Introduction

Do you know what separates grief from insanity? Do you know why overcoming can sometimes feel like succumbing? Breathing Out the Ghost is a literary thriller that explores these questions by contrasting how people cope with loss. When Colin St. Claire's son disappears, he speeds throughout rural Michigan seeking the man he believes responsible. Unable to sleep but unwilling to rest, St. Claire soon falls prey to ghosts of memory as intangible as vapor… Until he meets an Indiana farm wife, Beverly “Sis” Pruitt, whose daughter was murdered years earlier. While St. Claire admires Sis's quiet commitment to family, she envies the heroic resolve that has turned him into the “Ahab of the interstates.” George Garrett calls Ghost “a wonderful reading experience.… [It] has all the things we look and hope for in first rate fiction.” Please visit my website contest at www.kirkcurnutt.com. Five randomly selected readers who email me about whether they are a St. Claire or a Sis will receive a free copy. Thank you, Kirk Curnutt P.S. As of March 5, 2008, Ghost is a finalist for ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year in literary fiction!

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Excerpt

From “Everywhere and Nowhere at Once”

(Chapter Six of Breathing Out the Ghost by Kirk Curnutt)

NOTE: In this scene, Beverly “Sis” Pruitt and her younger sister, Martha, are walking home from the doll shop Martha owns in Franklin, Indiana. It is an early October evening, and Sis has spent the day looking for a missing child named Chance Birmage-a painful reminder for her of her daughter Patty's murder seventeen years earlier. Despite the eerie circumstances, Sis and Martha have family obligations to attend to: their grandmother, Ethel Brandywine, will soon turn 107, and the sisters have been bickering over the birthday party they've been asked to plan.

.… Sis and Martha walked the deposit to the bank and then started for the little house on Depot Street that Martha had rented since Rick left her. Halfway there, amid a block of faltering houses that dated back a century, they began to hear the sound of playing children-wordless, bodiless whoops and shrieks that made Sis wonder if they hadn't wandered into a goblin patch. Just as quickly she chastised herself for thinking such a thing. It was silly to imagine goblins romping invisibly around them; the world was too real and too hard for spirits and sprites. Still, as the voices rose through the leafless trees, shrouding Sis and her sister in the eerie ether of disembodied fun, she couldn't help but imagine that this was the sound of Chance Birmage calling to them, summoning them to wherever he was. Sis took a breath and reconciled herself to the likelihood that tonight when she tried not to dream these whoops and shrieks would congeal into recognizable words from a recognizable face asking a question that after only a day already seemed freighted with judgment: HAVE YOU SEEN ME? Only that's not what a missing child would whisper to you in your sleep. More like WHY HAVEN'T YOU SEEN ME?, she thought.

Then they turned a corner and saw where the voices were coming from. Two children, a boy and a girl, sat in a swing facing each other under the anemic spray of a single yellow bulb. They were trying to coordinate their dangling arms and legs to get a smooth glide going, but they weren't having much luck-in part because the girl was much bigger than the boy, and her roller skates dragged in the dirt when the boy tried to back up and stand so they could gain some elevation when he kicked out his legs. “You're not doing it right,” the girl complained when the boy launched them forward and their motion petered out after no more than a half-arc. Sis flushed with embarrassment all over again for thinking of goblins.

“They're spidering.”

Martha repeated the word indifferently.

“Yeah, that's what that's called. Look at how their legs hang together-they look like a spider's legs. That's where the name comes from.”

“I'm pretty sure the Kama Sutra calls it something else.”

Sis shot her sister a frown. “It's not a sexual thing, okay? Those kids are maybe five and six. They're innocent. Maybe you could try look at what they're doing innocently and not project your own dirty thoughts onto them?”

“It was a joke, okay? No need to turn me in to Perverted Justice.”

“I spidered all the time when I was a kid. All the way up to twelve, probably. Elaine Haskins and I were champs at it in fourth grade.… Good God, Elaine's a grandma now.”

“Elaine Haskins is one thing. I bet you didn't spider with Blain Haskins, now did you?”

“Nobody thought to name a boy 'Blain' back then. Boys were still Charlies and Rosses and Harolds. Those were family names; 'Blain' sounds like some kind of grippe. But even if we had known 'Blains' teachers wouldn't have let us spider with them. That would've been more than halfway rude.”

“My point exactly. Those kids may be innocent, but they're still feeling something sitting there that close together. You can't convince me they're not. And it's because you know they are that seeing them sitting in each other's lap is so disarming. You'd never let Tillie and Joey spider together-you know you wouldn't. It wouldn't look right. You'd throw a fit, they'd cry, and then the next time I babysat I'd have to explain why they're only allowed to do it when you and Pete aren't around.”

“If that's your way of getting out of babysitting, congratulations: I'll call somebody else next time. What's disarming to me is that they're out here on their own. They shouldn't be.”

“This is Franklin,” Martha shrugged absentmindedly. Not a half-block away the un-taped edges of one of Chance's fliers flapped against a utility pole.

“I wouldn't let my kids out unaccompanied on the farm, and that's five miles from here.”

“You've got reasons. Other folks don't.” Martha noticed the crosspiece of the swing set bowed with the children's weight. “Is it just me or does that thing looks like it it's one bolt away from falling in on itself? It must be twenty years old. The parents are probably thinking lawsuit.”

They watched the children kick and grope again for altitude. This time Sis and Martha heard the chains holding the rubber seat groaning.

