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 35
June 2018
Turns out it was simple. Mine and Olivia’s decision for her to resign her position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and relocate to Chicago. There were two main reasons: Paul Cummins and my revolutionary work with the renowned Jerry Coyne.
Olivia and Paul, with him already living and working only a few miles from the University of Chicago, naturally, could bond as any normal mother and son. I think the horrible situation that had ignited their eternal connection made each of them realize, although neither had a choice to begin with, life was too short to live in the past. The present became their joy and peace and allowed Olivia’s mothering instinct to drive her need and desire to be close to the one her body had helped create. Over the past five plus months the three of us had fallen in love regardless of the real dysfunction that should have driven us part.
My work as a geneticist was also important to me. If it hadn’t been for Dr. Susan Ayers at Boaz High School I likely would never have been in my current position. She had inspired me to follow my heart and, if possible, find something to do that would make life better for future generations. I think she saw Ellen in me, or rather, I became a surrogate for the loss of Ellen. I suspect that Ellen, brighter in every way than her mother, according to Dr. Ayers, would have changed the world. If not as a scientist, for sure, as one who taught by example that love is not a straight line.
My work with Jerry was important to the world. We had spent the last several months planning a road show of sorts. The show was the end of several years of research and planning before I had gone to Boaz last December. Mine and Jerry’s intention was to present Boards of Education around the country, beginning with the Chicago school system, that the powerful evidence for evolution lies in the genetic code. It had been known for years that humans and chimpanzees were closely related genetically, and that they had evolved separately for millions of years from a common ancestor. Jerry and I had a long-term desire to convince more and more high school Biology teachers the absolute truth concerning evolution. We had developed a teaching kit of sorts, including manipulatives, a slide show, and a video, that illustrated how Chromosome #2 in humans had fused into one longer chromosome while in chimps it continued separated into two shorter sections. This discovery, first in 1982, and more clearly confirmed by studies in 2005 and 2012, illustrated how evolution itself predicted what likely had occurred. The discovery of the fused site in the human genome confirmed the shared ancestry of humans and chimps. Olivia, a kind and generous soul, had agreed, almost from January, that my work had the opportunity to lead generations of America’s youth to the truth of science.
On Saturday, June 10, 2018, forty-seven years to the day after Dad and I drove away from Boaz, Alabama, Olivia and I married at Loft on Lake, a beautiful wedding venue in North Chicago. Paul was my best man and Randi Radford was Olivia’s maid of honor. John Cummins attended as well as about a hundred of my professional associates and a surprising number of Olivia’s family and friends from Boaz.
During the ceremony I placed two rings on Olivia’s hands. The Cameo ring I had given her shortly after she turned 15 and while the two of us burrowed down in our theater seats towards the end of the movie Shane. For some reason, I had saved and protected it after she had mailed it to me in the fall of 1972 along with her ‘Dear John’ letter. I wished I could say that I knew all along that someday we would unite, that something would happen to cause the most beautiful once in life love to be restored. I would be lying.
The other ring, a one carat diamond solitaire that we had purchased in January at Ethan Lord Jewelry off Wabash Avenue, was, for us, the true symbol of the rarest of loves, something that happens to only a few. I couldn’t help as I was sliding the beautiful diamond on Olivia’s left hand and considering her mystifying blue eyes, how I had felt seeing her, face to face, the first time, standing on the stage down in the Church’s basement after having performed a silly little skit. I had a feeling that one common ingredient for these rarest forms of love is the fact each partner knows, almost instantly upon meeting for the first time, that something spectacular is happening.
I will never forget the most interesting and unusual part of our vows.
Vow master: “Olivia, do you promise to love, honor, and cherish Matthew as long as you shall live?”
Olivia: “I do, and I will not stop then. I will eternally love, honor, and cherish gentleman Matthew, even after we both have returned to stardust.”
The highlight of the afternoon’s party was 89-year-old Betty Tillman’s imitation of Olivia trying to explain why she was so wet and muddy when she came in from a secret afternoon with Matt at Aurora Lake.
The happiness of the day was only slightly overshadowed by the sadness of Dad’s absence. It would have been degrees and degrees different if, before his death just a month earlier, he hadn’t prepared Olivia and me. He had someway known his cancer-battling days were ending when he challenged us to live simply and frugally, enjoying each day as though it was our last. He had given Olivia my notes from my one-year undercover work that he had someway preserved and encouraged us to never forget that but for his decision to choose Boaz over Sanford, North Carolina, we would have likely never met.
Olivia and I continued to live in my two-bedroom townhouse on Claremont Drive knowing we would sell in a few years, after my retirement, and move to Alabama. Our dream was to purchase and operate the Mountain Laurel Inn Bed and Breakfast in Mentone and to woo couples from around the world to visit “a quaint, welcoming mountain village nestled atop the west brow of Lookout Mountain,” and to experience Triple T: Time, Touch, and Talk, while bathing in a mysterious romantic brew.
The Pencil-Driven Life 