spoke up again. Just let her be, it said. If you really love her, let her be.

  I stuck the envelope in my shirt pocket and turned toward the house. I could hear the music clearly from where I stood out by the road. The musicians had shifted tempo now, after their initial lament. They were playing fast and hard, all three of them, with the peculiar pulsing tempo of genuine Irish music. The rhythm of Ceili music is irresistible, and to answer its call is instinctive. I could hear the entire house reverberating as dozens of feet stomped on the hardwood floor. I shuffled a few steps of an impromptu jig as I headed back.

  My life has been made of stories from beginning to end, and just when it seems one is ending, a new one begins. The world itself is woven of stories, each man and woman and child of us threading our own brightly colored tale into the bigger story that was already being told as we were born, and that will continue to be woven by others long after our threads have run out. But I have no fear that the stories themselves will ever run out. Stories are what I was fed on as a baby, a young boy, a teenager. Grandpa was overjoyed that I’d come along, he’d said, because my arrival meant he’d finally have someone to talk to in the big old house, someone who would listen to his stories, to help breathe life and color back into them. And it meant also that he was not, as he’d feared, the last of the Manns, but that there would be more of us, and that perhaps things would be different from now on. I know he thought this in the same way I know everything else about who I am and the people I come from: Grandpa told me, in his deep, rumbling voice. He’d held me in his arms the day he found me on the steps, looked deep into my blue Mann eyes, and felt a great and unutterable sense of relief. And from that first moment, he’d begun telling stories.

  Now that I was alone, the sole survivor of hundreds of years, the same thought began to occur to me, and I knew that I wouldn’t be the last of the Manns. More would come along, someday. I would take them through the house as Grandpa had taken me, leading them through it by their tiny hands, room by room, telling them the stories of the Manns who’d once inhabited this place and were now long gone in body, but who lingered in spirit and would continue to do so for as long as their names were spoken aloud. I could see this happening already, sometime in the future. It was time to stop looking behind me, and to turn my attention instead to what lay ahead.

  And I knew that when I looked into their baby-blue eyes, I would feel about them the same way Grandpa had felt about me. I would feel pride, joy, completion. We are daredevils, superpeople, heroes, we Manns. Small-town heroes, but heroes nonetheless. And I would think to myself as I looked at them what Grandpa had thought when he looked at me for the first time: Perhaps our greatness has only just begun.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Although writing is essentially a solitary endeavor, no writer can accomplish a work of any magnitude without the support of those friends and family who believe in him and in what he is doing. Mary Ingram Waugh was the first person to read this story in its earliest form, and it was she who convinced me that it was worth finishing; without her encouragement, this book would most likely not exist. My father, Dr. William John Kowalski Jr., unquestioningly and unhesitatingly supported me while this novel was in the final phase of completion. At the same time, my mother, Kathleen Emily Siepel, generously provided me with a quiet place to work. My friend and mentor, W. S. “Jack” Kuniczak, himself a novelist of formidable talent and achievement, gave me the advice and encouragement I needed whenever I needed it, which was often. And Peter Nash, also a gifted writer and a selfless teacher, had the decency and kindness to point out in exactly the right way that the book was not actually done when I thought it was, that I needed to take a deep breath, collect my thoughts, and begin yet again—a lesson for which I will be forever in his debt.

  The following people also helped me a great deal, whether they knew it or not: my brother, Patrick; my sister, Laura; Chris Maher; Heather Lovaglio; Dr. Ken Schiff, my first writing instructor and a good friend, and Marie, Rebecca, and Nick Schiff; Anita Iannello; Loretta Frankovitch; Lhasa de Sela; Bob and Laurie Martin; Annie and Ezra Nash; Paul Schmidt; Dave Beltran-del-Rio; Patricia Beltran-del-Rio; Bill Blais; Dr. Jorge Aigla; the entire Andrae family; Esther Woodruff; Anne Windom; Kevin Siepel; Tom Zimolzak; Tony, Anita, Emily, and Dante Stefanelli; Timothy March; Jonathan Cramer; John Hawkins; Father Hildebrand Greene; Jim Kerr; Chris Sarko Kerr; Jodi and Payton Kelly; Sandie Stefurak; and the indomitable Markus Greisshammer.

  I will never have adequate words to thank my agent, Anne Hawkins of John Hawkins and Associates, whose tireless energy, patience, and devotion to her trade have been an example in many ways, and without whose vision I would not have been able to achieve this final step of publication.

  I also wish to thank my editor at HarperCollins, Marjorie Braman, whose sweet nature and insightful comments were of invaluable help to me in the difficult process of revising this book, and whose confidence in me has been the source of renewed inspiration.

  Finally, to all my teachers, friends, and family members who are not mentioned here by name—every one of you who has touched me has helped me on my way, and you will have my gratitude always.

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  EDDIE’S BASTARD. Copyright © 1999 by William Kowalski. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Adobe Digital Edition May 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-195236-4

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