Naked Came the Leaf Peeper

The above is the intriguing title of a new book you may have already heard about because, within days of its debut, it was already causing a sensation around Western North Carolina. If the title sounds somewhat familiar, that's because it partakes of an irreverent literary genre dating back in recent history to Naked Came the Stranger, a bestselling 1969 collaborative serial novel spoofing America's fascination with sex and co-written by several staffers at Newsday, a Long Island newspaper, which was followed in 1996 by Naked Came the Manatee, a mystery parody similarly composed by a corps of authors.

Our highland home, offering as it does its own array of stereotypes ranging from the engaging to the bizarre, and parody being the mainstay of the previous two novels as well as a sincere form of fond celebration of its topic, co-editors Brian Lee Knopp and his wife Linda Barrett Knopp have persuaded some our region's most talented--and possibly deranged--authors to contribute the twelve 6,000-word chapters that make up the book.

Brian, already acclaimed for his bestselling memoir Mayhem in Mayberry, sets the stage with an initial chapter strewn like a minefield with plot devices each of which succeeding authors pick up and carry on, not only maintaining a compelling and consistent story line but also freely throwing in more and more clever twists and turns so that the book becomes a hilarious unfolding of incident and deepening of character that draws the reader eagerly to the fabulous climax, written by Vanderbilt's Tony Earley, which I guarantee will leave you screaming with helpless laughter.

In between are chapters written by John P. McAfee, Susan Reinhardt, Gene Cheek, Wayne Caldwell, Fred Chappell, Vicki Lane, Tommy Hays, Alan Gratz, Linda Marie Barrett and Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, writers known throughout our region for various styles of work but who, this time, have thrown themselves gleefully into a murder-mystery spoof while somehow managing to deploy their individual styles yet maintain a consistent authorial voice throughout.

Yours truly contributed a minor Afterword, but it is the collaboration of the chapter-writers which is the wonder and the mainstay of the book. I venture to predict it will live long. Already it has been praised by the likes of Charles Frazier, Ron Rash, Elizabeth Gilbert and Sarah Addison Allen. Get it and read it. And enjoy the belly-laughs!

Buy it or order it from Malaprop's Bookstore and Cafe in Asheville (www.malaprops.com).

MOVING ON

Those of you who may have been checking this blog since last fall will know it's been a while since I updated it. I apologize for leaving you in the dark for so long. It's not that I've gotten lazy; as a matter of fact, the opposite is true--I've actually been quite busy.

I've completed The Sunshine of Better Fortune, my sequel to Nor the Battle to the Strong; the manuscript is now with my publisher and I'm waiting to hear whether he plans to accept it. These two novels have consumed the better part of the last ten years of my life, so of course I'm anxious to hear his verdict. I continue to await word from the another publisher, whose editors have been considering Season of Terror, my nonfiction account of the Espinosa serial killers in Civil War-era Colorado, for twenty-one months now--a process which has taught me much about the difference between the publishing of fiction and of nonfiction. The latter requires endless peer reviewing, scrupulous editing to root out politically incorrect words and phrases, and of course a careful checking to insure sound scholarship. But I'm hopeful for a good outcome at the end of the frustratingly protracted process.

Nearly simultaneously I also wrote a novel about the Espinosas, a 650-page tome which a Colorado friend will soon be reading for cultural and geographical accuracy and which I hope will also see print someday.

Having done so much authorial heavy lifting, I've been looking around for something less exhaustive but still productive and, at the urging of my wife Ruth and good friend Britt Kaufmann, have decided to try e-publishing. As some of you will know, I've written a number of novels set in the early West--I don't like to call call them Westerns in the genre sense because I've tried to give them the literary heft of serious writing. I actually posted one on this blog some time ago, and some of you may have read that one. But I've been unsuccessful in peddling them to non-genre publishers and, as so many other writers are doing these days, have decided to try e-publishing.

We are in the process of formatting the text and hope soon to launch the e-book. Britt--who has an amazing artistic talent as well as a fine gift for poetry--has even designed an exciting cover, which I'll be sharing with you here when the time is right. Be assured I'll keep you posted on all aspects of our progress.

