To Die in California

By Newton Thornburg

While investigating his son’s suspicious death, a father descends into darkness in this thriller by “a commanding writer of unusual delicacy and power” (The New Yorker).
 
The police call on David Hook at his farm in Illinois, telling him his son Chris has committed suicide. But David knows something else must have happened in California to lead to Chris’s death. Diving into his son’s life, David discovers political corruption, immorality, and evil that shocks him to his very core. But it also awakens something lurking within, something David enjoys . . . something that poses an even bigger threat to those who hurt his son.
 
“One of the truly great American writers of the 20th Century.” —The Guardian
 
“Has an instant grab.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
“A born storyteller.” —St. Louis Post Dispatch
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781626817456

Book preview

1

Though he was looking down through gusting snow at a box holding the body of his firstborn son, David Hook’s eyes were dry. His heart was dry. He might have been some stranger who had absently wandered in upon this gathering among the gravestones and now found himself standing in the very center of it, and with eyes not only dry but cold too, a reporter’s eyes. He missed nothing, not even the simple antique beauty of the scene, its evocation of an America all but dead and buried itself now: these neighbors of his, these countryfolk in their shiny Sunday best, the hard vital weathered men and their drab women and cool longhaired young, who had gone to school with his son and made hay with him and maybe even loved him too, for there was weeping among their ranks, tears falling from some eyes anyway if not from his own.

As much as it was possible to love a cemetery, Hook loved this one, mostly for its rows of small ancient stones and the messages they bore, their litany of pioneer hardship and loss and courage. But he also liked the remoteness of the place, its quiet hilltop serenity and its shabby grounds from which one could see for miles, an experience all too rare in the flat farmland of southwestern Illinois. Now, though, in mid-December, that same view made for poor shelter against the wind, which blew Reverend Hodson’s words at him in gusts, like the snow:

I shall not want. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He restoreth my soul.

The Reverend’s squat figure facing him across the coffin obscured Hook’s view of his wife’s grave, but he was able to see the first Hook family marker in the cemetery, that of his great-grandfather James Hook. The modest stone was no less laconic than the man himself was reputed to have been, giving only his name and dates, 1855-1904. When Hook was a boy the place still had been known as the old Baptist graveyard, having been the burial ground of a country church that had burned down on this same hill around the turn of the century. But in recent years, in fact ever since the Second World War, people generally had called it Hook’s cemetery, possibly because his farm had grown to surround it on three sides or maybe because they knew that it was he who kept it up after a fashion, swinging in with a tractor and sicklebar a few times each summer to mow down its ever-flourishing crop of weeds.

So in effect this day Hook was burying his son in ground that touched his own and bore his name as well. Yet as he stared at it now, at the sandlike snow whipping under the coffin into the black pit beneath, he felt as if he were placing his son not in some familiar ground of home but in an alien, almost lunar soil. He had his arm around his two surviving children, sixteen-year-old Bobby on the outside and the year-younger Jennifer in between, both hugging each other, trembling and crying in the desperate grip of his arm. He himself would not cry, could not cry. He knew that if he allowed himself that luxury for even a moment he would end up falling on the casket like some poor sobbing peasant mother and that it would take men, it would take farmers like himself, to pull him free. So he held on to all he had in the world now, his two children and his rage—for there was still that, of course, and it had become his spine now, his blood and breath, his tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. As long as he had it, this treasure of rage, he could go on.

The Reverend Hodson’s voice gusted at him again, puffed and preening now, for these were the man’s own words and not his deity’s. And O, our dear heavenly Father, our blessed Jesus, we pray that Thou wilt grant eternal peace and life everlasting to the soul of this young man, whom, as we all here today can testify, truly lived his life according to the golden rule…

Hook, who despised bad grammar in anyone pretending to eloquence, did not hear the rest of the man’s prayer. The solecism, like a thrown rail switch, sent the train of his attention wandering off into the trees, the cemetery’s graceful old maples and dead-leaved oaks, and he observed that the wind was shifting, was southerly now. If it held, the temperature would rise in the next few days. The thin snow would melt. Christmas would not be white after all, not that it would matter to him, for where he was going it would be green.

