The primary aim of the "Novel Excerpts" blog category is to showcase my creative writing, specifically from the novels I've written. Hopefully, these posts will provide a glimpse into my storytelling style, themes, and narrative skills. It's an opportunity to share my artistic expressions and the worlds I've created through my novels.
The Boaz Secrets, written in 2018, is my third novel. I'll post a chapter a day over the next few weeks.
Book Blurb
Fifteen year-old Matt Benson moves with Robert, his widowed father, to Boaz, Alabama for one year as Robert conducts research on Southern Baptist Fundamentalism. Robert, a professor of Bible History and new Testament Theology at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School enlists Matt to assist him as an undercover agent at First Baptist Church of Christ. Matt’s job is to befriend the most active young person in the Church’s youth group and learn the heart and mind of teenagers growing up as fundamentalist Southern Baptists.
Olivia Tillman is the fourteen year old daughter of Betty and Walter Tillman. He is the pastor of First Baptist Church of Christ. Robert and Matt move to Boaz in June 1970, and before high school begins in mid-August, Matt and Olivia become fast friends. Olivia’s life is centered around her faith, her family, and her friends. She is struck with Matt and his doubts and vows to win him to Christ. Over the next year, Matt and Olivia’s relationship blossoms into more than a teenage romance, despite their different religious beliefs.
June 1971 and Matt’s return to Chicago comes too quickly, but the two teenagers vow to never lose what they have, even promising to reunite at college in three years after Olivia graduates from Boaz High School.
The Boaz Secrets is told from the perspective of past and present. The story alternates between 1970-1971, and 2017-2018. After Matt left Boaz in June 1971, life happened and Olivia and Matt’s plans fell apart. However, in December 2017, their lives crossed again, almost miraculously, and they have a month in Boaz to catch up on forty-six years of being apart. They attempt to discover whether their teenage love can be rekindled and transformed into an adult romance even though Matt is 63 and Olivia is 61.
In 2017, Olivia and Matt are quick to learn they are vastly different people than they were as fifteen and sixteen year old teenagers– especially, when it comes to religion and faith. Will these religious differences unite them? The real issue is the secret Olivia has kept. Will Matt’s discovery destroy any chance he and Olivia have of rekindling their teenage relationship?
Chapter 17
January 1971
Saturday afternoon I had escaped from the Lighthouse and Olivia’s attempt to learn about my response to Mr. Johnson’s Poetry assignment. After she had asked me to tell her about my Who Made God? poem, Brother Randy had called out to her from the back of the room. It was both a funny and weird moment. I felt as though God Himself had rescued me with his booming voice from the Heavens. The light rain that had begun when the Flaming Five had left didn’t hurt my cause, my need to flee. As Olivia walked away, I told her I had to leave but I would call her tomorrow afternoon after church and she would learn who made God.
After returning home, I worked on my poem for over an hour before Dad and I made our weekly trip to the Dairy Queen. It was becoming a tradition. The trip, along with sour kraut and extra onions on a foot-long hot-dog, was becoming my weekend meal of choice. By 10:30 a.m., right as the local TV news broadcast ended, my stomach revolted. The rest of the night was spent alternating between trips to the bathroom and laying across my bed wishing I would die. Dad said it was probably food-poisoning and would have to run its course. That it did. By sunrise, the rain had ended, and the evil bug had reached its destination. I finally dosed off to sleep and would probably have slept until Monday morning if Dad had not awakened me when he returned from church. It was a rare moment when I was nostalgic for Sunday School and preaching but as I got up and showered all I could think about was missing Olivia this morning, even though I rarely caught a glimpse of her on Sunday mornings. I guess, it was just the knowing that she was near. No matter if I never got to go out with her, I was realizing more and more how she was crawling inside every cell of my being.
Dad made me eat a small bowl of chicken soup that he had managed to prepare, and to drink some Coca Cola. My stomach was much better. I fought the urge to watch TV and slumber on the couch but instead retreated to my bedroom to continue drafting my “Who Made God?” poem. I was torn. I couldn’t wait to call Olivia, just to hear her voice. But, I was extra reluctant today to speak to her about God. I knew she would attempt to persuade me that God had always existed. She would also try out her best evangelical tricks to persuade me that I needed to accept Jesus by faith.