So stay tuned for fresh developments. And by the way, Happy New Year!

HONORING NATHANAEL GREENE - PART TWO

When I began my project to write a Revolutionary War novel my intention was a rather narrow one--to wite a partly factual, partly imagined account of the activities of a maternal ancestor, James Johnson, in that conflict. I had learned of Johnson's service through some materials on family history that my mother had gathered many years before. I supplemented this information by obtaining Johnson's pension records from the National Archives and from them I learned of his service in the Continental Army under Nathanael Greene in the South from late 1781 to early 1783.

I realized that in order to understand my ancestor's experiences I also had to learn about Greene's campaigns during that time, which until recently had been among the least known of the war. Accordingly, I read the relevant volumes of The Papers of Major General Nathanael Greene (University of North Carolina Press) and a number of primary and secondary accounts dealing with his operations in North and South Carolina and Georgia.

I came away from my research profoundly impressed by Greene both as a man and as a commander. He was not just a fine strategist who was, amazingly, self-taught in military science; in mental acuity ahd subtlety of thought and expression he was also one of the most considerable intellectuals of his time. He could, and did, correspond as an equal with the foremost men of Enlightenment America--Thomas Paine the polemecist; educator and Presbyterian divine John Witherspoon; Thomas Jefferson; John Adams; of course George Washington--and in the process showed himself a writer and thinker of remarkable style, wit and penetrating originality.

To illustrate, I'd like to quote from two of his letters, the first demostrating his mischievous wit and and another, his more serious side. On July 18, 1781 at the High Hills of Santee in South Carolina, Greene wrote this delightful passage in a letter to his friend and business partner Jeremiah Wadsworth, in reference to his masterful Fabian strategy during the Guilford Courthouse campaign:

"I had a letter sometime since from Mr John Trumbull wherein he asserts that with all my talents for Warr, I am deficient in the great Art of making a timely retreat. I hope I have convinced the World to the contrary, for there are few Generals that has run oftener, or more lustily than I have done, But I have taken care not to run too farr; and commonly have run as fast forward as backward, to convince our enemy that we were like a Crab, that could run either way."

The next passage, written on March 26, 1781, a few days after the battle of Guilford Courthouse to the Quakers of the New Garden Monthly Meeting, expresses his view of their faith, which had once been his:

"I was born and educated in the profession and principles of your Society; and am perfectly acquainted with your religious sentiments and general good conduct as citizens. I am also sensible from the prejudices of many belonging to other religious societies, and the misconduct of a few of your own, that you are generally considered as enemies to the independence of America. I entertain other sentiments, both of your priciples and wishes. I respect you as a people, and shall always be ready to protect you from every violence and oppression which the confusion of the times afford but too many instances of. Do not be deceived. This is no religious dispute. The contest is for political liberty, without which cannot be enjoyed the free exrecise of your religion."

In making the acquaintance of this remarkable man, the feelings I had were perhaps best described by the General's grandson, G.W. Greene, who in 1871 published a biography of his illustrious forebear and quoted on its title page these lines of Homer, from Book Four of The Iliad:

"After this manner said they, who had seen him toiling; but I ne'er

Met him myself, nor saw him; men say he was greater than others."

Toil Greene did. Few have toiled harder, been more scantily rewarded or more undeservedly neglected. Until quite recently history had all but misplaced him. Only in the last decade have we seen something of a resurgence of his popularity, thanks to the complete publication of his papers and two new biographies. Yet a fair case can be made than it was he, more than any other field commander, who won the War of the Revolution. It's certain that he saved the Southern States from British dominion. As all this came clear to me, Greene began to claim a larger and larger share of the story I wished to tell, though I could not at first see how I could include him, the commanding general, in a book whose other chief character was my ancestor James Johnson, a Scottish immigrant, runaway indentured servant and obscure private of dragoons.

