Good House by Bonnie Burnard

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In Canadian short-story writer Bonnie Burnard's deeply moving novel, we meet the Chambers family: Bill and Sylvia and their three children, an ordinary family from Ontario. Beginning in 1949, we follow the Chambers for the next fifty years through the many joys and disappointments of their lives: a childhood accident, a tragic illness ending in death, and a remarriage for Bill. Some of the children choose a traditional route, marrying and having children of their own. One forges her own very new path. The clan expands and changes; marriages fail and careers bloom. But despite the heart-aches and difficulties each member of the family faces, there is never a lack of love to be found. With writing so clear and crisp it rings with honesty and grace, Burnard's characters work their way under your skin and into your heart-an auspicious debut.

"Beautifully written. The ordinary moments of life become luminous, lovely, under this compassionate eye."
—Elizabeth Strout, author of Amy and Isabelle
"The finest novel published in some years…Its grace, its generosity, its humanity are present on each of its pages."
—Carol Shields, author of The Stone Diaries

From the Publisher

A Good House begins in 1949 in Stonebrook, Ontario, home to the Chambers family. The postwar boom and hope for the future color every facet of life: the possibilities seem limitless for Bill, his wife Sylvia, and their three children.

In the fifty years that follow, the possibilities narrow. Sylvia’s untimely death marks her family indelibly but in ways only time will reveal. Paul’s perfect marriage yields an imperfect child. Daphne unabashedly follows an unconventional path, while Patrick discovers that his happiness requires a series of compromises. Bill confronts the onset of old age less gracefully than anticipated, and throughout, his second wife, Margaret, remains, surprisingly, the family anchor.

This extraordinarily moving and beautifully crafted first novel was a number one bestseller in Canada where it won one of the country’s most prestigious literary awards, the Giller Prize, in 1999.

USA Today

A Good House is a true book, one to be treasured and shared with a sister, father or best friend.

Publishers Weekly

In 1952, 12-year-old Daphne Chambers falls from a trapeze and is left with a permanently asymmetrical face. In 1955, Daphne's mother, Sylvia, dies of cancer at age 40. From these two life-altering events, Canadian short story writer Burnard spins her engrossing debut novel, a traditional generational saga that unfolds with quiet grace and measure. Told from a variety of points of view, the book traces the upheavals and affirmations of the very ordinary Chambers family of Stonebrook, Ontario, from 1949 to 1997. The year after Sylvia's death, her husband, Bill, an injured WWII vet, remarries. His new wife, the unflappable Margaret, who used to work with him at the town hardware store, helps him raise his three children. Paul, the baby, becomes a hockey star and eventually a farmer, marrying young; oldest brother Patrick, a lawyer, is destined to be the keeper of family secrets; and middle child Daphne makes an eccentric choice for that time and place: she'll become the single mother of two daughters. As the years pass, the family, in nuclear and then extended form, gathers around the kitchen table to celebrate and to mourn. There are no saints, no Jobs, no Hamlets in Burnard's tale, just flawed people making the best possible choices given the passions and options of the moment, choices that sometimes require disingenuousness, stonewalling and outright lies. Changes in the initially remote town of Stonebrook are a significant strand in the narrative weave. Flashes of sly humor and an ability to avoid sentimentality are some of Burnard's skills, and the narrative's calm flow (once one gets past an initial excess of detail) builds to a deeply moving story of the truths of family life. 50,000 first printing; major ad/promo; author tour. (Sept.) FYI: A bestseller in Canada, this novel won the 1999 Giller Prize. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

This 1999 Giller Prize winner and Canadian best seller takes as its canvas 48 years in the lives of an Ontario family, beginning with hardware-store owner Bill Chambers and his wife, Sylvia, who soon dies. The book seeks not to dazzle but simply to present the highs and lows, the experiences ordinary and extraordinary, of a "normal" family. Yet the characters are so fully realized that one feels one has lived with them and knows them, as usually happens in Trollope's novels or in those of another Canadian, Carol Shields (although Burnard takes in several lives, while Shields generally focuses on one). Even the understated title--it isn't really a book about a house--has something to say about its solidity and graceful prose. One can even forgive Burnard occasional gaffe, like having one of her characters own a Mustang in 1963. This could easily become an Oprah book. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/00.]--Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, NY Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Entertainment Weekly - Valberg

[A] tender novel...by the book's ending, your level of attachment to this family, whose reservoirs of decency and humor run deep, may surprise you.

