Every story is so different that there is something for everyone here. "Balance" is a story about a bored and (we think) boring orthotics sculptor until we find that he has fallen in love with the feet of one of his distant patients, and has done something about it. "This Summer's House" describes a Vancouver Island family that rents a new summer house each year for the central event, a great family get-together that reminds us of a modern version of Chekhov. "Over Here" is an innocent story told by a 10-year-old boy who tries to keep the secret that the girl next door is an Indian. "Damage Done by the Storm" shows us Ottawa picking up after a snowfall as the central character, a retired senator, tries to keep his word to his grandson by getting to an important event. "Galleries" has a Faulkner scholar and her photographer son touring Mississippi to learn about the writer, and learning about themselves. "Promise" shows what happens when a former high-school principal visits a former pupil twenty years on. "The Crossing" is a taut story of an "ordinary" woman's life exploding. "Inheritance" tells how a Vancouver Island couple learn that their uncle in Ottawa plans to leave everything to them, in what proves to be a mixed blessing. "Astonishing the Blind" has a Canadian pianist in Germany writing home to congratulate her parents on their wedding anniversary, only to reveal terrible secrets about two marriages and to reveal links between some of the stories. The geographic range is wide Australia, Germany, Ottawa, Edmonton, Mississippi and, as home base, the Vancouver Island logging and farming communities that feature inSpit Delaney's Islandand other books by Jack Hodgins.The range of characters is just as wide, and many of these people are unforgettably larger than life, while still being utterly believable. In summary, a terrific collection of stories that will delight readers and renew the Jack Hodgins debate about the comparative excellence of his novels and his short stories.

<b>Jack Hodgins</b> was born in 1938 in the Comox Valley, on Vancouver Island. After attending the University of British Columbia he taught high school English in Nanaimo, before accepting teaching positions at a number of Canadian universities. He is now a member of the faculty at the University of Victoria, the city where he and his family live.<br><br>His literary career has been spectacular. His first book, a collection of stories entitled <i>Spit Delaney’s Island</i>, was nominated for the 1976 Governor General’s Award, and “did for the people of Vancouver Island what…William Faulkner [did] for the American south.” (The Montreal <i>Gazette</i>). The Vancouver <i>Province</i> called it “superb.”<br><br>His first novel, <i>The Invention of the World</i>, published a year later, attracted many admiring reviews (“an astounding achievement”, <i>Quill & Quire</i>; “the major work of Canadian magic realism,” <i>Canadian Fiction Magazine</i>), and won the Gibson Literary Award as the best first novel of the year. His second novel, <i>The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne</i> (1979), received still more critical praise and won the Governor General’s Award.<br><br>Since then Jack Hodgins has produced an admired collection of short stories, <i>The Barclay Family Theatre</i> (1981), and a third novel, <i>The Honorary Patron</i> (1987), as well as a book for children, <i>Left Behind in Squabble Bay</i> (1988). He has been awarded the Canada-Australia Literature Prize, and has read from his work in countries as distant as Japan and Austria.

I know what he wants. He thinks there is something wrong. The feet have been coming back, my workmanship has been slipping. “Is there something on your mind?” he will say, when he has closed the door so that the others can’t hear. “Are there problems in your life?” He will lower his voice, and sound genuinely interested, so that I won’t take offence. “You’re the best person we’ve ever had on Stage Two, but something must be wrong.”

He won’t fire me. It takes too long to train someone to become as skilled as I am at this job. He will have to be satisfied to hear that I’ve had a few bad days. It happens.

I ­don’t know what it is about me that causes him to speak in that tone. It is as though he believes he is speaking to someone who might burst into tears, or explode in a terrible tantrum. This sort of thing has happened all my life. My father would grab my brother right up out of his act of teasing the dog and start paddling him on the spot, hollering all the while. But if I threw a shoe across the room because its laces refused to unknot, he would guide me firmly into another room, close the door, and sit down to look me sadly in the face. “What’s the matter with you now? You know better than that. Do you think the lace will untie itself if you throw it?” Greg Morrison, who is the manager here at Stanford Orthotics, can be brutal when he is displeased with the others – “Smarten up, for chrissake, willya? This is a piece of shit.” But with me he uses very much the same tone as my father did. It is as though the whole world knows how easy it is to make me ashamed.