As is so often the case in my writing, it was my wife whose insight resolved my dilemma. The story, Ruth said, should be equally Johnson's and Greene's, the General's point of view giving the reader a top-down perspective on the war as an exercise in command; Johnson's, a bottom-up look at the same war as seen by the ordinary and usually uncomprehending soldier in the ranks. So the first novel--and its sequel when I am able to complete it, hopefully later this year--owe their forms to Ruth. If they succeed in their purposes, the credit is hers. If they do not, the fault is mine for failing to capture the pattern she so clearly saw.

I want to speak now about what a good friend of mine describes as Greene's Forgotten Years. If he is remembered at all, Greene is known for his remarkable campaign in the spring of 1781 culminating in the battle of Guilford Courthouse. His later campaigns--the ones in South Carolina cited on the pedestal of his monument in Greensboro and so mysterious to me as a boy--are not so well known, even though his last, the bitter struggle at Eutaw Springs, was in fact the bloodiest battle of the Revolution for the numbers engaged.

Even less understood are his months of arduous service in the South from January 1782 through July 1783. Though major combat operations were over, Greene still had to arrange for the conquest of Georgia. Few Americans know that he sent a small contingent of troops into Georgia under the command of Brigadier General "Mad Anthony" Wayne; or that Wayne, in a seven-month campaign, defeated a coalition of British, Hessian and Loyalist troops as well as allied Creek and Cherokee Indians (I might mention that James Johnson was a part of this force). Ironically, we think of Wayne as a hero of the Northern War but his service to the South has largely gone unrecognized, as has the knowledge that he operated under the command of Nathanael Greene.

Greene also involved himself deeply in statecraft, working hard as the war wound down to reconcile Patriots and Loyalists who, in the Southern states, had been at each others' throats in a frightful internal struggle ever since the outbreak of war. It is thanks to Greene that when the war did end, these contending parties were able largely to compose their differences.

Sickness and want if every kind afflicted Greene's army during these last grueling months of the war as everyone waited for peace to be concluded. Under the Articles of Confederation there was no mechanism to compel the states to furnish money or supplies to the Continental Army, and after Yorktown Greene's army struggled on without pay or adequate food, clothing or necessary equipments. During this trying period Greene had to contend with several mutinies and with at least one plot on his life. I'm sorry to say that one of the mutinies involved the First Regiment of Continental Light Dragoons--Greene's cavalry force--and that one of the mutineers was my ancestor, James Johnson.

When there was no national source for supplying his army, Greene arranged for a private contractor to do so, with the understanding that the contractor would be reimbursed by the Congress. But this did not happen and, in order to keep his army supplied, Greene pledged his own resources. Regrettably, the contractor turned out to be an unscrupulous scoundrel, misspent the money and then died, leaving Greene holding a debt that plagued him for the rest of his days. Not until many years after his death was his widow finally reimbursed by Congress. Cruelly, the mutiny in which my ancestor participated was brought on, in part, by the unfounded suspicion that Greene, while his army starved, had enriched himself by lining his pockets with money intended to supply the troops.

But the country never paid Greene his salary as a Major General of the Continental Army, nor did he realize any profit from his arrangement with the contractor. The Southern States, in gratitude for his services but also impoverished by war, did give him some confiscated Loyalist plantations, the largest at Mulberry grove in Georgia.

So at war's end Greene, whose Quaker teachings condemned human slavery, had to scrape up enough money to purchase slave labor to work his rice fields in hopes of providing for his wife and five children. We do not know what inner conflict this may have caused him. Sadly, despite all his toils and this compromise of his early principles, he never managed to make Mulberry Grove pay, and he died of sunstroke after visiting a neighbor's plantation one hot summer's day in 1786. He was forty-four years of age.

He did not live to write his memoirs and make himself famous, as did his troublesome former subordinate "Light Horse Harry" Lee. He did not live to serve his country further, in Congress or perhaps even as President of the United States, though he was certainly qualified to have done so. And because he did not live, he and his works--and the contribution of the South to the winning of independence--have been largely ignored.

So, to return to my earlier theme, victory in the Revolution and liberty for the United States were the South's gifts to the thirteen colonies struggling to become a nation. Those gifts deserve to be remembered, especially by Southerners who should know their own history better than they do. We have allowed the Civil War to stand like an impenetrable wall across the Southern memory. But if we can climb that wall and look eighty years farther into the past, we will see glory.