The Ottawa Citizen - Carol Shields

The finest novel published in some years in our country. Its grace, its generosity, its humanity are present on each of its pages...The Australian novelist Patrick White once announced that he had no interest in "plots," that he was only concerned with writing about life going on toward death. This is precisely the narrative arc Bonnie Burnard has chosen and so brilliantly brought into being. It is a daring feat, and one that will move the reader to recognition and, at times, to tears. Our literature needs this kind of real wealth, our own lives given back to us in the form of enduring language.

Time - Katherine Govier

[A] gem of a first novel...The true hero of this book is not the good house but what it holds, the family ... This is essential Burnard: appearances are lovingly, nostalgically recreated only to be followed by a devastating insight that belies all we initially see. The novel affects by compound evidence until the sheer weight of their days brings the Chambers family up close like old friends. There is something almost consciously cinematic about the scrutiny of A Good House: it is a long movie, elaborately staged, impeccably styled. It even finishes with a home video, followed by a still photograph of family members holding one another's children. It needs a key, thinks Margaret, or we'll forget who we are. A legend, it is called...She could be defining the novel. It is a legend of pain, pretense and hopeless love, the stuff that small towns, even big towns, are made of.

The Globe and Mail - A. F. Fraser

As compelling to the outsider...as one's own family history would be...Burnard manages, with what seems almost magical skill, to bring 11 major characters, as well as the characters of their homes and their shared and disparate worlds, fully to life ... Her first novel proves she is a master. Anyone who loves history, legends, architecture, comedies, psychological studies and rambling, delicious novels will love A Good House and will never again look at any family in quite the same way.

Burnard's strength lies in her sensitive wisdom and sharp eye for detail ... These are the kinds of characters we can't help growing attached to; we wish them well and worry for them—even after we've set Burnard's book aside.

Quill & Quire

Burnard's wise and assured first novel is an accomplishment to celebrate.

The Edmonton Journal

It is strange and wondeful to finish A Good House and look back at the arc it has followed—the children who began the novel are now old, or gone, their children have grown up, and the reader has been there as they lived their lives, witness to all the turns and tragedies they have encountered together and severally...Bonnie Burnard made her mark on the landscape of Canadian fiction with her first two books. Now, with the publication of A Good House, that mark is irrefutably indelible.

Winnipeg Free Press

[A Good House is] a celebration of the Canadian family and small-town life...characterization and setting come vividly alive.

William Otta

A Good House is the best proof in recent memory that realist fiction can contain the imaginative charge and impact of the wildest fantasy or science fiction—skillfully handled, the everyday world can amount to legend.

The National Post

Bernard is a master of the thumbnail sketch, capable of conjuring all a character's robust vitality in a few scant lines...

The Hamilton Spectator

A gripping story from the odds and ends of unremarkable lives...

The Sunday Daily News

In A Good House, Burnard exercises her considerable talent and skill as she provides readers with a story rich in detail, texturing and characterization.

The London Free Press

A Good House is written with confidence, steady wisdom, its large cast of characters beautifully assembled...rich layers of everyday life have been peeled back to reveal the often startling depths of ordinary human experience. The writer's fine eye for detail and her unerring sense of her characters' strengths and inadequacies help lend the novel its radiance and grace.

Kirkus Reviews

A multigenerational Canadian bestseller in which distinctive characters respond gallantly to love, death, and life's unexpected assaults on family happiness. Set in a small Ontario town on the shores of Lake Huron, the story begins slowly as it introduces the town and the Chambers family. The year is 1949, and Bill Chambers, a navy veteran who lost three fingers from his right hand in battle, is happily working again at the local hardware store. His wife Sylvia, a lively and wise woman, is a homemaker; their children, Patrick, Daphne, and Paul, are still in school. In the summer of 1952, 15-year-old Patrick's friend Murray McFarlane, the only son of wealthy but elderly parents, decides to produce a circus. But on opening night, Daphne, 12, who was to be the acrobat, falls mid-performance and badly breaks her jaw. Shortly after the accident, Sylvia becomes terminally ill. The family is strong and loving, but her death will continue to affect them in the years ahead. Even Murray, who loves Daphne and spends most of his time with the Chambers brood, will recall Sylvia's perceptive advice to him. Bill soon remarries, and his new bride, 40-ish Margaret—a beautifully rendered character: perceptive, generous, and sensitive—holds the family together in the years ahead. Prize-winning newcomer Burnard, who has published two story collections in Canada, occasionally renders the the passage of time too abruptly by using significant events as markers: the birth of Margaret and Bill's daughter Sarah; Paul's unexpected death; unmarried Daphne's two pregnancies; as well as weddings and divorces. But she deftly traces the impact of all these joyful and sad occurrences on the wholefamily.Margaret's ordeal in the 1990s, as she copes with Bill's dementia, is especially moving. One of those quietly resonant novels that memorably portray a family and a place as time presses on. First printing of 50,000