When they promoted me to Stage Two, it was to replace a fellow who’d been laid off because so many of his feet were sent back. He was fast but not very good. At first I was lucky if I managed to complete just two in a shift. It took me a month – standing eight hours every day at my bench – but eventually I was completing sixteen to twenty a shift without any failures. “You’re a real artist,” Morrison said — his best compliment. He has repeated it often. It gives him pleasure to think that the painters and sculptors and failed architecture students he hires are doing a job that has at least a little in common with their artistic ambitions. “I like to watch your face when you work,” he will say to me. “You could be Michelangelo grappling with David.”

I wouldn’t know about that. My job at Stage Two is to take the brown plaster casts that are made in Stage One from the moulds sent in by doctors all across the country – dainty feet, ugly feet, children’s feet – and to measure them, line them up, centre them, weigh them, find where the imperfections are, and then, with white plaster, build whatever is needed to establish a perfect balance. My white additions, then, become models for the plastic inserts created in the next room. I like to think I have done my part to ease limps, eliminate backaches, and cut down on the strained calf muscles for half the people I pass on the street.

Sometimes I could believe that every foot in the country has passed through my hands in the three years I’ve worked here. They pile up by the hundreds in the room behind me. Fallen arches, twisted toes, inadequate heels. It is a peculiar thing, to realize how many people are operating at a painful tilt. Mr. Peter McConnell of Corner Brook, Newfoundland, should be walking straight as a perfect soldier now. Alice Degrout of Red Deer, Alberta, can – if she walks slowly – disguise the fact that her right foot has been deprived of its natural heel. When I first worked at Stage One, I could not help but notice that every foot had a name, a physician, and an address attached. It was always a surprise to discover that an enormous, twisted foot that you could imagine belonging to some hairy Sasquatch in the Coast Moun­tain Range was actually the possession of a Bambi Duchamp, whose doctor kept an office in Sainte-Agathe. I have a great deal of affection for Bambi Duchamp, who is a pretty woman, I imagine, in her Sainte-Agathe apartment, suffering torments of self-consciousness about her gigantic feet, despairing of ever finding shoes that will hide her imperfection from a merciless world. I have a great deal of affection for all those who spend a little time at my workbench and then pass on. When I think of them, I imagine that all their aches and limps and malformations have been deposited with the plaster casts in the storage room behind me, and that they have all gone on to live strong and fulfilling lives in a state of confident balance.

Sometimes, quite unexpectedly and in the most unlikely moments, I believe that I can feel in my hand the memory of a certain foot it has held. I can be riding in the bus, heading for work, and will feel all at once a particular shape in my palm. Daisy Martin, I will think. Swift Current, Saskatchewan. And blush, so help me, at the thought. It is as though I can feel the very warmth of Daisy Martin’s flesh. More than that, in such moments I sense that I have established some sort of relationship with its owner, though we have never met. I believe that if Daisy Martin of Swift Current were to drop in at the shop I would recognize her immediately. It is a peculiar thing, but consider how very few feet a person will ever hold in his hands. And how intimate is the connection when you do – a wife’s, a lover’s, a child’s. Sometimes my fingers will burn with the secrets they have somehow learned but haven’t known how to tell me. There have been times when I have worked for most of an hour with the small foot of a child, say, holding it, turning it, stroking it with my blade, so that when it is time to pass it on I do so as if I were parting with a friend.

I will not mention any of this to Greg Morrison when I enter his office at the end of the day, of course. God knows what he imagines his employees are thinking about as they scrape away at the plaster. We are not machines. And yet indeed it may be that I am the only one who gives a thought to the owners of the feet. I ­wouldn’t know, for I have been careful not to mention this to the others.

---

Excerpted from Damage Done by the Storm by Jack Hodgins
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.