We should honor that glory and we should also honor the great patriot Nathanael Greene--the former Quaker from Rhode Island--who led us to achieve it.

HONORING NATHANAEL GREENE

Regular readers of this blog will know that in 2008 I published a historical novel, Nor the Battle to the Strong, based in part on the service of Major General Nathanael Greene, commander of the Southern Continental Army during the last years of the American Revolution, and that I'm now working on its sequel, The Sunshine of Better Fortune. Recently I was privileged to address the Nathanael Greene Chapter of the Sons of the Revolution in Atlanta, GA. I chose the topic "Nathanael Greene: The Forgotten Years." Some of the material in the speech has appeared before in this space and others, but I attempted to weave that material into a broader and more comprehensive whole. I thought it might be of interest here. Part One of the text follows:

When I was a child, my family lived for a time in Greensboro, North Carolina. We used to picnic in a public park there called the Battleground. Of course this was the site of the battle of Guilford Courthouse during the American Revolution, but to me it was jusy a place to eat relish sandwiches and drink Cokes and, later, to play softball. It was also memorable as the place where I hit the one and only home run of my life.

One fixture of the place did command my attention, though. It was the great equestrian statue of Greene that stands on the spot where the General stood as he directed the battle. I used to linger at the foot of that magnificent monument and admire the handsome figure in his great metal horse. I would read the names of his Southern engagements emblazoned on the pedestal: Guilford Courthouse; Hobkirk's Hill; Ninety-Six; Eutaw Springs. I wondered what those words meant and who the man was who fought in the places bearing such exotic names.

Now, of course, I know. And looking back on my boyhood, I marvel at the strangeness of fate. It never occurred to me then that I would grow up and in late middle age I would immerse myself in the life of Greene and come to admire him as I've seldom admired any leader of my own time--much less that I would live to write two novels about him. I guess all these years later I'm still, in some ways, that same little boy gazing up at that mighty figure on horseback.

Back then, in about 1951, I, like most Southern-born males of my generation--indeed, like many Americans still--knew very little about the Revolutionary War. For me the watershed event of the collective history of the South was The Civil War, or what we were then wont to call The War between the States. For most of my life I studies that war and found in it my heroes such as Robert E. lee, Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart.

My own Confederate credentials, I discovered, were impeccable. My paternal great-great grandfather served throughout the conflict in the 39th Georgia Volunteers, an outfit recruited in Gilmer County, GA, and was wounded in the battle of Bentonville in Eastern North Carolina in March 1865. My great-great uncles, from Clay County in Western North Carolina, also served, two in the 39th North Carolina State Troops amd the third in the 65th North Carolina Cavalry; briefly, at Chickamauga, this ancestor was under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Two of my forebears gave their lives in that war and another, suffering from what we would now call post-traumnatic stress disorder, was so severely disabled that in later life he had to be committed to an insane asylum, where he died.

A vigorous debate flourishes to this day over the purpose and meaning of the war those men fought. But however one construes these issues, during this Sesquicentennial of The Civil War, it seems to me impossible to regard that struggle as anything but an immense tragedy, especially for the South.

Please don't misunderstand me. My respect for my Confederate ancestors is so great that I devoted my first four novels to their lives and the lives of their families during and after The Civil War. But what I realized when I came to write about Nathanael Greene was that we Southerners too often disregard the American Revolution--the only successful, enduring national revolution in world history that has continued to grow and flourish over time by re-inventing, re-interpreting and striving always to perfect the essential values laid down by its Founders.

And the fact is that the South won the War of the American Revolution. In my opinion it is that achievement which represents our finest and most positive contribution to American history. It was that belief, confirmed by long and intense study, that led me to write Nor the Battle to the Strong. I hope it won't diminish the seriousness of my theory if I confess that my wife Ruth devised a promotional handout when the book debuted in 2009 poking a bit of fun at the persisting (and competing) popularity of Civil War fiction. Its title was, "Why Not Read about the War the South Won?"

