LOTS TO SHARE, INCLUDING A FIRST LOOK AT THE NEW NOVEL!

Lots of things to share this month, but first, my heartfelt appreciation to those who have contacted me about my latest novel, The Intended Ones, from TouchPoint Press. Some of you have said it’s the perfect sequel to last year’s Substitute Angel, while a few others have even said you enjoyed the book and totally understood the story without even reading its predecessor. Thank you all! I’m grateful for the positive feedback and encouragement. But I know some of you haven’t posted a review yet on Amazon, so please keep them coming. BTW, I think everyone knows this, but you can read several pages of my books for free on amazon to get a feel for the story. I hope to add free chapter samples on my Goodreads Author Page as well, and will try to have them up in the near future.

Meantime—and speaking of free—attached with this month’s blog is the first chapter of my next book I hope TouchPoint will be releasing entitled, A Farm In Pennsylvania. It’s a historical romance set in 1863, just a few weeks after the battle of Gettysburg. As I’ve written in previous blogs, it was an extremely challenging project. Everything had to be researched from the clothing my characters wore to the location of where things were in Gettysburg back in the day. With this year marking the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, I hope it will be released by year’s end and that you romantics (like me) out there will get swept up and carried away in its pages.

I’m also happy to report I’m making good progress on my next romance, The Thing About Margot, and that I’ll occasionally be doing some writing for a magazine called B-Metro. It’s "the" lifestyle magazine in the Birmingham area. Check out their site at b-metro.com. My first article for them should appear in the August issue.

Until then, I hope you like the first chapter of A Farm In Pennsylvania. PLEASE KEEP IN MIND THIS BLOG DOESN'T ALLOW FOR PROPER INDENTATION :)

As always, thanks for visiting!


JAMES BICKERS' MOMMA


“James Bickers, CSA,” John Dorian read on a hastily made wooden grave marker, “1844 to 1863.”

Nineteen years of age, he quietly calculated. He looked at the roughly hewn knife scratching that bore the inscription, then down at the long, narrow mound of recently dug earth. The mound seemed too small to contain a whole person. “Does your Momma know what happened to you, James?” he wondered out loud. “Did a friend cry for you?” His green eyes shifted to the next wood plank marker: Matthew McDonald, 1843 to 1863, then to the next, William Gavin Duffy, 1841 to 1863. All of the six grave markers sat about fifteen feet off the main road he’d been traveling on. The markers of varying heights looked like they had been made from the ripped-up floor planks of a wagon; probably a supply wagon. All of them had been planted shallow in the ground. All of them were soldiers from the Confederate States of America. The first good rain to come along would certainly erode the soil holding the markers and then they’d topple. Meaning the poor souls lying beneath them would be lost a second time; lost to the seemingly never ending muddy red current that was America’s first Civil War.

Dorian’s brown leather holster squeaked as he rose from his squatting position. When he did, his nostrils flared once again from that repugnant smell. It was like someone was grilling meat, only it was intermixed with the fouled aroma of burning fur. It wasn’t too dissimilar to the way a steer smelled after being branded back on his father’s farm of Mandalay. But there were also nastier parts to the aroma that he couldn’t quite identify. He knew one thing for sure, though, nobody was cooking. Rather, people were purging; burning and clearing away the destruction that over 160,000 thousand soldiers had reeked over the course of a three-day battle. All the newspapers said the town he was near, Gettysburg, was the worst fighting since the war had begun. Even when he had crossed into Adams County miles earlier, he saw the black smoke, snaking its way above the farming countryside, then becoming thinner and thinner as it weaved toward heaven and a cleaner place than where it had originated.

Spotting a loose rock twice the size of his hand, Dorian picked it up, turned, then struck the top of James Bickers’ wooden marker, pounding it deeper into the ground so he wouldn’t be forgotten. He had to be careful not to hit the edge of the wood too hard for fear it might split. After three good whacks, he repeated the process on the next marker, then the next, until he was interrupted by a voice drenched in a thick foreign accent.