What People Are Saying

Alice Munro
A Good House is a deep read. You keep finding more and more satisfaction in the unshowy craft, the unique vision of this writer who can tell you hard truths, hopefully.
—(Alice Munro, author of The Love of a Good Woman)

Elizabeth Strout
Beautifully written. The ordinary moments of life become luminous, lovely, under this compassionate eye.
—(Elizabeth Strout, author of Amy and Isabelle)

Product Details

• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Reading Group Guide

Discussion Questions:
1. Given Margaret's pragmatic approach to her life, her awareness of the ways in which "a life gets built," and in particular her cool-headed decision to marry the widowed Bill Chambers, discuss the decades of love she offers to the Chambers family. How does her love show itself? Is it applied differently to different members of the family? How does it change as she gets older and more experienced in her step-motherhood?

2. Like many families of this time and place, the Chambers family, with the exception of Murray's first wife Charlotte, practices emotional restraint in the face of turmoil. Some conversations, for instance the one between Margaret and Patrick about Sylvia's skill as a softball player, begin in one decade and end several decades later. Compare this with the modern assumption that blunt honesty is best and that every ugly detail should be openly discussed.

3. Before she dies, Sylvia's discipline allows her to talk to her children honestly. She seems to be saying to them: "Yes, I am dying, but you still have lives to live, and this matters, too." Do you think Sylvia's approach is rare or common? Explain.

4. Discuss Daphne's fall from the trapeze. Could learning at such a young age that little stands between happiness and catastrophe feasibly affect the style and substance of Daphne's life? Compare Sylvia and Bill's responses to Daphne's fall.

5. Before the emotional strain of raising Meg and then, even more horrible, Paul's accidental death, Andy seems to have a natural capacity for joy. Does that quality leave her entirely-or is there evidence of her younger self later on? Compare the arc of her life with the other women in the novel. Do these women each have an 'essential self' that is tempered by time and fate or do they create new selves as they age?

6. While almost all of the characters are faced with hard individual challenges over the fifty-year span of A Good House, the family as a whole is most severely altered by the deaths of Sylvia and Paul and by Bill's dementia, which is a death of personality or selfhood. How does this family survive each death? In this respect, discuss the nuances of the word "survival."

7. In his young middle age, Patrick has a tendency to want to bring moral order to the life of this family. What is his motivation? Is it honorable? Why does this most careful and most judgmental character engage in an extramarital affair that could only be called superficial?

8. After Patrick's first wife, Mary, has surgery for breast cancer, Margaret insists that Patrick accompany her to the hospital to see Mary, as if she is taking a boy by the ear. Margaret alone seems to be aware of a kind of love that can forget or leap over past insult, past complexity, past heartache. Are gestures of forgiveness usually prompted by fear of something more horrid (in this case the death of the mother of Patrick's children)? Is there a connection between Margaret's insistence here and her pragmatic approach to marrying Bill years earlier? Explain your views.

9. Late in his life, Bill Chambers suffers not from Alzheimer's but from a more common, generalized dementia that alters his personality in very significant ways. Discuss the responses of his wife, children, and grandchildren to this altered state. Who among them has the hardest adjustment to make? Having known Bill Chambers when he was young-and more truly himself-how did you respond to his casual cruelty, his demands, his aggression? Compare him to the standard "evil" character in other novels while also discussing the nature of individual responsibility.

10. In the years immediately preceding the start of the story, North America suffered its most devastating depression-and then came World War II, in which Bill served. With this in mind, compare the expectations, both material and spiritual, of the novel's first generation-Bill, Sylvia, and Margaret-with the expectations of the younger characters.