If the claim sounds extreme, pause and consider the history. The Revolutionary War stalemated in the North after the French alliance and the battle of Monmouth. The British then unveiled their Southern Strategy, believing Loyalist support in the region and alliances with Native Americans would help them reclaim Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia. Success in the South would then allow them either to sweep northward on a tide of victory and defeat George Washington or, under less propitious circumstances, approach the peace table and at least hold the Southern colonies for England.

This strategy succeeded admirably at first with the fall of Savannah and then of Charleston, the conquest of South Carolina and the defeat of General Gates' American army at Camden. But then, owing to incessant attacks by Southern partisan leaders like Marion, Sumter, Pickens, Clarke and Davie, together with the battlefield victories of the Overmountain Men at Kings Mountain and Daniel Morgan at The Cowpens, fortune began to turn against Cornwallis.

The decisive event of the Southern War was Washington's appointment of Nathanael Greene to the command vacated by Gates. Greene, a Rhode Island-born ex-Quaker, self-taught in military affairs, proved an adroit and wily strategist. So thoroughly did he outmaneuver and exhaust the army of Cornwallis in North Carolina that--though the Earl won the engagement at Guilford Courthouse--his force was virtually incapacitated and he chose, rather than try conclusions again with Greene, to limp off to Wilmington to lick his wounds. Eventually he marched north into Virginia to meet his fate at Yorktown in October 1781.

Americans are generally taught that ther surrender of Cornwallis ended the Revolution. We know this is untrue; Greene's Southern army, suffering defeat after defeat in places like Ninety-Six, Hobkirk's Hill and, debatably, Eutaw Springs, still, by stubborn perseverance and in the face of terrible want, during late 1781, all of 1782 and through the spring of 1783, succeded in winning back the Southern states and penning up the British in Charleston and Savannah, where they languished until their government concluded a peace based on American independence. It is this latter story that I tell in my forthcoming sequel The Sunshine of Better Fortune.

(End of Part One; Part Two will appear in my next blog posting.)

Independence Day

During the week surrounding this Fourth of July I've been pleased to join with a number of other authors who've written about the American Revolution in submitting posts to the blog of Suzanne Adair, a popular author of historical fiction set in the Revolutionary period. My post and those of my colleagues may be found at www.suzannadair.typepad.com. Readers have responded to our posts with comments, some of which reflect astonishment that the South's contribution to the winning of our liberty is not more widely recognized--a fact which was the subject of my particular post. But a couple have, regrettably, reflected an unfortunate blind spot that I fear afflicts many Americans in these days of imperfect teaching of American history. They misread "Revolutionary War" as "Civil War." Now certainly there are many Southerners who still vow that what is generally called our Civil War was in fact the Second War of Independence for the South. But the misreading I refer to is of another stripe--it is simply the result of the sorry state of American education. I lament that our schools are turning out graduates who can't tell the difference between the war to win our national independence from Great Britain and our war between the states over the issues of slavery and disunion, even when the distinction is made for them, as it was in my post. I do not necessarily blame those on whom the distinction is lost; I blame the teachers and the education system that have failed to make the distinction clear. When will we in America ever come to understand the value of a quality education, one that teaches our children to respect and understand history? Those of you who know my work or have heard me speak know how strong my feelings on this topic are. How can a nation go forward in perfecting its values if it has no knowledge of how those values came to be or what they mean? Nowadays our political discourse is riddled with inaccurate references to supposed events of our national past that are said to have shaped us. Even when these inaccuracies are exposed, they are glibly explained away and we as citizens shrug our shoulders and excuse them. Isn't it time we acquainted ourselves with the real history of the United States? Isn't it time we retooled our education system so it teaches us the truth about how our values were formed and refined and perfected over time?

THE SUNSHINE OF BETTER FORTUNE

After pledging, in my last post of October 2010, to do a better job of updating my blog, I have--obviously--failed to peform as advertised. The reasons are several, but the chief one is that I've been working very hard to complete the sequel to Nor the Battle to the Strong, my 2008 novel about the American Revolution in the South.

