Shadow on a Weary Land

The narrator of "Shadow on a Weary Land" imagines the many lives that have been lived over the years on Brown''s Ridge—from the teeming wildlife that once roamed the land to Jesse and Frank James, who settled there, to the farmers recently pushed out by the imminent rise of a housing development. These ghosts from the past haunt the narrator and his friends, a group of misfits who realize that their hardscrabble lives are intimately tied to a vanishing place.