“You are trespassing, sir,” he heard a female voice announce. He looked up from his work to see a slender Hispanic woman holding a Springfield 58-caliber musket. She wasn’t pointing the weapon directly at him, but both hands were holding the nine-pound rifle in a businesslike manner. Dorian looked at her steadily, neither nervous nor offended by the gun. Quite the contrary, he understood it. The whole county felt a certain sense of violation. These were troubling times.

She stood erectly at five-feet-four, appeared to be in her mid-twenties and was triangular faced with high cheekbones. She had a narrow nose and large, round, brown eyes that were the color of polished mahogany. Her lips were full but perfectly proportioned to the rest of her poised features. She could have been called beautiful were it not for her plain brown wool skirt, worn black five-button high-top leather shoes, and a faded green long-sleeve cotton blouse that was nearly worn through on the right elbow. Her straight raven-colored hair was mostly pinned up on top of her head, but it was obvious from the perspiration on her brow that she’d been doing physical labor, so several strands had slipped their bindings and were dangling down her back, stopping just above her twenty-two-inch waist. She also had a wide brim straw hat, but it wasn’t on her head. It sat in the middle of her back with two pieces of dark string tied together in a knot that sat on her dainty throat.

Dorian dropped the rock, then touched the brim of his hat as a gesture of courtesy. She was the first woman he’d ever seen with sepia-colored skin and was instantly taken with her looks, although he concealed it.

“I thought this was a public road.”

“You took a wrong turn at the fence,” she replied. Her English was good, but her accent was from a far away upbringing. In his entire life he’d only seen one other Hispanic before and that was a man just passing through the village near his father’s farm. Up north where he had come from, brown people were a novelty, even more so than the black man.

“You came onto my husband’s land at the rail fence,” the woman explained. Then she remembered something. “No,” she said, her eyes drifting downward, “the fence is gone.”

“Is this anywhere near a place called Cemetery Ridge?” he asked.

“No. That is on the other side of town. Go back to Mummasburg Road, then south,” she pointed.

“Mummasburg. . .”

“The road you were on before you turned on my husband’s land.”

He glanced in the direction she indicated, then turned back to her. “My apologies,” he said in a level voice. He slowly reached over for the reins of his chestnut mare that had been patiently waiting a few feet away. “I was examining the graves looking for a name. He could still be alive but—he probably isn’t.” He cracked a small, parting smile. “Sorry,” he muttered, turning his horse to walk away.

“You lost someone in the fighting?” she asked.

He paused, then turned back to her.

“A brother. My family received a letter that he was missing. That was a month ago. We’ve heard nothing further since. I’ve just arrived from the north.”

“New York?”

“Ohio.”

The woman wasn’t sure how far away Ohio was. She’d never been there. But she knew it was a distance. Meaning, this stranger must have been traveling for days. She eyed his expensive but dusty saddle. She knew something about saddles and concluded he probably wasn’t of an unscrupulous character, although she did take note of the Colt Navy revolver in his holster. It was a serious weapon.

“Town is a couple miles down the road,” she said, lowering her Springfield. “Cemetery Ridge is beyond that next to Evergreen Cemetery. You’re welcome to bring your horse up to the barn for water if you want.”

Dorian raised his eyebrows, surprised by the woman’s sudden change of mind and hospitality. “I’m obliged.”

“You must understand, senor, a stranger at fresh graves is suspicious. Bodies have been robbed for valuables. There are stories of deserters roaming the woods. Men from newspapers trespass onto farms making angry those who just want to return to their lives. One needs to be cautious.”

“Of course,” he said, taking a step toward her then stopping. “I was just pounding the markers deeper into the ground. First good rain will wash ‘em away.”

She looked him over, then turned. “The barn is this way.”

