The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership
This collection of six interrelated stories, set in the 1930s through the '70s, portrays life in back-country Kentucky and its county seat, "a dying town in the midst of a wasting country." Wheeler Catlett, the central, unifying figure, is a lawyer whose roots and sensibilities exfoliate from the soil of the surrounding farmland. He is its voice and consciousnessits collective memory; his "clients," who are also his friends, neighbors and kinfolk, provide his cast of characters. In one story, a quiet, strong, dignified farmer copes with the "great weariness" of the end of his life. In another, Catlett makes sure that a farm willed to a coldly indifferent heir remains in the hands of the tenant couple whose lifeblood has nurtured it. In a third, a youth comes quietly of age by observing other lives and sensing kindred feelings within himself. The stories are fashioned in a stately, somewhat archaic, prose quite lacking in dramatic force, partly redeemed by a deep feeling for the land and an affectionate respect for the obscure "little" people of their purview.Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.