Its working title is The Sunshine of Better Fortune, a phrase taken from Major General Nathanael Greene's parting address to his army in the spring of 1783. When Green used those words, he was looking toward a bright future for the American nation he and his army had just helped to establish. But while he had won his war, he had also lost both his personal wealth and, to some extent, the good regard of his heretofore faithful soldiers. He was looking from a deep darkness into the light of hope.

The story of the last year and a half of the Revolutionary War in the South is both grim and inspiring; I won't spoil the novel by divulging details here, but suffice it to say, Greene and his men, and their women, were tested to their limits by severe trials both on the battlefield and off. Yet despite these difficulties, it was also a time when men and women could find love or recover a lost love; share the unique bond that unites those who fight for their lives and for a cause; and be satisfied that they had struggled successfully to attain a high and worthy purpose.

I've found that story so compelling that I've devoted all my energies to it for these past several months. The story is so large and so important that I've often doubted my ability to do it justice. But in spite of everything I've kept steadily at it, till I've reached the point when I can just catch a glimmer of its ending; thus I've told myself I'll complete it by summer's end or by early fall at the latest. Then of course I'll have to try to get it published--no mean achievement given the current economic environment.

Now, the other reason I've allowed my blog to languish for almost eight months is that I find myself a singularly uninteresting person; thus, it's difficult for me to write about myself. I'm mainly just an old guy sitting at a computer and doing little else but research. So rather than bore you with a recital of personal trivia, I thought I'd patch in below an excerpt from my manuscript of The Sunshine of Better Fortune:


Day broke, and at mid-morning one of Major Call’s dragoons came pounding into camp bearing word that Lady Greene’s conveyance had passed the vedette line at Goose Creek Bridge and was fast approaching.

That was the thunderbolt. It mattered not that she had been long expected, three interminable months upon the road, delayed first in Philadelphia and next at Mount Vernon, Petersburg, the Moravian Towns, Salisbury, and finally at the High Hills. Now she was here. It seemed a miracle, or a phantasm. Excitement stabbed him so sharply that he feared his heart might burst; he did momentarily lose his breath, and perhaps, he feared, the power of speech. But then he heard himself call for his horse with his old battlefield roar and a startled Peters scampered obediently off to fetch a saddled Cruger. With the same exuberance he summoned Pendleton and Morris; Caty knew them from his letters, would be pleased to see them in his company.

A sudden inspiration set him rummaging in his trunk; he sought and found the cockade given him by a friend when he left West Point to take up the Southern command; it was the only bright thing remaining to him—perhaps its bit of color would relieve, to a degree, the spectacle of dilapidation he knew he would present when Caty saw him. He fixed the silly thing to his hat, a whimsy of the sort common to him in easier times but now so rare as to seem peculiar. Pendleton and Morris stared disbelieving when they came, but Greene did not mind; on this one occasion he would permit himself a felicity. Five minutes more found them galloping toward Goose Creek, accompanied by a swiftly summoned sergeant’s guard of dragoons.

They had made about twelve miles when, at noon, the path straightened and ran on before them to the very verge of sight, diminishing to a thread; and upon that thread, just before it lost itself in the surrounding wilderness, Greene spied an atom of movement. “There!” he cried. “There she is!” He struck spurs to Cruger and the gelding sprang into a run.

Greene leaned forward into Cruger’s flying mane. The speck in the distance grew, took shape, became a coach and four; behind it, riders—dragoons by their dress—in a column of twos. Then details emerged: the body of the coach, once green but weathered now to a mud-dimmed olive; a sour-faced driver on his perch hauling at the reins, a footman on the rear dickey box turning round to peer at him; then, thank God! faces in the near-side windows, first Burnet’s squint at the quarter-light, then, in the door-light…Caty.

He flung a hand high in greeting; she gave back a timid, unsure gesture, a flutter of her fingers, withdrawn as quickly as given, and he realized with a plunge of despair that she did not know him. Sobered, he slowed to a trot as her escort—Third Dragoons by their white coats, probably from the Continental camp at the High Hills—advanced on him with drawn sabers, their lieutenant demanding to know his business.