What she saw was a twenty-five year-old man whose face had been chiseled from a life of working outdoors. Even though twenty-five wasn’t old, John Dorian looked older. At five-feet-eleven, he was straight and lean like a white pine and nearly as tough. He wore an eggshell colored long-sleeve button-up cotton shirt that had light grey pinstripes on it, dark brown wool pants with thin leather suspenders, a wide brim sweat-stained light tan Stetson hat, brown cowboy boots with spurs that jingled when he walked, and then that formidable Colt that was strapped to his right leg. He also wore a red bandana around his neck. His hair was long, thin, straight and caramel-colored. It was tucked behind his ears and came to rest on solid shoulders. He not only needed a haircut, but also a shave. He had a five or six-day growth of beard on his face and a much thicker permanent moustache under a straight, prominent nose. He was more rugged-looking than handsome. But he had tipped his hat, apologized for trespassing, had clear green eyes and owned an expensive saddle, so she decided there was something more substantial to this man than the nosy reporters and land speculators that had come to Gettysburg to pick over its wheat and cornfields like a plague of locusts.

It was Monday, August 10th, 1863, a little more than five weeks after the biggest battle ever fought on the Western Hemisphere. The graves where Dorian had stopped was were the lane to the woman’s farm and Mummasburg Road, which ran north and south, converged. The dead had been buried amongst a natural half-circle of oak and maples with a thicket of flowering hydrangeas that had grown up at the base of the trees. It was picturesque and shady and that was probably why this particular piece of ground had been selected by the Confederates. That, plus its convenience to the main road.

“My name is John Dorian,” he said.

“I am Maria Angelina Alvarez Samuels,” she replied while walking.

“That’s a lot of names for one person.”

She smiled a little which showed the flicker of even more beauty.

Dorian glanced to his right at a clearing, then to his left. Just beyond the trees and thicket that had obstructed his view, he saw two or three acres of corn that had been laid flat as pancake. Thousands of broken green stalks lay rotting and brittle in the morning sun. Being raised on a farm himself, he paused and furrowed his brow.

“Confederates,” she explained. “That’s why the fence no longer stands. It was on the first day. There was much fighting down the road and this is where they started to—to—” she stopped, not knowing the correct word.

“Come together? Converge?” he guessed.

“Si.”

He remembered reading in the papers that on the first day of the battle, the rebels had ironically arrived in Gettysburg from the north while the Union army had arrived from the south.

“We were lucky,” she continued. “Many crops were completely destroyed. Many families lost everything. One man, a Senor Trostle, even became insane because of all the slaughter on his farm. His family had to take him away to a hospital.”

“You’ve got husks out there that need to be salvaged,” he advised, looking at the corn and beginning to walk again.

“Si, Senor Dorian. I know. You did not see this from the road?” she asked, surprised that he was just now noticing the condition of her field.

“No, ma’am. I guess my mind was otherwise engaged,” he admitted.

“You are from Ohio?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’ve been traveling a long time?”

“Fifteen days.”

“I think maybe you should have come by train.”

He smiled. “My father would agree with you.”

She likewise liked the warmth of his smile. “All of your family is in Ohio?”

“My brother and I work my father’s place, or did. He was a Corporal with the 25th Ohio Infantry. They were heavily engaged at Cemetery Ridge. He turned up missing either the first or second day of battle. . .The letter we received from his Lieutenant said he didn’t know for sure because some troops got separated. We received word about his disappearance in mid-July. My mother’s been most anxious for further news but. . .” his voice trailed off. “She’s taken his disappearance very hard. I’ve wired my father during my journey to see if they’ve received any additional word. But, alas, no.”

“So, you have come to find answers for her,” she concluded. “That may not be easy. Thousands of men were killed. Thousands more are missing. Even now, they are still finding bodies—or—what’s left of them. The coyotes and cows have not gone hungry.”

“Cows?” he asked.

“No,” she chuckled, realizing she had misspoken. “The birds. The big, black ones.”

“Crows?” he guessed.

“Si. Crows. I get my English confused, sometimes.”

The jingling of Dorian’s spurs stopped again as he paused and eyed a five-foot pile of horse and cow manure intermixed with old hay sitting near the two swing-open doors of the wood and stone barn. It had been shoveled out of the stalls but not yet properly disposed of and flies buzzed around it annoyingly. Next, he eyed a corral gate in front of the barn where a bottom hinge was missing, then he eyed the condition of the barn. It looked like someone had begun to paint it, but then abandoned it.

