Red Sky at Morning: A Novel

by Richard Bradford

Overview

The classic coming-of-age story set during World War II about the enduring spirit of youth and the values in life that count.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062345493
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	02/18/2014
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	67,506
Lexile:	810L (what's this?)
File size:	523 KB

About the Author

Richard Bradford was born in 1932. He is also the author of So Far from Heaven.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

We were using the old blue china and the stainless steel cutlety, with place mats on the big oval table and odd-sized jelly glasses for the wine. The good stuff was all packed and stored, and the Salvation Army was due the next day for the leftovers. My mother called this last dinner a picnic, but she didn't wear her overalls to it. She had on the blue hostess gown with the purple flowers.

Dad looked four sizes smaller in his newly delivered summer uniform, and the tight stock collar was giving him trouble. He kept swallowing and twisting his neck. The two and a half stripes looked good, though; they made a nice contrast with Jimbob Buel's civilian seersucker. He was holding a glass of my father's Tavel rose', looking at the candlelight through the wine, the perfect Virginia connoisseur. He was probably thinking a seventeen-year-old snot like me was too young to know its virtues.

Well, I do know its virtues, Jimbob boy. Paul and I knocked off a bottle of it just last week, warm, a refined accompaniment to cornbread and beef cracklins.

Courtney Ann Conway squeezed my leg under the table. "Ah bet you'll be sorry, leavin' Mobile with all the pawties and all comin' up." I didn't answer right away. I was figuring how to get Jimbob into the Bankhead Tunnel, and pump a little mustard gas in there. If I could block the exits, and use two pumps, maybe....

"Josh, are you listenin' to me?"

"I'm sorry, Corky. I know I'll miss a lot of parties, but I really have to leave town. You know: the war and everything."

"You're such a brave and manly chap," said Jimbob. "I think it's charming of you to defend your country off there inUtah, or Iowa, or wherever it is."

"Mr. Buel, I forgot you were wearing khaki. The candlelight makes your clothes look more like seersucker."

"Now, Joshua," said Mother, very sharp and offended. "That is enough of that. Quite enough. You've been terribly rude this evening. Mr. Buel's asthma is well-known."

"Sorry again," I said. "Sorry all around." Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.

"Josh," said my father, "have some more ham-with-CocaCola-sauce, Probably the last time you'll have it for the duration." He picked up a thick slice of the nasty stuff with the serving knife and fork, and I passed my plate. Glup. Good salt-cured Tennessee smoked ham. Perfectly decent Coca-Cola from Atlanta. Put them all together, you've got Secrets from a Southern Kitchen.

Jimbob's helping himself to another glass of wine; I notice he's not eating the ham. Corky's burping, soft and low, an exceltent thing in woman. I suppose the bubbles in the sauce got to her. And Amalie's sitting over there stoking it away, okra and ham on the fork at the same time, all stuck together with grits.

"I think the Navy's so romantic, Mr. Arnold. You look like a regulah ol' salt." Good for you, Cork. Even with your head full of cornpone you always say the right thing. I'll bet old Oscar Wilde is lying there in Paris right now, gnawing on his knuckles, wishing he could have made bright talk like that.

"Miss Courtney's absolutely right, Frank," said Jimbob. "You seem positively encrusted with salt. And to be a Commodore right off the...."Commander."

". . . Commander, pardon me, right off the bat like that, why, the Navy Department must have great faith in your seamanship. My family, of course, were usually Army, not nearly so fashionable."

"I'm considered a fair hand with a Dolphin-class sloop, I admit," Dad said, straightening up and looking a little keener. "It's a shame the Navy isn't using them this war. Last I heard, they'd converted to ironclads throughout."

"And rightly so, I maintain," Amalie said, poking her fork at Dad. She's been concentrating on the grits so hard she hasn't heard anything. Look at her sitting there like a big pale lady bullfrog; that concentration on the grits is paying off in fanny.

"Rightly so what, Amalie?" my father said, genuinely puzzled.

"That about the boats, with the iron on them. Much better. Didn't you say something about putting iron on boats? Well, I think it's a wonderful idea, and I'm only sorry they didn't think of it sooner. Frank, honey, would you pass me another slice of that delicious ham, and maybe a tee-ninecy spoonful of okra? Lord, Ann, I surely wish you'd give me the recipe for that deficious ham. Everytime I have it here I eat more than's good for me. Thank you, Frank. Little more grits? Thank you, honey."

"There's really nothing to it," said Mother. "The trick is, you're supposed to warm the Coca-Cola before you pour it over the ham. Then you just keep on basting. Lacey got it right the first time I showed her how." Yeah, she got it right, and she stiff cries every time she has to pour Coca-Cola over a country ham. You messed up the best cook anybody ever had, and I'm glad she's got a good job at the compass factory. They don't float that old needle in Coca-Cola.