11. The ending of A Good House features talk, laughter, music, dancing, food, gorgeous clothes, and beautiful pictures, both still and moving. Though no one at the wedding dance tries to pretend that their shared lives have been idyllic, there is nevertheless a feeling of celebration and hope. Does this situation give the novel a cliched "happy ending" quality? Explain why you do or do not think so.

About the Author:
A resident of London, Ontario, Bonnie Burnard is also the author of two prize-winning story collections. A Good House is her first book to be published in the United States.

Read an Excerpt

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

1949

* * *

FED BY THE rolling fields and the running miles of shallow country ditches to the east of town, Stonebrook Creek approached the town aslant, cutting down through Livingston's gully, then flowing past the burning mounds of garbage at the dump, a ripe, evolving depth of trash that came alive at night with the industrious plunder of raccoons, an afternoon home-away-from-home for the town's mostly good-natured dogs. Beyond the dump, the creek narrowed and angled sharply west to hug the bottom of Bald Hill.

    Then it twisted its way through the recently rehabilitated nine-hole golf course. The course had been closed during the war years but when the men returned, crews of volunteers had worked long hours to bring it back to its pre-war self, the greens shaved close and graded to fool the eye and framed by sand traps, the creek a recurrent water hazard crossed by pretty wooden bridges.

    Nettles and cattails and goldenrod and Scotch thistle grew on the banks down close to the water and in high summer there were orange lilies and buttercups and thick, hovering clouds of dragonflies, and butterflies. And you didn't have to follow the current far to see suckers or catfish or carp. There were snakes, of course, and musk- rats, and the slight fear of drowning. But at the very worst the water was deemed only a mild hazard, just something natural, something that could safely be ignored.

     As it left the golf course the creek passed under the narrow, hand- somely arched highway bridge thatmarked the town's southern out- skirts and finally it entered the town proper, flowing behind the canning factory down near the double row of tracks and then past the Vinegar Works and the foundry and the last remaining barns.

     Dominion Canners was still in business in the forties and a can- ning factory was a significant thing for a town to have because it meant jobs for men and women both, dirty, respectable, seasonal jobs processing fruit and vegetables. The work was well paid, but because it was entirely dependent on markets and the yields of particular crops, production ebbed and flowed. Jobs had been steady only during the war years, when tons of fruit and vegetables were trucked in to be dehydrated and shipped to the men fighting overseas.

     In the winter months, at Turnball's barn, kids who had bundled themselves in bulky, wet-smelling wool rested their lit flashlights in the crotches of the willows that lined the frozen creek to shovel the snow up onto the sloping banks, diligently chipping at the hardest ridges of ice to make the surface smooth enough for skating under the winter sky, which was never black but always the darkest possible navy blue. Brothers and sisters fought for their turns with the family skates and bright red mitts got dropped in a December thaw and then forgotten until they could be seen again through the cloudy ice, trapped, waiting for spring under the barren, overhanging branches of the trees. Some nights, when the illumination sent by the faraway moon and stars bounced off their high-banked snow like thrown bolts of wedding dress satin, the kids switched their flashlights off, proud to be out in the night alone, made safe by the natural light.

   But soon there would be no need to shovel Stonebrook Creek clean because people were starting to talk about a Memorial Arena, to honour the war dead.

     Sixteen of the town's sons had been killed overseas this last time and another thirty had been wounded, many of them seriously. Amputees were a common sight now, as were torn, badly healed, once-handsome faces and eyes gone hesitant or vacant and, in the heat of summer, out at the lake, backs and chests and limbs defiled by pulpy ridges of flesh which had been pulled shut over wounds by mili- tary doctors working without the luxury of time, without the care that time allowed. Many families were slowly and quietly learning how to make their way around small, unanticipated explosions fired by edgy nerves and some of the wounded had been sent home carry- ing in their toughened bodies the extra weight of shrapnel, which doc- tors at the big vets' hospital in London were still busy excavating four years after the fighting was done, often, by necessity, one shard at a time.

      Stonebrook Creek did not have in it the force of industry. Stonebrook had never been a mill town. The creek did offer good dependable drainage, which mattered a great deal now that so many new houses were going up, and it did provide a bit of work for the town's men, whose many responsibilities included occasional atten- tion to the creek's banks, to hip-high weeds in the summer, and some- times to discarded, rusted chunks of sharp-edged machinery parts and, once in a while, deep in the current but stopped by stones, a tightly tied burlap sack filled with carcasses, the lazy disposal of an unwanted litter, lazy because the lake was such a short drive away and rowboats so easily rented.