On his left his Aunt Marian suddenly cried out and Hook, feeling Uncle Arnie struggling to hold her, realized that it was all over, the ceremony finished. The Reverend was coming around the coffin toward him, his stocky figure properly bent and condoling, though Hook thought he could see in the man’s doughy face a look of muted triumph. See? it said. You finally needed me. In the end you all need me.

Nodding, Hook thanked him but barely touched his proffered hand, for Jenny had collapsed against him and was holding onto his arm with all her strength—to keep him there, he knew, hold them both there, for to move away would be to acknowledge the finality of the thing, that their Chris, their shining splendid loved and loving Chris, was actually dead, actually lying there in that box about to be covered over with earth. To leave would be to accept that it was all not some fantastically detailed nightmare from which they would soon wake. Nevertheless Hook gently forced her away from the grave, moving slowly, holding her up, with Bobby on the other side of her—Bobby, who if anything had to feel even more bereft than they, for they at least had known where their lives had ended and Chris’s had begun. They had not all their days played with him and gone to school with him and worked with him; they had not fought for their lives with him or lain together in the warm summer nights giggling at what scatological humor Hook could only guess at, smile at, from his room across the hall. Yet Bobby helped him with Jenny as they headed toward the gate and the cars lined up outside it, along the blacktop road.

On the way, friends kept stopping them, not so much to talk as to touch them with their hands, pat them, give them their twisted smiles of sympathy, which were genuine, Hook knew, for it was Chris in the coffin and not himself. Mrs. Corman, a neighbor and high-school English teacher as Hook himself once had been, tried to speak but had to give it up. He would have taken her hand and tried to comfort her but Jenny was still holding onto him, pressing her face against his shoulder. Even old Emil Strickler, whose last hundred acres Hook had bought at a fair price, and earned the man’s undying resentment in the bargain—even Emil came up and put his hand on Hook’s arm, squeezed him.

Others walked along with them. A weeping George Anderson cursed out loud. "It don’t make no goddamn sense, Dave! Why him, huh? Why him? Why not us? Why not me?" Two winters before, when George had broken his ankle hopping down from a tractor, Hook and Chris had seen to it that the man’s thirty-cow dairy herd went on producing through all the months of his mending.

They came to the cars and got in, Hook and his children into the rear of the first car, his aunt and uncle into the second. And it seemed ridiculous to Hook. They could have walked. A quarter-mile down the road, down the hill, was the gate to his farm; another quarter-mile back was his house. Yet he knew that they had to drive, that they had no choice, just as they had no choice but to suffer the presence of most of the mourners at his house for the next few hours, and for that matter just as he had had to suffer the absurdity of the whole ceremony, the rite of Christian burial. They lived here. They would go on living here. A man had to bend now and then. For himself, Hook would have preferred just the five of them, his family, bringing Chris’s body here and lowering it into the ground next to his mother’s with no more ceremony than the silence of their grief. And with this thought, as the mortician Rohmer discreetly closed the door of his prized Cadillac behind him, Hook felt the thing coming at him anew, and all out of control now. It was like being in a skiff on a fogged sea and out of nowhere there was suddenly this great dark shape slipping silently toward him through the mist, a ship’s prow, a shape of death, of loss. And then abruptly it was gone, was past him, moving just as silently on. Someday it would not miss him, he knew. But now was not the time for it, not the time for grief. Now was the time for control.

Hook looked at Jennifer sitting between him and Bobby. Meeting his eyes, she put her hands to her face and Hook looked away from her, only to see his son whipping his head furiously back and forth. The boy’s mouth was open; he was trying to speak.

Some of them looked like they wondered, he got out finally. Like they believed maybe he really did kill himself.

We know better, Hook said.

Why’d they have to lie out there? Why’d they— But the boy could not go on. He began to pound his fist against his knee, slowly, but with brutal force.

Hook seized his wrist. I don’t know why. But we’ll find out, son. We’ll change it. The words felt good to him, good on his lips, like the cubed bread of a childhood communion, like the recitation that accompanied the bread’s ingestion, a statement of faith and fact, solid, unarguable.