His anger surged. “I’m General Greene,” he bellowed. The lieutenant paled, drew aside with a salute, mumbled an apology. Greene ignored him, spurred alongside the coach, bent eagerly to the door-light. And saw Caty. In a black tricorne trimmed with yellow, ruffled neckwear, a riding habit of purple velvet, a multitude of golden buttons, lace at her wrists. Beauty that stole the breath.

Her eyes just now were a luminous violet in the light of day but would be black as jet when passion came; he suddenly remembered that. But under the beauty she was pale, worn. Which was she—surpassingly lovely or jaded, reduced? She looked up at him oddly, inquiringly, as if trying to believe that he was actually her husband and she was actually herself, that they were the same two who had wooed and wed and made children together and once had known how to laugh and dance and make love and walk hand-in-hand under golden-red maples in the Rhode Island autumn. He knew he had changed in the two years of their separation but he had not expected her to change too. He had expected to see what he remembered—his vivacious child-bride, his wild girl from Block Island, lit from within by laughter and mischief. Now her fire was dimmer. A wound opened in him that he feared might never again close. They had lost so much. They had lost a part of each other’s lives, a prize beyond value that could never be recovered. War had consumed it. All they would have of each other now was the remnant that the war had left them. He reached down and they clasped hands and suddenly he burst into tears. But Caty did not weep. She smiled and spoke his name with the old tenderness. Her almond-shaped cat’s-eyes brightened. She said, “That’s a pretty cockade you’ve got in your hat.”
He choked on tears and then on laughter. “I fear,” he said, “it’s my only possession to escape the mold and rot—including my poor self.”

“We’re no longer what we were,” she admitted. “But then, look what we are.”

“What’s that?”

“Lovers,” she smiled. “Man and wife, come together after too long a time apart. And the very best of friends.”

He stepped down, unwilling to release her hand, Pendleton and Morris and the sergeant’s guard trotting up all unnoticed. He spoke vaguely to Burnet. The Major, who had somehow left the coach without his knowing, took Cruger’s reins. Next a strange lady came forth—fortyish, shapeless in a billowing pelisse, a calash on her head and features hidden by a traveling mask of stiffened silk—this must be Mrs. Kingston, hired by Caty in Philadelphia as a traveling companion, to keep malicious tongues from wagging; Pendleton helped the duenna into the dickey box. Then Caty’s strong hand drew him up. He was inside the coach. She was in his arms. Her fullness. Her warmth. Her smell. Her mouth upon his. And at last her tears too. He tasted their salt. “You were with me,” he told her. “Even when I tried to shut you out.”

“I know,” she answered. “And you were with me.”

A CHANGE OF VENUE

In my last post I mentioned that in writing Blood Offerings and Season of Terror, my fiction/nonfiction pairing about the murderous Espinosas of Civil War-era Colorado, I was feeling a strong tug westward and hoped to find a way to relocate to that fascinating and beautiful region, which is the original home of my wife Ruth.

In the time since, however, that goal has seemed to go glimmering thanks to the stubbornly bad economy. Consequently I've reconsidered my options and have come to the conclusion I should just stay put here in Western North Carolina for the foreseeable future and turn my energies back to a project I abandoned two years ago--a sequel to my Revolutionary War novel Nor the Battle to the Strong.

Back in 2008 I stopped working on this project--a book which I call The Sunshine of Better Fortune--because my fancy was captured by the sinister Espinosas. Now that they're out of my system, I'm eager to find out what happens to my 18th-century lovers, James Johnson and Agnes Baker, and to my favorite Revolutionary General, Nathaniel Greene, as well as to numerous other characters new and old who will, I hope, tell readers the fascinating untold story of how America's freedom was ultimately won, not at Yorktown in 1781 as the school books would have us believe but around Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia as late as 1783. I've resumed work on the sequel, which ran 200-odd pages when I quit on it two years back--and so far I'm feeling pretty good about the direction the writing is taking.

I'm doing this while shopping the Espinosa manuscripts around, so in case you're wondering, I still haven't given up on my Colorado serial killers.

By the way, I have to thank my publicist Britt Kaufmann for updating my website which, as those of you who may have checked it in the last year or so know, I have allowed to languish pretty much unattended. I pledge to do better in the future.