     The creek touched a few properties. Before it finally left town to make its way over to Lake Huron to empty itself, it turned sharply north to run behind one long street of houses, to move across the bot- tom of their sprawling backyards. But the houses built on that street were as good as any.

    Stonebrook held perhaps five hundred houses in 1949, brick or painted frame and mixed together, big with small, new with old, good with bad. Normally they sat well back on very big lots, sheltered from the weather by five or six fully matured trees, planted maples, sometimes elms or walnuts, the occasional hickory or chestnut. Forty or fifty of the houses were new since the war, and although these had been built on more modest, modern lots, most of them had fancy up-to-date kitchens and laundry chutes and high, dry basements and wall-to-wall broadloom carpet for the living rooms. Almost all the residential streets had been resurfaced and graced with brand new poured-cement sidewalks, and the tall poles that carried the heavy telephone and hydro wires, slung between them and from them to the corner of each roof, were interspersed now with streetlights.

    Down near the Vinegar Works, five or six places had been let go too long to be brought back and these could be picked up for next to nothing by a man who had to settle, who had to have some kind of shelter for his family, even if the linoleum floors did slope in many puzzling directions, even if the rooms did hold the stench of all their previous inhabitants.

    The magnificent houses, the three old-money brick houses, each with a small turret and a wraparound porch, had been built uptown near the churches when the town was younger and smaller, before the Great War. The wraparound porches were there to hold rainy-day children and morning tea carts and quiet late-evening conversation, cosy, discreet conversation which could not easily take place in front rooms or kitchens or bedrooms, certainly not on the street.

    Sitting on one of these porches, hidden in covered darkness, you could feel the weight of the wet summer air on your skin, you could smell it, the soft scent of toilet water and mown grass and lilacs and honeysuckle in that air. You could listen to the endless ringing of a million crickets, hear birdsong flying from nest to nest in the highest branches of the trees, and sometimes you could hear the low mumble of a car or a door slamming or people shouting, streets away. If you sat there long enough, if you were a patient person, you could see through the dark. You just had to start with the most prominent, most easily recognized shapes, the shapes anyone would know, and then concentrate, hard.

THE CHAMBERS HOUSE, a storey-and-a-half white frame with a grey shingled roof, was halfway down the street that backed on Stonebrook Creek. Like almost everyone else in town, the Chamberses had two big maples out close to the new sidewalk and a few decorative evergreen shrubs planted under the big front window to soften the line of the foundation. In the backyard, which stretched in a gentle slope down to the creek, there were two more maples, one horse chestnut, one pussy willow, three very old hickories, and, on the shallow creek bank, two majestic willows overhanging the water.

    A narrow gravel driveway led along the side of the lot back to a too-small garage, which was really just an oversized shed. But this was common. Not many garages had caught up to the bulk of the new postwar sedans. If there were extra people around, and there often were extra people around, they just pulled their cars over onto the grass. The grass had to be tough enough to survive this, to thrive without pampering, because no one paid any attention to it. It was there primarily to keep the weeds down and to reduce the likelihood of mud.

    Across the front of the house there was a large living room with three small, leaded windows on the side yard and a big, recently installed picture window facing the street. Since the war, lots of perfectly adequate living-room windows had been replaced with these picture windows, which were said to both nicely frame the view to the street and open the rooms to sunlight.

    In the long living room there was a marble fireplace that didn't draw very well, with delicate tulip sconces on either side, and a wide archway leading to the front hall and to the vestibule, which had a mullioned, bevelled-glass door and then a heavy front door that was permanently locked and never answered, except maybe at Christmas, or to a stranger.

    The staircase, which turned halfway up at another pretty leaded window, this one translucent with patterned glass stained green and deep rose, and the glowing hardwood steps fanned to make the turn, led from the vestibule up to a small central hall and off the hall to a bathroom and three bedrooms with extra-large closets cut into the sloping roof. This was the quiet part of the house, where voices were muted, where privacy was sometimes sought and found.

