Children of the Wind

About the Book

On a scorching, dusty road in south-central Illinois in the late 1930’s, Doc finds Cully, eleven, running from his father’s death in the fields. He takes Cully in, as he had taken in other stray creatures, and teaches him the life of a rural veterinarian. Thus the boy gains an understanding that death, a commonplace in nature’s cycle, reaches animals and people, young and old, by accident or intent. One day a letter from Connecticut, three-months delayed, arrives for the boy Cully from the mother who had abandoned him two years earlier. The letter, an old out-of-tune piano, a curling photograph, and some names buried deep in his vanished youth draw Doc with Cully eastward on the National Road, Cully toward his future and Doc toward his forgotten youth. With quiet, poetic force, the journal-told story emerges like the gradual focusing of an old stereopticon, the two pictures blending to reveal an unsuspected three-dimensional depth as the lost boy searches for his mother and Doc tries to piece together a repressed and catastrophic past. Cully and Doc’s odyssey of discovery is steeped in knowledge of and love for the land across which they journey. It is a true American myth, yet it reverberates with echoes of the Arthurian legend, of Henry Hudson, of the orphan trains, of traumatic conflagrations, and of the dying rooms where waifs’ bodies are sold for cash. The dramatic and surprising ending is at once a tearful defeat and a smile-producing victory.

About the Author

Ed Sundt grew up in a sparsely populated north-eastern Connecticut town wanting to become a professional baseball player. Every summer afternoon he shagged fly balls with a friend, hiked the woods and back roads with his dog, and played along the brook and among the lumber stacks on his grandfather’s small farm. He came to know the land closely, as a friend, as a child creating his own adventures is apt to do. After college and a long (but not professional) summer-time baseball career, after decades of teaching English and helping students learn to write, after publishing in The Washington Post, Potomac Review, Yankee Magazine, Hartford Courant, Prometheus, The 4th edition of The Fireside Book of Baseball, and The Athletic Journal--all the experiences and travels, poems and stories, fused into the story of Cully and Doc, the children of the wind. Ed lives now in Garrett Park, Maryland, with his wife Ann, and their large Newfoundland-golden retriever Ballou.