Home Grown: A Novel
Page 36
The smile faded from her face as the memory bloomed full blown in her mind. Seth crossed the room in two steps, pulled her to her feet and put his arms around her.
“Sonny was in love with you,” he said into her hair.
She pulled out of his arms and looked up at him. “How do you know that?”
“I just know.”
She did, too.
“He had good taste in women.”
She watched Seth try to smile but he couldn’t quite pull it off, either. So he cleared his throat and said, “Thing One and Thing Two are outside.” He did smile, then. Ben was home on Thanksgiving break from USC; Jake had just completed basic training. “And the Marine standing out by my car is a beast! Right now he’s a hungry beast and that’s a dangerous combination, so I offered to take the two of them and my best girl to lunch. You interested?”
“Now? It’s only 11 o’clock.”
“I have to get back to Double Springs early. They’re putting in the foundation on the new warehouse this afternoon.”
She loved the irony of it. In order to get a mortgage on the distillery, Seth had been forced to take out ridiculously expensive insurance on the property. When Bubba burned the warehouses, Seth collected enough to pay off the loan and build back. Just one warehouse, though, not five. But Seth didn’t waste time anymore worrying about how he ought to do things. Neither did Sarabeth.
She reached out and took his hand. “Let’s eat.”
• • • • •
Billy Joe could see the trailer house sitting on the riverbank on the other side of the walking bridge. It had a flower garden out front and a vegetable garden out back with a nearby clothes line where Becky always left a pair of his old overalls hanging to flap in the wind. She said it helped keep the birds and the deer out of the garden.
He could see Becky, too, beautiful, wholesome—like her picture belonged on the front of a cereal box, her hair curled around her chipmunk cheeks and those eyes big and brown and framed by lashes so long and thick they looked artificial. She was standing at the sink beneath the window with red chintz curtains, washing dishes and he’d been staring at her.
She turned around and asked, “What? What are you staring at?”
And he said “I’m staring at you ’cause you’re so da-gone pretty, that’s wha—”
“Billy Joe.”
He opened his eyes. It was the jailer standing outside his cell.
“It’s time to go now. You ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
He stood and turned to pick up his UK ball cap off the bunk. It wasn’t standard orange-jumpsuit-prison garb, but the jailer had urged him to keep it all the same, said maybe they wouldn’t take it away.
The jailer had been good to him the past few months. Let Sarabeth sneak him burgers and fries from the new McDonalds that opened up in October. She’d promised to bring Billy Joe a Big Mac every week for the next five years, but he wouldn’t hold her to that. The maximum security prison in Eddyville was a long drive from Brewster.
The jailer had hand-delivered the note from Becky, too. Billy Joe had it in his shirt pocket, close to his heart. He sure hoped they’d let him keep that where he was going. But it didn’t matter if they took it. He had it memorized.
Billy Joe,
Me and the girls are living in a trailer Seth McAllister got for us. He put it on a piece of land by the distillery where the fire cleared the woods away from the river. It’s real nice, like the one we used to have before Like the other one, you know, only nicer.
Bethany’s fine. Kelsey don’t say much. Just sits. But I take her outside some and she likes the sunshine on her face.
I got me a job waiting tables for Squire Boone at the tavern and folks are real nice to me there.
I will write to you when you get settled.
Becky
He reached out and clasped his hat between his hands like you’d pick it up if you were wearing boxing gloves. And he might as well have been. His fingers didn’t work anymore. They were so torn up and mangled they just hung useless. But he could use his right thumb, so he could grasp things. He was learning how to get along with that.
The jailer unlocked the cell door and held it open so Billy Joe could cross in front of him.
“I’m sure gonna miss your hospitality,” Billy Joe said.
Then he smiled that dimpled smile of his. It had a gap in it now where Bubba’d kicked out one of his front teeth. But it still was a smile that’d break your heart.
THE END
*****
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After two decades of shame that drove him into a whiskey bottle and left him a homeless, under-a-bridge drunk, Will Gribbins has come home to face his past.
He and his best friend were the only two survivors of the 1980 explosion that killed 27 Eastern Kentucky miners in the Harlan #7 Coal Mine and shattered countless other lives in the close-knit little community of Aintree Hollow. But the two young men escaped the mine that day with more than just their lives. Each carried the burden of a terrible secret about another tragedy that occurred in the mine after the explosion, a secret that destroys the next two decades of Will’s life.
He returns to the hollow for the first time in 20 years for the memorial service on the anniversary of the disaster, but Will doesn’t know his arrival has set in motion a chain of events that will threaten the lives of another crew of miners digging coal in a mile-deep hole under Black Mountain.
As he reconnects with Aintree Hollow, with Granny Sparrow, whose grief has imprisoned her, JoJo, who carries a terrible secret of her own and Jamey, a mentally handicapped boy who carves magical coal statutes, Will doesn’t see the mounting danger. Or that the boy holds the key to it all.
When the fate of innocent miners is again placed in Will’s hands, can he summon the courage he lacked two decades ago? Is he man enough to save them, even if it means he must do the one thing he fears most?
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On a warm May Friday in 1963, a mammoth tornado hurls across the empty plains toward the little town of Graham, Oklahoma. The writhing column of destruction a mile wide and eight miles high is not just on a collision course with the town, but with the lives of four of its residents; each of whom has already planned their own personal rendezvous with death that day.
Jonas Cunningham has reached the end of his rope, now he lives only to free his precious Maggie from the fog of Alzheimer’s. His 16-year-old granddaughter, Joy, is desperate, too. She’s pregnant. And scared. And sees only one way out. Joy’s father, Reverend Mac MacIntosh has lost his wife and his faith and on Friday plans to “kill” his ministry.
