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978-0-89587-223-4
0-89587-223-4
$19.95 hardcover
5 1/2" x 7 1/2"
258 pages
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"For
a man in the business of damp," Doctor Lucius Tipton muses, "Hank
Beecham was the driest creature alive."
Hank Beecham's rainmaking abilities have brought him
twenty years of fame all over the arid West. In 1916, the city fathers of St.
Elmo, California, ask Hank to return and rescue his hometown from drought.
Rather than pay his exorbitant fee, they propose a bet: Hank's skills against
nature. Hank accepts, with this single caveat: he shall get credit for every
drop of rain that falls from that day forth.
The bet offers Hank a chance to redeem his family's
name. The Beechams were a shiftless lot, luckless, drunken, and violent. Hank's
father, a Confederate veteran, had raged and failed on a ranch sentimentally
named Shiloh. Hank, however, escaped Shiloh, and moved into town with his
long-suffering mother, Eulalie. Returning to St. Elmo stirs up Hank's memories
of her death and his own love affair with an older woman.
In paying a long forgotten debt to Doctor Tipton, the
grim Hank strikes an unlikely friendship with the convivial doctor. But Lucius
Tipton is appalled to discover what Hank truly plans for St. Elmo.
The rainmaker unleashes a devastating flood,
destroying lives, property, livestock. And when at last Hank comes to collect on
his bet, the city fathers refuse to pay unless--according to his own caveat--he
will accept responsibility for the ruination his rain has wrought.
Hank Beecham leaves, vowing to take his money out of
St. Elmo's soul. Time means nothing to Hank. Eight years later, he sets up at
Shiloh, prepared to take his revenge.
Based loosely on historical events in 1916, Caveat
tells a tale of rain and revenge, the power of the past to imprison and
illuminate.
about the author
Caveat follows Laura Kalpakian's two
award-winning collections of stories and six other novels, including These
Latter Days and Graced Land. Winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Award
and two Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Awards for Excellence, Kalpakian is a
California native.
Also by Laura Kalpakian:
These Latter Days
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