    At the back of the house, behind the living room, there was a dining room with a slippery hardwood floor, a swinging door into the kitchen, and a wide window which overlooked the sprawling backyard. In the winter when the trees were bare, if you lifted the new, silky sheers, you could see Stonebrook Creek from this window, at least you could see where the smooth blanket of snow became the frozen surface of the current.

    Sylvia Chambers' kitchen had most of the modern conveniences: an adequate stove, a brand new porcelain sink, an almost new, half-price Frigidaire which Bill had brought home from the hardware store, half price because of the small, harmless dent in the side. The kitchen was big enough to hold the oversized pine table where the family ate most of their everyday meals and anyone who came over was expected to use the never-locked kitchen door.

    All the walls were painted plaster, smooth as silk. The staircase and the trim were oak, the baseboards eight inches high. You could run in a circle on the main floor, from room to room to room, around and around. Small children liked to do this, and visiting dogs.

    It was a good house. Bill and Sylvia Chambers had bought it in 1941 when Patrick was four, Daphne one, and Paul just born. The bank loan had looked manageable, and although the war in Europe was well under way and not threatening to wind up any time soon, Bill and Sylvia had both felt a guarded optimism about their lives when they signed the papers that fall.

    Neither of them had ever lived anywhere else. Their distant ancestry, an unexamined mix of quiet, hard-working Irish and sanctimonious Scots with the occasional black sheep thrown in, either boisterous, bothersome, speech-making Irish or Scots turned soft, was seldom actively present in anyone's thoughts. Bill's paternal grandparents had farmed eight miles north of town but because there wasn't land enough for all the sons, his father had slowly bought into the hardware store, where Bill now worked. That was before the misery of the thirties.

    After the thirties, with the hardware let go for a song, Bill's father had started to sell cars and trucks up at the Chev Olds and he'd loved it, the wheeling and dealing, the good cigars, the flask of celebratory rye in the top drawer of his otherwise empty desk. He was now, in late middle age, a minor partner, with no serious thought of retirement.

    Sylvia's Ferguson grandparents had moved up from the Chatham area when they were just young to take over the grocery store, which her father had recently sold to the Clarkes, although he'd reluctantly agreed to continue on for a couple of years as their butcher.

    Bill and Sylvia had married in 1936, the year King George died, because Sylvia was pregnant with Patrick, a situation which was not especially desired but certainly not unusual. Sylvia's father adjusted himself to the circumstances quickly, he didn't see any reason to go too deeply into these matters, but her mother thought Sylvia, because she was so very pretty, could have done better and like a fool she said so.

    Sylvia had to pull her mother down on the front porch steps to try to convince her once and for all that Bill Chambers was a very decent man, a kind man, that while he was obviously neither traditionally handsome nor brilliant he was everything else a woman could want, and then some. Saying these last words she had smiled and raised her eyebrows in an impudent gesture which was both rare and immediately understood for what it was, and which settled the question for good.

    Bill Chambers signed up to go overseas in 1942, very soon after they'd bought the house, just when Sylvia was starting to find ways to believe in the life they were making. He wasn't any kid, he was almost thirty. To explain himself, he told Sylvia he simply couldn't stand not going. He left by train, was sent first out to Halifax to be too hurriedly educated by his country, too quickly taught about ships and depth charges and German U-boats, and then he was shipped over with all the others like him to try to apply what he had too quickly learned.

    When it was finished, finished for him, he came back to Sylvia and the kids left-handed. In the organized chaos of an attack from the air, in the bitterly cold, loud, black, bloody mess that was a battle in the North Atlantic, the caution Bill had taught himself, the deliberate, sober, rational maturity he'd thought he would need was wasted. He watched the three most useful fingers of his right hand leave his hand, watched two of them land on the deck at his feet, and just before the guy beside him kicked them overboard he had snapped a mental picture that would make itself available to him for the rest of his life: the bloody fingers roiling slightly with the heave of the ship, the pulpy, mangled flesh that was no longer his own split open like burst sausage, the nails, blue-white and still almost real, holding firm.

    But none of this made Bill Chambers extraordinary. He had come home alive, to his family, to his job, to his comfortable house on Stonebrook Creek. And in 1949, with the war mercifully over and won, the only cost to Bill those three fingers and the time it took to train his left hand, with the country ready to enter an unprecedented boom and Sylvia confident that she could get her children safely through their childhood, comfortable was what the Chamberses were hoping against hope to be.