But as Mac meets daily with a strange, mystical death row inmate during the final five days of her life, everything begins to change. Set to be executed at five o’clock that Friday, Princess knows things she can’t possibly know about Mac’s life and sees things she can’t possibly see. And she is determined to carry to her grave an incredible secret about the little sister she confessed to beheading 14 years ago.
When the monster twister bears down on them, al
l four of the people who’d penciled in “death” on their calendars for that day in May actually do make eye contact with dying. But they don’t come to the crossroads of life and death by the path they’d planned and they don’t leave with the result they expected. And they don’t all survive.
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In the deepest, darkest midnight of her soul, Gabriella writes a horror story about demons, and then one of them crawls up out of the pages and confronts her face to face. A deranged, fanatical fan who believes he is The Beast of Babylon from her novel turns up at a book signing and then comes after her to claim her as his bride. And to sacrifice her son, Ty, as an blood offering to their unholy union.
Gabriella, Ty and Ty’s grandfather, Theo, the crusty old stand-up comic called Slap Yo Mama Carmichael, run for their lives, back to the only place in Gabriella’s life where she ever felt safe. But once there, she discovers that facing the demons from her past may be harder and more dangerous than facing the one who hunts her.
As Ty and Theo battle their own, personal monsters, Gabriella begins to fall for a man who carries a guilt she can’t even begin to imagine.
The predator who stalks Gabriella and her family tracks them down and corners his prey as a full moon rides high in the night sky and lightning explodes on the mountaintop. Then all their lives and demons collide in a final, apocalyptic celebration of one man’s madness. Gabriella’s only hope lies in the unexplainable power of 2,000-year-old tree. Is it strong enough to save them? Can a single, perfect bristlecone pine somehow determine the fate of them all?
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Something happened to Anne Mitchell when she was 11 years old so horrible her mind erased the whole first decade of her life. Twenty-five years later, she has come home to a dried-up Texas prairie town to live with her crazy grandmother in the rambling old house where she grew up in a final desperate effort to remember.
Unless she remembers, Anne will never understand the meaning of the anguished confession her mother choked out as she lay dying. And Anne will remain forever a slave to what she calls the “Boogie Man”—strange images from her lost childhood that haunt her dreams, stalk her waking hours and leer at her from the shadows behind her reflection in mirrors, windowpanes and wine glasses.
Though Anne has finally summoned the courage to face her past, she really doesn’t understand how expensive remembering will be. The cost of her memories could very well be her sanity. She might very well have to pay for her childhood with her life.
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Sudan 2000.
Hiding in the chaos of a civil war, the Arab government of the largest nation in Africa has practiced a ruthless program of systematic genocide and more than two million southern Sudanese tribal people have been massacred. But American human rights journalist Ron Wolfson isn’t in Sudan to cover the war. He’s risking his life there to chase a different story—reports of a massive government-assisted slave trade.
When Arab Murahaleen guerrillas attack a small village and kidnap a little girl named Akin to sell on the slave market in the North, her father, Idris, goes after her and Ron joins the simple villager in his desperate effort to rescue his child. While Ron’s brother, a U.S. congressman, battles indifference to force international political pressure on the Sudanese government, Ron finds the story he’s been looking for and suffers the brutal retaliation of a slave trader.
On the eve of the sanctions vote in the U.S. House of Representatives, the lives of Ron and Idris hang by a thread, their fate in the hands of a bloodthirsty mercenary and an orphan boy. But even if they survive, is it already too late to save little Akin from the brutal horror her master has panned for her?
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WHEN BUTTERFLIES CRY.
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On August 11, 1969, two anguished voices on opposite sides of the planet cry out in terror at the exact same instant and their desperate pleas release a strange power. That power will change the destiny of a West Virginia family in a strip mined hollow that lies in the shadow of a 300-million-gallon coal slag lake—held in place by a makeshift dam high on the mountainside.
Grayson Addington
…returns from Vietnam to his wife, Piper, and 2-year-old daughter a broken man, ravaged by post traumatic stress syndrome, a chaplain who left his faith in the jungle mud with his massacred unit.
Piper Addington
… doesn’t know her husband anymore. In his absence, she turned to his brother Carter for support. Now, she must choose between them.
Carter Addington
…is in love with Piper and intends to have her by framing the shell-shocked returning soldier for a heinous crime he didn’t commit.
Maggie
…is a mystery. A strange, battered child with amnesia, she shows up on Piper’s porch and instantly bonds to Sadie, a cripplingly shy toddler. When Maggie runs away and takes Sadie with her, the warring brothers must team up to search for them, unaware that Piper’s raging older brother is also in the woods—with a deer rifle, intent on shooting Carter and Grayson on sight.
But something more than chance has brought the child called Maggie to this wounded family. And nothing less than destiny will be fulfilled by her incredible sacrifice…
… on the foggy morning when the makeshift dam on the mountain above them explodes.
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Ninie Hammon
Ninie Hammon spent 25 years as a professional journalist, worked her way up from a reporter to a publisher who started her own newspaper. But that was before she tried her hand at fiction and discovered making up the facts was waaay more fun than reporting them. She became a novelist then and she has never looked back.
Her first book, a biography published by Penguin Putnam’s Berkeley imprint, was followed by seven novels published by Bay Forest books. Each of her novels is a fast-paced, riveting tale of ordinary people who are forced by circumstances to fight for their lives, gloriously complex characters who grab the reader by the lapels and drag him into the story to live it with them.
Ninie grew up in Muleshoe, Texas, and says she now lives “somewhere in the sky over Greenland.” She and her husband, Tom, travel back and forth between their home in Louisville, KY and one in the village of Great Linford in Buckinghamshire north of London where Tom directs Young Life in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Scandinavia. The couple has six children and eight grandchildren.
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HOME GROWN
Copyright © 2011 Ninie Hammon
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