Peace Like a River: A Novel

by Leif Enger

When did it come to Davy Land that exile is a country of shifting borders, hard to quit yet hard to endure, no matter your wide shoulders, no matter your toughened heart?

I had a feeling the adults didn’t know we were in the room—a feeling we were getting away with something, and a sadness that it was nothing to be prized.

“Why don’t you change it,” I suggested, “make this girl his wife, see—they ride away together.” “She wasn’t his wife!” Swede flared. Past tense, you notice—history, even the fictive kind, being beyond our influence.

You can embark on new and steeper versions of your old sins, you know, and cry tears while doing it that are genuine as any.