"You do run a superlative kitchen, Miss Ann," Jimbob said. And you get a superlative amount of free victuals over here, too, don't you, Buel boy? When's the last time you missed a meal with us? Was it the time I had the mumps? Must have been. You wouldn't want to catch it and have that patrician Virginia jawline puff up. You wouldn't want somebody to safety-pin your pajama bottoms to the bed. If Grant's artillery had been a little sharper they might have hit your house and killed your grandfather, and stopped the whole useless line of Buels right there. Worst mistake of the war...

Red Sky at Morning. Copyright © by Richard Bradford. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Reading Group Guide

Plot Summary
In the summer of 1944, Frank Arnold, a wealthy shipbuilder in Mobile, Alabama, receives his volunteer commission in the U.S. Navy and moves his wife, Ann, and seventeen-year-old son, Josh, to the family's summer home in the village of Corazon Sagrado, high in the New Mexico mountains. A true daughter of the Confederacy, "wrapped up in tissue paper like a Wedgwood egg cup," Mrs. Arnold finds it impossible to cope with the quality of life in the largely Hispanic village and, in the company of Jimbob Buel--an insufferable, Virginia-born, South-proud professional houseguest--takes to bridge and sherry. Josh, more the son of his Baltimore-raised father than of his class-conscious, Old South mother, becomes an integral member of the Sagrado community, forging friendships with classmates at Helen De Crispin school, with the town's disreputable resident artist, with Chango Lopez--macho bully turned model student--and with Amadeo and Excilda Montoya, the couple hired by his father to care for their house. Josh narrates the story of his fateful year in Sagrado and, with deadpan, irreverent humor, reveals the events and people who influence his progress to maturity. Unhindered by his mother's disdain for these "tacky, dusty little Westerners," Josh comes into his own and into a young man's finely formed understanding of duty, responsibility, and love. One of America's finest coming-of-age novels, Red Sky at Morning remains a "first novel to rejoice in" (Harper's) and "a novel of consequence" (New York Times Book Review).

Discussion Topics
1. How does Bradford portray racial prejudice? How do relations amongdifferent ethnic groups in Sagrado differ from those in Mobile? What is the significance of--and some of the confusions and consequences related to--Steenie's classification of people in Sagrado as Anglo, Native, and Indian?

2. How would you describe Josh's father and his relationship with his son? What role does Frank Arnold play in Josh's life? Are his presence at the novel's beginning and his few letters to Josh sufficient to establish and maintain his presence as a force in Josh's life?

3. Are Bradford's "Native" characters--the Montoyas, Sheriff Chamaco, Chango Lopez, and others--fully realized individuals? To what extent do they provide a clear understanding of the life, traditions, and history of Sagrado?

4. What differences between life in Sagrado and life in Mobile are critical to the story and to Josh's character and coming to maturity? How does Josh deal with those differences?

5. Do we learn enough about Ann Arnold's life and attitudes to adequately understand her reaction to living in Sagrado? In what ways would the story have been different if told from her perspective? Can you sympathize with her unhappiness and her inability, or refusal, to adapt to life in Sagrado?

6. What is the significance of the novel's title, in addition to its popular reference ("Red sky at morning, sailors take warning")? In what ways does the title apply to Josh and to the story's development? What should give the novel's characters cause to take warning?

7. What is the sequence of events, experiences, and insights that make up Josh's progress toward moral, emotional, and intellectual maturity? How do others--family, friends, teachers, and other residents of Sagrado--influence that progress? What does he learn from each?

8. What feelings and values are associated with Bradford's presentation of the New Mexico landscape? What is the significance of Romeo Bonino's returning his carved boulders to the mountain clearing? Do you agree with his explanation of why he returns the boulders?

9. What purpose is served by Josh's Christmas visit with Amadeo and Victoria to the mountain village of La Cima? To what extent does the lawlessness of La Cima throw into relief the need for a social order based on law, mutually beneficial communal behavior, and a recognition of everyone's humanity?

10. What attitudes, behaviors, and expressed beliefs and values of the men, women, and children of Sagrado provide a persuasive picture of the kind of lives they lead and aspire to? What is the significance of Victoria's revelation--to Jimbob's consternation--that her family has been in Sagrado since 1598?

11. Josh explains to Mr. Gunther that he believes his father's reference to "Sage Counsel" "means the counsel of Amadeo and Excilda, since they're both pretty sage." Is Josh correct? What about the Montoyas' life and outlook might explain Josh's trust in them?

 

About the Author

"Bradford believes in the human comedy the way DiMaggio believes in baseball, the way Nureyev believes in the dance, the way people, no matter what, believe in laughing when they might just as well be weeping."
--Richard Condon, author of The Manchurian Candidate and Prizzi's Honor

Born in 1932, Richard Bradford has spent most of his adult life in New Mexico, a landscape to which he pays homage in both of his novels, Red Sky at Morning and So Far from Heaven. Before the 1968 publication of Red Sky at Morning-- which many reviewers favorably compared to such coming-of-age novels as The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird--Bradford had worked as a technical writer, a promoter of tourism, and an environmental-impact analyst.

Editorial Reviews

A sort of Catcher in the Rye out West.

World Book