In the front, Rohmer started the car and they began to move down the narrow road toward the creek bridge and just beyond it the entrance to his farm. Along the creek bottomland stretching to their right about fifty head of Hook’s Black Angus herd were placidly moving among the brokendown corn stalks, scavenging for any grain the picker might have missed six weeks before. It was a hobby for them, not a necessity; they got all the hay and silage they needed.

I want to go with you, Bobby said.

Hook did not answer him. He would go alone, of course. The boy knew that. It was not a matter for discussion.

Except for the stretch of cleared ground along the creek, the rest of his land bordering the road was rough and wooded, virgin white oak and hickory with a sprinkling of maple and ash, and for Hook it was never anything but beautiful, the muted grays and blues of winter now, the black electricity of its barren limbs, just as important to him as the bright glory of its springtimes and autumns. And as always, he found it strange that such beauty was held against him, was somehow part of his neighbors’ brief against him, along with his college degree and his unbelief and just his character in general, his cold unblinking inability to be or even pretend to be just plain folks. That he, a farmer, a businessman the same as they, would leave this land along the road in a wild state instead of clearing it off and seeding it, making it work and produce—this, Hook knew, was one further heresy as far as they were concerned, further proof that he was not one of them. But as the Cadillac swung into his gravel drive now, leading the cortege over the cattle gate and up the long hill through the woods, Hook did not doubt the rightness of his decision. This strip of woodland was the stone wall of his castle. It was the moat between his world and that other, larger one outside, the one that had just cost him the life of his son.

As they reached the top of the hill the woods ended abruptly and the main part of Hook’s farm stretched out before them, some three hundred acres of rolling pasture and hayfields, with his house and farm buildings lying among an island of trees almost in the center of the cleared expanse. Back on the other side of the blacktop, beyond the kindred strip of woods there, he owned a similar piece of ground, only twice as large. And two miles east, toward the town of Banner Hill, was the hundred acres he had bought from Strickler, flat rich land he planted to corn to fatten whatever cattle he did not sell to other feeders around the state. It was a large operation, one of the few big farms in the area, and it was almost wholly his own creation. When he had taken it over from his grandfather fifteen years before, there had been just the old one-hundred-sixty-acre nucleus, the house and barn and a small herd of pampered unproductive Jersey cows the old man kept because the high butterfat content of their milk consistently won him prizes at the county fair, if not much of a living. The new buildings, the added land, the three-hundred-head beef herd were all his own doing, with the help of Uncle Arnie and Bobby and especially Chris, who daily after school and each summer had worked like a man, or even better, like a man who cared. So there was no part of the farm, no fence or field or animal or building or piece of equipment, nothing the limousine drove past on the gravel road to the farmhouse now that did not carry with it, in Hook’s mind, the image of his son.

They entered the island of trees and came to a stop at the house. There were already a few cars parked alongside the drive, transportation for the ladies of the Bethel Baptist Church Philathea Class, friends of his Aunt Marian here to help the family, which meant serve the mourners all the cakes and casseroles and sandwiches and salads the ladies had brought with them in the first place. Yet Hook was not ungrateful for their effort. Nor did it bother him that some of the women would be in an almost festive mood, that as far as they were concerned one church function was pretty much like another, a social gathering, a time for fun and gossip. He could accept this, did not expect humanity to suspend its grossness for even this one special day. But he wanted desperately to be by himself now, just him and the children, or ideally just him alone, if Bobby and Jennifer felt anything as he did, aching for privacy, wanting to put his suffering beyond the reach of another’s eyes.

As Rohmer opened the car door and they got out, Hook gently herded the children and Aunt Marian and Arnie into the house ahead of him. Inside, a half-dozen Philathea ladies were standing about the food-burdened dining room table like sentries at attention, and in uniform too, all with the same tightly curled blue-rinsed gray hair and the same soft stout bodies stuffed into rigid girdles and Sunday dresses off the half-size rack in Sears. Aunt Marian went straight to them, crooning over the food, accepting their embraces, returning them with a vengeance. But all Hook could do was nod to the ladies as he and the children moved through the dining room into the new part of the house, which contained their bedrooms and the family room. Jenny pushed ahead, running to her room and falling onto her bed. Following her in, Hook sat down next to her and put his hand on her head, on her long blond hair. Bobby, coming in too, stood inside the door looking down at the two of them.