“Do you ever wonder if her you're not denying Tillie and Joey this freedom? I'm not saying you are-I'm just asking if you ever doubt how much protecting you do.”

“I doubt it all the time. I never felt safer for the kids than when they were in me. It was different with Patty; it was all different with her. I was so green I was clueless about what a lost sense of control you feel when your baby breathes its first. With Tillie I was so terrified of losing her that I drove Pete and me both crazy. I'd stay four feet behind the Guernseys in case one got it in its mind to kick. How can you milk a cow from four feet back? But it wasn't just outdoor work. I couldn't round a counter for fear of a sharp edge puncturing my stomach.”

“You had your reasons,” Martha said again, only impatiently this time. Sis knew that was her cue to stop talking. Talking wasn't her job; hers was to listen. That's what people expected from her. She wished she had someone other than herself to listen, though. She would have liked to describe how, cradling Tillie seconds after the delivery, she had caught a glimpse of her own afterbirth as the hospital staff prepared its disposal. Severed from the child's stomach, the blue lifelines running through the transparent knots of the amniotic sac turned pasty gray, asphyxiating on air. The baby had been born into the vulnerability of life, and Sis felt her power to protect that existence die away to the rhythm of the girl's inhalation. Two years later, with Joey, she went three days overdue, and on the way to the Caesarian section her doctor joked about her not wanting to give up the child. She laughed it off, but he had the right idea: sometime in the third trimester Sis grew so convinced of the sheltering calm of her belly that she decided she'd let the doc fetch this one.

Nobody wanted to hear that story from her, though.

“Hey, I almost forgot,” Martha said, changing the subject. “Did you know you're nearly as famous as Grandma? I found a list online of the oldest birth mothers in Indiana. You're there because of Joey. You'd think that forty-nine is about the high end for a woman to get pregnant, but you're only like No. 22 or something. There's some lady in Evansville who had twins at fifty-seven, but she used in-vitro fertilization. You're one of the few on the list without that asterisk.”

“Do they have a list of the longest spans between children?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I had Patty at nineteen and Tillie at forty-seven. That's almost thirty years. That must be some kind of record, too, don't you think?”

Martha blinked as she pushed her glasses higher on her nose. “I'll have to look for that list. That one didn't enter my mind to look up.”

“When you find it, make sure there's an asterisk on it explaining why I had Tillie and Joey so late. You know why, don't you?”

“No need saying it. I know why.”

Sis said why anyway: “I was having my own grandchildren.” view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. Why, if St. Claire is so intent on finding A.J., does he become addicted to amphetamines? Does his reliance on speed affect his sense of purpose?

2. How do St. Claire’s memories of his father shape his relationship to A.J.?

3. Why does St. Claire call himself the “Ahab of the interstates”?

4. Does St. Claire’s realizing his rage is destructive alter the reader’s opinion of him? Does having this knowledge justify his actions and choices, especially towards Neve?

5. Sis finds no relief in making the quilt with other members of her Parents of Murdered Children group, as do many of the other parents. Why does she resent being admired for how she’s handled Patty’s murder?

6. Why is Heim so committed to finding St. Claire and bringing him home? How does his need to resolve A.J.’s disappearance parallel St. Claire’s?

7. In several passages, Sis reflects on the monotony of suffering, What does she mean? And how does that feeling affect her opinion of St. Claire and his search?

8. Sis, St. Claire, Pete, and the Birmage family all grieve differently. Are they judging one another? Is any one way right or wrong?

9. References to wind appear throughout the book, especially in the chapters “Idiot Wind” and “A Striving After Wind.” What does this symbolism mean to the various characters?

10. Does having Dickie-Bird Johnson narrate the chapter “Tenderloin” shine a different light on St. Claire and Heim? Do we need to hear Dickie-Bird’s perspective?

11. Sheriff Dub Ritterbush is a minor character, yet the sole focus of the chapter “Night’s Coming.” Why does his story appear between Dickie-Bird’s narrative and Heim’s effort to get back to Indiana after being abandoned by St. Claire? Which character does Dub most parallel? Why?

12. In what ways are Sis and St. Claire’s mother similar?

13. Discuss the secret Sis learns on her visit to St. Claire’s abandoned wife, Kimm. How does this knowledge affect her? The reader?

14. What role does Pete Pruitt, Sis’s husband, play in the story? Does Sis fail to understand Pete’s grieving as she feels he has failed to comprehend her sorrow?

15. Why is Grandma Brandywine’s story told in the second half of the “Apropos of Wet Snow” chapter? How do her losses in life compare to those of St. Claire and Sis?

16. Why does St. Claire confront Chance Birmage’s father, By-God Bob? What other characters in the novel does By-God resemble?

17. When Sis and Heim confront St. Claire with the selfishness of his suffering he responds with a long barrage of clichés drawn from poems and songs. What are the sources for these lines? What do they all have in common? And what is St. Claire doing when he recites them?

18. Why does Chance Birmage’s story end the way it does? How do events in his disappearance parallel those in A.J.’s?

19. Why, even after the accident with the gun in “Bears of a Bluer River,” is St. Claire unable to resolve his despair? Is he ever able to reconnect with his family?

20. Do you think Sis and Pete resolve their resentments? And what happens to Heim’s marriage after so many lies to Stephie?

21. What is the symbolism, if any, of the playground game “spidering” mentioned in the last chapter? Does this symbolism appear anywhere else in the story?

22. Why does the story end the way it does? Why is the final chapter necessary to the story?

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