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Bluestocking Press

August in Defiance: A Perfect Burial

August in Defiance: A Perfect Burial

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The casket and corpse of Madeline Locke float down the Missouri River from Schimmerhorn’s Mortuary during the Hundred Year Flood in Defiance, MO, August, 1993.

James leads the search for his mother’s body, frustrated by the absurdity of the search in the turbulent, backwater landscape and his father’s strange response to grief.

The Locke’s and Schimmerhorn’s battle to locate the casket and body to arrange for a perfect burial.

James’ sisters are confused by emotions they feel regarding the disease, death and disappearance of their mother.

Half-wit Alvin Schimmerhorn, son of “Old Cottonmouth,” discovers Maddy’s body and displays her burial clothes in a his own family’s shrine. Alvin delivers the body while his father faces the Locke’s with an alternative plan for burial. The battle intensifies.

Versions of this saga about disease, death, grief and tangled
relationships are recounted for the reader by James’ Aunt Oletha, family historian, and by his sister, Amelia, who drives a thousand miles and talks to a stuffed frog between Spearfish, S.D. and Defiance, Missouri. Galen leaves the house, to go fishing. He intends to scatter Maddy’s ashes over the surface of the flooded Missouri River.
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