Well, it’s over, Hook said. This part is over.

Bobby nodded. It’s over.

Jenny turned her head away from Hook’s hand. I don’t believe any of this, she said. I don’t believe this is happening.

From the doorway Aunt Marian intoned: The Lord moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.

Hook looked at his aunt, his father’s sister, rangy like most of the Hooks, but heavy now after all her years in the kitchen, nibbling, testing, cleaning up leftovers, a good kind proper Christian lady on the outside, yet all saddle-leather toughness underneath, tough enough to have kept her Arnie working all this time against all his better instincts, and tough enough to have stepped in and saved them all seven years before, when Hook’s Kate had lost her life in the head-on crash near Alton and Hook for almost a year afterwards had spent his days like a man wandering in a battlefield searching for a death of his own. This same morning he had watched Marian salt her coffee and place the sugar in the refrigerator, and later he had seen her standing in the pantry shaking with grief, yet here she was now, so quick and easy with the mindless platitude. She was not a simple woman.

I’m not going in the living room, Jenny said now. I’m staying right here.

Her eyes filling, Marian looked at Hook. Tell her, David. Tell her she can’t. She has to come out.

Hook got up and put his arm around his aunt, patted her beefy shoulder. You cover for us for a while, okay? You and Arnie.

You’re not coming out either? But you have to, David. You just have to. For a while anyway. A few minutes.

Maybe later.

Uncle Arnie had come to the door now too. Let ’em do what they want, he told his wife. Me and you can handle it. All it takes is sittin’. Small and light for a Swede, Arnie Bergman at sixty was considerably outweighed by his wife, and usually out-maneuvered and out-opinioned too, but every now and then, when he cared, he would prevail. He prevailed now.

Aunt Marian moved toward the door. All right. It’s up to you, David. But try to come out, will you? They’ll expect you to.

Hook would not commit himself. For now, I’m going to stay back here with the kids, Marian.

But Jenny did not want that either. Dad, I just want to be alone now. I just want to lie here alone. I’ll be okay.

Hook touched her head again, patted her. Why could he not keep his hands off them? he wondered. They were here. They were right here, living. He could see them. Sure, honey, he said. Of course.

He turned to Bobby. You want to go out? Walk a while?

The boy nodded.

More out of habit than any compulsive fastidiousness, they put on boots before going outside, and it was a good thing they did, for the dung-rich soil of the farmyard had none of the frozen crust of the cemetery. Going past the barn, Hook saw that Coley Jonas, a neighbor’s son he hired to help out occasionally, was already back for afternoon chores, in body anyway if not in spirit, for the youth was lying back on some sacks of protein supplement stacked near the feed mill, and he was smoking. Any other day and Hook would either have given him a roasting or fired him on the spot, since the hairline profit margin in cattle-raising did not allow such luxuries as insuring one’s buildings at their replacement value. But this afternoon Hook simply walked on past the open door. The cattle in the feedlot, yearlings mostly, and accustomed to men on foot, barely bothered to glance up as Hook and Bobby moved through them and out the gate into the main pasture, a rolling dun carpet of brome and lespedeza and clover stretching out ahead of them all the way to a fence row of elm shade trees over a half-mile distant, and barren now, but still a favored haunt of the cattle, which Hook could see lying in clusters along the row, like scattered raisins.

Though Hook was taller than his son, and longer-legged, he had to step quickly to keep up with him. Where Chris had been built along his father’s lines, slim and bony, Bobby had the good fortune to favor his mother, and the same subtle force that had kept her body firm of breast and belly and buttock till her death at thirty-eight was evident in the boy, in the solid wedge of his torso and in his athlete’s rump and sturdy legs. A trackman like Chris, he had been the faster of the two, beating his older brother regularly in their wind sprints up and down the farm drive each morning before chores and breakfast. Yet Hook knew that the boy had counted these victories as less important than the fact that as the distance lengthened, as it stretched out to a mile and beyond, Chris had left him far behind, just as he had everyone else on the school track team and in fact almost every miler in the conference.

I don’t understand death, the boy said now. I can’t figure it.

I know, son. Neither can I.

