All Over Creation. Ruth Ozeki

      

      Praise for All Over Creation

      ‘Highly original’

       Daily Mail

      ‘Captivating . . . Ozeki joins the constellation of such environmentally aware writers as Barbara Kingsolver, Annie Proulx and Margaret Atwood, bringing her own shrewd and playful humour, luscious sexiness and kinetic pizzazz . . . a busy, darkly humorous and cunningly entertaining novel, weaving canny psychological insights into each twist in her purposeful yet anarchically tinged plot’

       Chicago Tribune

      ‘Amusing, moving and delicately controlled’

       Big Issue

      ‘A sprawling, good-hearted story about friendship, family discord, reconciliation and the slow, creative process of social change’

       USA Today

      ‘A well-crafted, often comic story of the personal and political’

       Observer

      ‘A nice blend of humour and strangely affecting optimism. Ozeki has written a book where dread and hope coexist. Neither is given short shrift or magicked away’

       New York Times

      Praise for My Year of Meat

      ‘Smart, funny, irreverent’

       Guardian

      ‘A sensitive and compelling portrait of two modern women’

      Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha

      ‘A meaty first novel about relationships, cultural boundaries and the beef industry. Ozeki masks a deeper purpose with a light tone . . . delightful’

      Jane Smiley

      ‘A wacky combination of love story and exposé . . . marvellously funny and passionate, this had me laughing out loud and engrossed to the end’

       Literary Review

      ‘Original, genuinely funny and mighty strange . . . provocative, smart and makes you wary of biting into anything that hasn’t actually grown in soil’

      Maureen Lipman

      ‘A jalopy of a book whose various bits seemed tied together with baling wire’

       New York Times

      ‘Highly original and gripping’

       Daily Mail

      ALL

      OVER

      CREATION

      Ruth Ozeki graduated from Smith College, Massachusetts with degrees in English literature and Asian studies, then received a Japanese Ministry of Education Fellowship and emigrated to Japan to do graduate work in classical Japanese literature. She has worked in film and television and has made her own films, two of which have received awards, festival recognition and international distribution.

      All Over Creation is Ruth’s second novel. Her first novel, My Year of Meat, is also published by Picador. She divides her time between New York City and British Columbia.

       ALSO BY RUTH OZEKI

       My Year of Meat

      This edition published by Canongate Books in 2013

      This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books

      Copyright © Ruth L. Ozeki 2003

      The moral right of the author has been asserted

      First published 2003 by Penguin Putnam, Inc., New York, USA

      Published in Great Britain in 2013 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE

       www.canongate.tv

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 78211 117 7

       To my father,

       who was always kind

      Contents

       first

       second

       third

       fourth

       fifth

       sixth

       seventh

       epilogue: daddy’s letter

first

       Esto Perpetua

      (“May It Be Forever”)

      —Idaho state motto

      in the beginning

      It starts with the earth. How can it not? Imagine the planet like a split peach, whose pit forms the core, whose flesh its mantle, and whose fuzzy skin its crust—no, that doesn’t do justice to the crust, which is, after all, where all of life takes place. The earth’s crust must be more like the rind of the orange, thicker and more durable, quite unlike the thin skin of a bruisable peach. Or is it? Funny, how you never think to wonder.

      On one small section of that crust—small, that is, by global or geologic measure—in Power County, Idaho, where the mighty Snake River carved out its valley and where volcanic ash enriched the soil with minerals vital to its tilth, there stretched a vast tract of land known as Fuller Farms.

      Vast, by human scale. Vast, relative to other farmers’ holdings in the region, like the Quinns’ place down the road. And as for the description, “land belonging,” well that’s a condition measured in human time, too. But for one quick blip in the 5 billion years of life on this earth, that three thousand acres of potato-producing topsoil and debatably the slender cone of the planet that burned below, right down to the rigid center of its core, belonged to my father, Lloyd Fuller.

      It used to be the best topsoil around. Used to be feet of it, thick, loamy. There’s less of it now. But still, imagine you are a seed—of an apple, or a melon, or even the pit of a peach—spit from the lips of one of Lloyd’s crossbred grandchildren, arcing through the air and falling to earth, where you are ground into the soil, under a heel, to rest and overwinter. Months pass, and it is cold and dark. Then slowly, slowly, spring creeps in, the sun tickles the earth awake again, its warmth thaws the soil, and your coat, which