Great Dream of Heaven

THE REMEDY MAN

E.V. made no bones about it; he was not a horse whisperer by any stretch. He was a remedy man. He could fix bad horses, and when he fixed them they stayed fixed. That's all he laid claim to. We had one that needed to be turned around real bad. A five-year-old my dad had claimed off the low end of the fair circuit out in Sonoma, running for $1,200 tags. He was good-looking enough with a powerful hip and gaskin but his mind was the size of a chickpea. The one intolerable habit he had was setting back hard against his lead shank when tied to anything solid. The day he dragged down half the side of our pole barn on top of himself was the day we called E.V. He showed up at our place a week late in his usual beat-up outfit: a '54 Chevy half ton with Arizona plates and a one-horse trailer sporting bald tires and a flapping canvas top. He always parked his rig down on the flat bottom and hiked the steep gravel grade up to the house because he had no rearview mirrors to negotiate our hairpin turnaround. He didn't come to our place that often because most of the "knuckleheads" Dad was able to deal with himself, but when E.V. did pay us a visit I always got excited about it.

E.V. was a springy little man in his late fifties with an exaggerated limp from having his kneecap crushed in a shoeing accident when he was about my age; about fourteen. He climbed the hill in steady jerks, his gray felt hat pointing straight down at the ground and bobbing with his gait. He had an old patched inner tube slung over one shoulder and a thick snow white cotton rope dangled from his left hand with the loose end looped through his horse- hair belt. I always thought he must have washed that rope regular in Ivory to keep it so white. It was the cleanest thing about him. When he got to the top he wasn't puffing or blowing like you'd think a man his age would be. He just arrived like he'd been air-dropped. "So, Mason, you shipped him off to the killer's yet?" He grinned at my

Sam Shepard was the Pulitzer Prize winning author of more than fifty-five plays and three story collections. As an actor, he appeared in more than sixty films, and received an Oscar nomination in 1984 for The Right Stuff. He was a finalist for the W. H. Smith Literary Award for his story collection Great Dream of Heaven. In 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, received the Gold Medal for Drama from the Academy, and was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. He died in 2017.

Extraordinary by any measure. . . . With this collection [Shepard] becomes a storyteller in the purest sense. The New York Times Book Review

Devastatingly artful. . . . Brutal and satisfying. . . . In their careful craft and mysterious revelations, the best stories in Great Dream of Heaven recall . . . Chekhov. Minneapolis Star Tribune

Strong emotions . . . make a Sam Shepard story as familiar as an old leather saddle. . . . Shepard s terse, lyrical style excels. . . . There s something broadly American . . . about the frustrations his characters feel. San Francisco Chronicle

Shocking. . . . Often funny. . . . Shepard s writing is consistently excellent. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

His playwriting skills . . . make his fiction shimmer with a brutal clarity. Los Angeles Times Book Review