I knew what I wanted to write but had trouble since starting the assignment. Yesterday, I ditched my whole idea of trying to rhyme every other line. I simply wasn’t ready for this more intense poetry method. Mr. Johnson had said that a poem is what you say it is. There are no rules. I really liked that. I really hated rules even though I was pretty good at following most all of Dad’s. Instead of rhyming, I chose prose poetry. And, I chose to let my dear departed Mother help me get going. She was a devout Catholic and had told me about Thomas Aquinas, probably one of the most famous Catholics. He was still well respected by the Pope and all his underlings. Mother had told me about Aquinas’ five proofs for the existence of God. She had trusted old Thomas nearly as much as she did God. His first three proofs were all similar sounding to me. They involve infinite regress. This was a term I had just learned about. Dad had been able to locate for me an article by a Harvard scholar that he liked and trusted. The scholar had described infinite regress as a continual question arising the farther one goes back in time. Aquinas had said that “nothing moves without a prior movement.” He said something similar about cause and effect, “nothing is caused by itself, every effect has a prior cause.” Whether something is moved or caused, it leads back and back in time to something that moved something or caused something. Aquinas argued, with no real proof that I could ever gather, that God was the first mover or the first cause, something that got everything started. To me, Aquinas argument was feigned. I recalled how I had asked Mother how Aquinas knew this. She had answered, “Faith. He knew this by faith.” To me, then and now, that was not a valid answer. The only logical and true definition of faith was believing something without evidence, not because of evidence.
The first line of my poem read, “Faith made God, and man made faith.” Aquinas also had argued that if we could go back in time far enough we would discover that there were no physical things in existence. He argued that, again according to the scholar’s article, “since physical things exist now, there must have been something non-physical to bring them into existence, and that something is what we call God.” As I was contemplating how to create a visual of what Aquinas believed, here what was referred to as his Cosmological Argument, I realized, as just a 16-year-old, that Aquinas must have been deranged. Where did he learn basic logic? I reminded myself that logic wasn’t needed in Christianity, that it was evil. I couldn’t help but think of Brother G’s talk on the first day of school and how Martin Luther had warned Christians against using reason in their contemplation and relationship with God.
After turning my attention to Aquinas’ fourth and fifth proofs, the argument from degree, and the teleological argument or argument from design, I realized that I wasn’t going about this, my poetry writing assignment, in the right way. I was turning this into more of a research project. I was not using my imagination at all. I was not attempting to connect seemingly unlike things as Mr. Johnson had instructed. I need to be more spontaneous. I sat with my eyes closed for at least five minutes. The thought crossed my mind that I had started off thinking wrong. God, which God? What if I didn’t start with the Christian God? Weren’t there, hadn’t there been hundreds and hundreds of different gods over the years? Couldn’t I start with a wind god or a rain god or a sun god? I wasn’t making much progress. I was already contemplating my next poem, “Where is God Now?”
Somewhat frustrated, I stood up and was walking to the kitchen for a little more Coca Cola when the phone rang. Dad hollered over the blaring football game that it was for me.
“Hello.”
“Matt, it’s Olivia. I’m so upset. I hope you don’t mind me calling.” I could barely understand what she was saying. She seemed to be both crying and out of breath.
“It’s okay. I was working on my poem. I was going to call you in a little while. Why are you upset?”
“You haven’t heard?” Olivia said, sounding more like her natural voice. “The horrible car wreck. Last night.”
“No. I’ve been here all day. I was sick last night and couldn’t come to church this morning. What are you talking about?” I said realizing that I had never heard Olivia being so incoherent.
“Kyle Keller and his younger brother Kent, and Brenda Simmons, and Tina Williams were all killed late yesterday afternoon. Kyle and Brenda are seniors and Kent and Tina are my age, ninth graders.”
“What happened?” I was searching my mind for what to say. I had never had such a conversation.
“Nobody knows for sure, but the police are saying that Kyle was going too fast for the curve on Bruce Road, given the rain. Matt, they found beer cans in the car. Here’s what is tearing me up. They don’t even know for sure who was driving. If the four of them hadn’t had their school ID cards the police wouldn’t have known who they were. They were so mangled.”
“I’m so sorry. Were you friends with Kent and Tina?” After I said it, I recognized that it was a dumb question. What relevance was Olivia’s friendship. If the three of them were not friends, would the accident and Kent and Tina’s death have been no big deal.
“Tina had just started coming to youth group. She was quiet. Matt, she was saved only last week. My heart goes out to her family. Why would this happen?”
I was surprised that Olivia would ask this question, especially that she would ask it of me. “I don’t know. From what you just said it sounds like Kyle, or whoever was driving, made some bad decisions. I hate to say it but, to me, bad decisions usually have bad consequences. I suspect you would have a different take on what happened and why.”
“I usually do. This is the first time I have ever had someone so close to me to die. Before, I’ve always thought, ‘God is mysterious, we do not know, and cannot know what He does, and why He does things the way He does, but we can trust Him because He loves His children.’”
I don’t know if I was simply trying to be a smart ass or what, but I responded, so low Olivia couldn’t have heard me: “Maybe God needed Tina to help him hand out angel’s wings in Heaven.”
“Matt, I didn’t hear you, but were you making fun of me? I need you to console me, to help me get through this. You are the only boy I can confide in.”
“Do you want me to come over?”
“Could you? Mother said it would be okay. I asked her before I called.”
“I’ll be there in five minutes. Olivia, I’m glad you called.”
I rode my bike and was excited about seeing her and that she had asked me to come to her, but my heart went out to the families of the teenagers who had died a horrible death.
The Pencil-Driven Life 