"They came like a caravan or carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face." Section I, p. 3

"He moves in dry chaff among the dust and slats of sunlight with a constrained truculence. Saxon and Celtic bloods. A child of God much like you yourself perhaps. Wasps pass through the laddered light from the barnslats in a succession of strobic movements, gold and trembling between black and black like fireflies in the serried upper gloom." Section I, p. 4

"He stood in the crossroads listening to other...