The people.

Every entry below describes a person as they are on the first page of Touched by Thunder. Anything that happens later is folded away behind a marker you open yourself.

• Elena Hartwell

  Widow. Farmer. Forty-two.

  Born Elena Brennan, married Tom Hartwell in 1989, widowed in April 2009. She has run two hundred and eighty acres alone ever since. She thinks in the farm ledger — weighs, measures, tallies, takes stock — and she is better at carrying things than at putting them down. Thunder is a trigger — Tom died in a storm, and the weather that killed him comes back every season.

• Jake Morrison

  Marine veteran. Mechanic. Twenty-three.

  No family to speak of. He rode up from Ohio in a January blizzard on a 1979 Honda to sit with the parents of a friend who did not come home, and to tell them who their son had been. He went into a snow drift a mile short of their place; Jim Johnson found him and brought him in, and the storm kept him there three days. He was not planning to stay. He knows engines and machines; he knows nothing at all about crops.

• Matthew Hartwell

  Elena and Tom’s son. Nineteen.

  At the University of Minnesota studying ag systems, two years later than he should have been because he stayed home after his father died. He carries more guilt about leaving than his mother knows.

  Contains Touched by Thunder

  He is the one who brings Jake to the farm.

• Tom Hartwell

  Elena’s husband. Died April 2009.

  Third-generation Hartwell farmer, born 1964. He is present in the book the way the dead are present on a farm: in the wiring he did himself, the equipment he chose, and the way things are still arranged.

• Jen Carlson

  Third-grade teacher. Elena’s closest friend for thirty years.

  Lives above her father’s insurance agency on Main Street. She came home to look after her mother, who died in 2008, and stayed. Jen knows what the town is saying before the town has finished saying it, and she tells Elena the truth without trying to fix her.

• Rick Anderson

  Retired Marine gunnery sergeant. Forty-five.

  Co-owns the fuel station with his brother and runs Post 4478. He tells a newcomer the lay of the land once, and then lets him decide what to do with it.

  Contains Touched by Thunder

  He becomes Jake’s way into the town.

• Jim and Carol Johnson

  Bobby’s parents. Neighbors a mile and a half east.

  Jim is a Vietnam veteran and a second-generation farmer; Carol is a CPA and tax preparer. Their farm has been running at about seventy percent since 2011, for reasons that have nothing to do with the land.

• Bobby Johnson

  Jake’s closest friend. Killed in Helmand Province, March 2011.

  A Millfield boy, and the reason Jake came here at all. His room at the Johnson place is much as he left it.

• Dave Coleman

  Regional agricultural lending manager. Elena’s high-school boyfriend.

  Came back to Millfield in 2007, two terms on the city council, divorced around 2008. He is dangerous because he is sincere. Whatever he says about you, he believes.

  Contains Touched by Thunder

  He says the version of events he genuinely believes, which is exactly what makes it so hard to argue with in public.

• Ruth Solberg

  Manager, Prairie Co-op.

  Wire-rimmed glasses, conservative in how she presents herself, and people read her as older than she is. Where some people in town trade information, Ruth keeps it. She extends seasonal credit and does not make anyone explain why they need it.

• Katie Lindgren

  Bartender at the Grain Elevator Tap.

  Dark hair pulled back, and the flat steel of a woman who has been cutting off dangerous drunks since before most of her customers could legally order one.

• Travis Kemp

  Former Millfield football star who peaked at eighteen.

  A mean drunk with an audience, who peaked at eighteen and has been telling people about it ever since.

  Contains Touched by Thunder

  What he says about Elena at the Tap, other men hear and do not correct.

• Marge Keller

  First Lutheran elder. The pie table.

  Late sixties, and a friend of Tom’s mother for twenty years. She asks loaded questions from entirely sincere concern, which gives everyone else’s concern somewhere respectable to stand.

• Wes Halverson

  Twelve hundred acres. Co-op coffee counter.

  Sixty, twelve hundred acres, and a seat at the co-op coffee counter he never had to ask for. He believes Elena needs guidance, and that Jake is not the county’s idea of a proper man for her.

  Contains Touched by Thunder

  He repeats Dave Coleman’s framing, because it matches what he already believed.

• Pastor Karen Lindquist

  First Lutheran, about fifteen years.

  She married Tom and Elena, confirmed Matthew, and buried Tom.

  Contains Touched by Thunder

  She is civil to Dave Coleman while seeing exactly what he is, which takes more effort than she lets on.

• Diane

  Countryside Cuts.

  Cuts hair on Main Street. If something is being said in Millfield, it has been said in that chair first.

• Bill Peterson and Howard Meier

  Neighbors. The back booth.

  Bill farms next door, keeps a border collie called Dutch, and turns up after storms with the right tool already behind the seat. Howard is eighty, wears the VFW cap, and knew the Hartwell place back in Tom’s father’s day.

• Donna Larson Book Two

  Millfield Books & Supply, since 2001.

  The town’s unofficial therapist by way of the shelf. Tell her what is wrong and you will leave with something to read, and she is right more often than not.

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