One moment you’re alive. And the next you’re dead. It doesn’t make any sense. Why live in the first place?

Hook wished he had something to give the boy, but there was nothing. I don’t know, he said. I can’t say I know.

If we believed—I mean, you know, if we were like the others around here, and I believed he was in heaven and that we’d all be together again someday—that I could see him again—him and Mom— He was strangling on the words. It would be easier.

Yes. It would.

All I wish is he’d never gone out there, Bobby got out.

They walked on. The distant elms were still distant, still miniature. The sky was overcast, and the air—Hook could not feel the air at all. He was not sure whether it was warm or cold.

How are we so sure there’s no afterlife? Bobby asked.

We’re not.

"But we are. I know you are. I remember how you were after Mom."

Hook had no answer.

If I could only see him, Bobby said. Just once more.

Suddenly Hook’s eyes were not dry. And for some reason Bobby chose that moment to look at him. Through his tears Hook saw the boy react, saw his first look of shock, as if he had been struck in the face, and then the whole surface seemed to give way, crumpling from the force of the blow, and he took off running. Hook followed, trying desperately to catch him and hold him, keep him from doing whatever it was he felt he had to do. But it was no contest. The boy flew across the snow-dusted turf, effortlessly increasing the distance between them. Yet Hook would not let himself quit, and kept puffing along after him, running as fast as he could in his heavy coat and boots over the slippery ground. And even when it felt as if his heart was about to chop through his chest he kept on, until finally he saw Bobby slip and fall up ahead, not far from the row of elms. Trying to get up, the boy slipped again, and Hook drove himself even harder, sprinting the last few yards till he had his hands on him finally, holding him, dragging him down into the snow. For a few moments the boy fought him, and fought the earth too, raining his fists on both in a rage of impotence. Then Hook got his arms around him.

Let it out, son, he told him. It’s all right. Let it out.

And Bobby did. I loved him, Dad! he sobbed. I loved him! I loved him so much!

Me too, was all Hook could say. I loved him too, son.

Hook sat there on the ground holding the boy for a while, hugging his quaking body, and in time the cattle began leaving the fence row one by one and came toward them, gathering a safe distance away to observe this curious ceremony in the snow.

At two in the morning, after lying awake for three hours, Hook dressed and went outside. He would just walk down the farm road and back, he told himself. He would smoke a cigarette, and he would try not to think about it all, Chris and the funeral and California.

As he closed the door behind him and started across the lawn toward the gravel drive, the dogs heard him and came barking from their post in the implement building. Hook silenced them with a word and then they began jumping at each other, nipping and wriggling and talking in celebration of this rare event, a moonlight walk with the chief himself. There were two of them: Mickey, a spayed boxer-collie cross, all sweetness and femininity, and a huge black German shepherd male Bobby had named King six years before, only to have Uncle Arnie and the times rename him Martin Luther, which in turn the years had shortened to Marty. Like most shepherds, Marty was a one-man dog. And Hook was that man.

Now the two animals sped down the gravel road ahead of him, all the way to the woods, then stopped and came whipping back. While he walked the half-mile to the blacktop and back, they would cover ten times that distance. Hook lit a cigarette. The sky had cleared and the mid-month moon was just a paring short of fullness. Reflecting off the snow, it made the night almost dusklike in its brightness. Under his shoes the snow squeaked wetly, melting. With the morning sun it would disappear. As he passed the feedlot some of the cattle came snorting to their feet, frightened at seeing a man on foot at so late an hour.

He came to the end of the cleared land and started down the road through the trees. Six months before, the woods would have been raucous with insect sound, but this night there were only his footsteps on the snow-covered gravel to break the silence. Yet he knew there was life out there watching him, night creatures crouched and silent, waiting for the great predator to pass on. And especially he knew the owl was out there, a great horned owl that for years had patrolled this strip of woodland dividing his farm, and which Hook saw every now and then in daylight, like a wolf sitting in a tree, its lemon Life Saver eyes glowing furiously at him for one long timeless second before the huge body would abruptly sprout wings and glide off through the trees to some other perch to wait for darkness and a renewal of the hunt.

