Novel Excerpt

Excerpted from Renee Goodchild, a novel

(64,000 words)

I’ll bet you’d expect to find some kind of deliberate purpose for this ruinous decision, the one that cheated me of childhood and stripped away the last of my self-confidence. At bare minimum, you’d think I’d have relished the details of that fateful day well enough to recall them now; most would have. But to be honest, my initial offense has over time become far less memorable than its penalty.

All I can tell you is that it happened in a stand of live oaks, somewhere off a deserted county road in North Texas, one sweltering afternoon in August 1971. There in the blistering back seat of a Ford Galaxy, I succumbed to a young boy’s attempt to set my body and both our futures ablaze. Like a prairie grass fire, my reasoning followed no particular path. I simply yielded to his pent-up needs and our secluded setting – took advantage of a rural opportunity, if you will. And that single stroke of bad luck, or poor judgment, depending on how you choose to look at it, led me and Kenny Ray Murphy straight to the front door of the Second Baptist Church in White Rock, Texas, where Daddy was a deacon.

We didn’t exactly live in White Rock, proper, the largest town in Limestone County, population 5,090. But how else can I describe that physical location, a flat treeless twenty acres simply called “unincorporated land?” The parcel that Momma and Daddy owned looked like a child-size sliver cut from a whole buttermilk pie. For the most part, our neighbors, the Caldwells, with their 500-acre spread, owned the rest of that pastry. And every summer when the whirlwinds transformed those honey-colored strands into millions of miniature pompons, the Caldwells graciously, and no doubt jokingly, baled Daddy’s six acres of oats.

Anyone who saw our barbed wire enclosed grain field or puny, three-acre black-eyed pea patch must have known that Daddy was only a weekend farmer – not a serious sodbuster; heck, he didn’t even own a horse, much less a tractor. So he improvised by using me and my younger brother Carl for farm implements. It looked something like this: Imagine a horse-driven plow, the kind they used before the Industrial Age, and then substitute two kids for the horse. We walked abreast, pushing against a leather strap that crossed our ribs and pulling a giant spade behind us, praying that nobody we knew or would ever see again would spot us. Daddy claimed the contraption ingenious – but we called it downright humiliating.   

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