“You and your husband new to farming, Mrs. Samuels?” he asked.

“Like your brother, my husband joined the army,” she replied. “Last I knew, he was somewhere in Tennessee.”

“You’re running the place alone?” he asked, starting to walk again.

“I have my son and another man.”

“I see.”

“Most every farm in the county wants for men, Senor Dorian. Fathers, sons, brothers—many have gone off to fight.”

“What’s the smell?” he asked, gesturing to the curling black smoke rising against the backdrop of the blue sky.

“Dead animals,” she answered. “Horses mostly. Hundreds were killed during the fighting. But there was much livestock also. Goats, sheep, pigs, chickens, dogs, mules. Wagons pull the remains to cleared fields then men stack them up for burning. I’ve seen piles as high as ten feet.”

“What about your livestock?”

“There was only a little fighting here. I lost no animals.”

“What about the graves?” he inquired, glancing back over his shoulder.

“There was some cannon fire when the soldiers were gathering,” she explained.

He nodded and surveyed the farm again. The barn was medium sized and had a cantilevered forebay. This was a purposeful overbuilding so the top half of the barn—the roof and hayloft—looked like it had been glued onto a smaller bottom half. Two of the barn’s four walls were wood and two were mortared fieldstone. Its oversized top half and the use of fieldstone walls were different from the more traditional square-looking wood hay barns he was familiar with in Ohio. So was its color. The barns in Ohio were either unpainted or red due to the mixture of linseed oil and rust that was used to seal the wood and prevent moss. The wood walls of this particular barn were painted white. Or, at least they were from the ground level up to about five feet, then the brush strokes thinned out in varying lengths. This new coat of paint was going over a much older coat of white but, at the moment, it looked like a haphazard white stripe had been slapped around the bottom front and back of the barn. It was the work of either a youngster or an idiot, Dorian concluded.

He scanned the trampled corn again, then the pile of manure which, if not dealt with, was inviting disease, then the farmhouse itself. It was a two-story wooden house with a wide front porch that ran its full length and had five narrow columns to hold the overhanging porch roof secure. On the porch was a rocking chair. There were two four-pane glass windows on either side of the front door, then four more four-pane windows on its second level. He guessed it was a seven or eight room house. Not a mansion, but more affluent than most of the farmhouses he had passed along his journey. Although above average in size, everything was in need of attention. There were two bullet holes near the farthest right-hand side second story window and another pane in one of the downstairs front windows was cracked. Rose bushes on the right side of the house were scraggly and in need of pruning. About thirty feet beyond them was a bunkhouse. It was only fourteen-by-twelve but in its heyday could’ve accommodated four farmhands. In between the house and bunkhouse and set back close to a wooded area was a vegetable garden in need of weeding. Immediately in front of the garden was a well with a square wooden frame around it and rope hanging on a peg for buckets to be tied and dropped. On the other side of the farmhouse, to his left, in between the house and barn, was a small hen house that needed a new roof. All in all, the farm was too much work for too few people.

“How long has your husband been away?” Dorian asked.

“Two years,” she replied without any particular emotion.

“Do you hear from him regularly?”

“I don’t hear from him at all,” she answered plainly. “But his service should be done soon. When he left, we had two other men. Now there is just myself, my son, and Carl Smithers.”

“What happened to the two other men?”

“They—they didn’t stay,” she answered. She hesitated in a way where he concluded there was a story behind their leaving, but it wasn’t his place to ask. So he nodded and continued to look around instead. “How many acres?”

“Two hundred.”

Dorian furrowed his brow again. He opened his mouth to ask if her husband had ever been home on leave, when he heard a voice ask: “Who the hell is this?”