Hook had reached the blacktop now, but instead of turning back he headed west along the road toward the hill on which the cemetery rested. To him, this strip of blacktop was like the nave of a cathedral, a path running between the great pillars and buttresses of the trees crowding the hills on either side, and indeed there were times in early morning and at sundown when the light filtering through the leaves and branches there created a rage of color not unlike that of a cathedral’s stained-glass windows. Yet now, at night, Hook knew the small valley for what it was, a cathedral of death if anything, a kingdom in which the owl reigned and the only ritual, the only chorus, was the shriek and squeal and rustle of his victims. Hook felt no pity for them. Men were no better off. As far back as he could remember, he had had no illusions about the vulnerability of his kind. He had learned it the first time at the age of four or five, on a tricycle pedaling furiously to catch up with a neighbor boy on another trike, and had been right behind him when an automobile, braking, tires screaming, hit the boy broadside and sent him tumbling down the street like a football. That had been in Wauwatosa, one of the many Midwest suburbs where Hook had lived as his father kept moving from one job to another. Later, as an eighteen-year-old sailor during the last year of the Second World War, Hook had learned about death again, but in a different way and on a different scale. Waiting at Long Beach for his ship, a destroyer, to be refitted, he had been temporarily assigned to shore duty in a warehouse, and for a month had spent ten hours a day seeing to the handling and the storage and the shipment home of dead Marines. He had been a warehouseman of death.

But of course, you forgot. The years passed and you spent them with the living, and you even created new life yourself, and there was not much reason to think about death. You were like a rabbit in the spring sunshine feasting on soybean sprouts, and then suddenly it was night and the owl was on you and you never even heard his approach.

Dad, where’s Mom?

Alton. At the dentist’s.

Still?

Still.

It’s almost six. I’m starved.

So make supper.

She should’ve been back by now.

She’ll be here.

When?

Soon.

But he had been wrong.

Hook caught himself now and consciously tried to put all that out of his mind. The dogs, finally tired of roaming the countryside, had fallen in beside him, Marty at his heel and Mickey wisely on the outside. The snow had melted off the blacktop, so Hook had no trouble walking up the steep hill to the cemetery. He did not know he was going to enter it until he had already done so, carefully pulling the old wrought-iron gate closed behind him in order that none of his neighbors driving past might see it open and conclude that he was there. It was one of the things he liked least about himself, that he valued the respect of men he in turn respected hardly at all. He did not care whether they liked him or not, but he would not

Reviews for To Die in California

[lovinglit · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In a nutshell, this book is literary noir. It is certainly dark in tone and rich in description. The pages are dense with words and the book itself deals with barely a fortnight in the life of a father dealing with the apparent suicide of his son. The way he deals with it is to refute the official version of is death, and to go out to California to find out whodunit. He appeals to the police, who tell him to await proper procedure (yeah right, as if a capable, practical man like this could do that!), he snoops around bars and neighbours and goes to the crime scene to see and to question. But mainly he just really wants to clear the name of his son, who he believes would not have died in the way described in the papers. It is fast moving in spite of the lengthy descriptions, but benefits from fast reading in order not to get bogged down. Although some actions taken are fairly unbelievable, there are some incredibly insightful passages dealing with the human condition, life and death, and just life.

[dinoreader · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Probably deserves more than four stars, less than five.

Starts slow, it was written in 1973 and reflects the style of the time, it becomes very good and finishes very realistically.

Well worth reading. Thornburg writing is very good and he doesn't flinch from a real finish or try to force the characters into a finish that isn't them.

Not uplifting or for depressives.

[ahs7wolfy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

David Hook hears of his son's death and is unable to accept the reported verdict of suicide. So he leaves the rest of his family behind on his farm in Banner Hill and heads off to Santa Barbara to see if he can uncover exactly what did happen. Finding discrepancies in the statements of the two women present at the time of death David keeps prodding and pushing trying to get to the truth of the matter. Into the picture comes local politician Jack Douglas and his associates. Are they in some way linked to the death and why is everyone so intent on covering everything upCan David Hook uncover the truth and will he like it if he does? Are there greater consequences at stake and how will this investigation cause more than just a few ripples for those involved?A decent mystery/thriller that does feel a little dated though I did want to know the outcome.