He turned to see a see a man who was wearing dirty white long-john bottoms, cowboy boots, and an equally dirty blue button-up cotton shirt. He was coming from around the back of the house in between the house and the garden. He had one leg two inches shorter than the other so he walked with a pronounced limp. He carried a newspaper under his arm suggesting he was just returning from the outhouse. He had slight potbelly, was a little older than Dorian and had a high forehead with thin strawberry blonde hair. He also had a rather large purplish birthmark on his right cheek that stretched-up the right side of his flat, gorilla-like nose. He hadn’t bathed in several days and, on the whole, gave an uncivilized first impression. He scowled at Dorian, then his eyes shot to Maria expecting an answer.

“This is Carl Smithers, Senor Dorian. He—” she hesitated again, “works here.”

“Whatever you’re sellin’, we don’t want none,” Smithers said gruffly.

“I’m just waterin’ my horse,” the stranger explained, trying not to show his disapproval of a farm hand that would be so bold as to walk around in such a state of undress.

“Trough is over there,” Smithers jerked with his thumb one way, “town is that way,” he pointed in the opposite direction. He turned and looked at the front door of the farmhouse. “Armando! Coffee!”

A moment later, a skinny, black-haired, olive-skinned boy, nine years old, opened the front door of the house, carrying a steaming mug of coffee. Dorian led his horse over to the water trough along side the barn watching as the boy dutifully delivered the mug to Smithers. Maria walked with him to the trough.

“He ‘works’ for you?” he asked quietly.

“He is a childhood friend of my husband,” she answered. “He’s supposed to help us, si. But, it is—what is the word—‘complicated.’”

No, it wasn’t, Dorian figured. Maria’s husband had asked someone he trusted to look after his wife and son. Maybe besides room and board he was even being paid. But two years had gone by and Smithers had become complacent, and even belligerent, with his situation. Instead of working the place, the roles had been reversed and he’d become the task-master to this Mexican woman and her son, who probably needed a man on the property for safety sake. No, he concluded, it wasn’t complicated at all.

“You one of them reporters?” Smithers asked, farting and taking his coffee from the boy at the same time.

“No,” Dorian said, stroking his horse’s side and watching him take a drink.

The little boy, who was the spitting image of his mother, approached Dorian’s large, brown mare. He wore an old, white cotton button-up shirt and black pants with no belt or suspenders. Like any child, his thick, black hair was a little ruffled and askew.

“This is a Morgan horse, isn’t it?” he asked in an accent not as thick as his mother’s.

“You know your horses,” he smiled, extending a hand. “My name’s John.”

The boy started to raise his hand to reciprocate, but Smithers bellowed at him. “Armando, back inside. Get to your chores!” The boy stepped back then turned to go back toward the house. Smithers limped over and continued his interrogation of Dorian. “One of them picture makers, then?”

“Perhaps today you can remove that pile of manure, Carl?” Maria asked.

“I got business in town,” he answered but still keeping an eye on the stranger. “You lookin’ to own a piece of the battlefield? A land speculator?”

Dorian’s horse raised its head from the trough indicating it was finished drinking. The visitor took the reins, gently brought them back over the animal’s ears, then rounded his horse, stuck a boot tip into the stirrup and mounted, his spurs jingling as he did. He looked up at the sky. He could tell by the position of the sun it was nearly 10 a.m., yet Smithers wasn’t even dressed yet. In his world back in Ohio, four or five hours of work would have already been done on the farm.

“Obliged for the water,” he said, looking at Maria. He touched the brim of his hat again as a gesture of respect, ignored Smithers, then turned his horse’s head and started to ride down the dirt lane toward the wooden grave markers and back to Mummasburg Road that would take him to Gettysburg.

“Not a very friendly son-of-a-bitch, is he?” Smithers concluded, taking a slurp of coffee.

“What ‘business’ do you have in town today, Carl?” Maria Samuels asked. Her query suggested that Carl had had business in town the day before, and the day before that.

“Just business,” he answered, scratching his potbelly.

“Drinking business? Whoring business? Or is today gambling business?”

“Be nice, now,” Smithers warned smugly, smiling and turning toward the bunkhouse. “Remember that nice, young Mrs. Green all alone on her farm? The one that got molested by them drifters? You need a man around here. Unless you’re fixin’ to learn how to actually shoot that Springfield instead of just carryin’ it around.”