Novel Excerpts–The Boaz Stenographer, Chapter 44

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 Stenographer, written in 2018, is my fourth novel. I'll post a chapter a day over the next few weeks.

Book Blurb

Walt Shepherd, a 35 year veteran of the White House’s stenographic team, is fired by President Andrew Kane for refusing to lie.

Walt returns to his hometown of Boaz, Alabama and renews his relationship with Regina Gillan, his high school sweetheart, who he had ditched right before graduation to marry the daughter of a prominent local businessman.  Regina has recently moved back to Boaz after forty years in Chicago working at the Tribune.  She is now editor of the Sand Mountain Reporter, a local newspaper.

Walt and Regina’s relationship transforms into a once in life love at the same time they are being immersed in a growing local and national divide between Democrats and traditional Republicans, and extremist Republicans (known as Kanites) who are becoming more dogmatic about the revolution that began during President Kanes campaign.

Walt accepts two part-time jobs.  One as a stenography instructor at Snead State Community College in Boaz, and one as an itinerant stenographer with Rains & Associates out of Birmingham.

Walt later learns the owner of Rains & Associates  is also one of five men who created the Constitution Foundation and is involved in a sinister plot to destroy President Kane, but is using an unorthodox method to achieve its objective.  The Foundation is doing everything it can to prevent President Kane from being reelected in 2020, and is scheming to initiate a civil war that will hopefully restore allegiance to the U.S. Constitution.

While Walt is writing a book, The Coming Civil War, he is, unwittingly, gathering key information for the Constitution Foundation.

Will Walt discover a connection between the Foundation  and the deaths of three U.S. Congressmen in time to save his relationship with Regina, prevent President Kane from being reelected as the defacto head of a Christian theocracy, and the eruption of a civil war that could destroy the Nation ?

Chapter 44

Wednesday, the Fourth of July.  An important day for all Americans.  Other than a quick run to the Ferguson National Bank to purchase an $8,000 cashier’s check, Regina and I either sat around the pool or in our room entranced in our novels.

At 3:30 p.m., we drove to Fulwood Park. This morning there had been a flyer left outside our front door, along with today’s edition of the Atlanta Constitution.  The flyer was an invitation to attend the annual Independence Day Celebration at the Park.  When we turned left on Love Avenue we saw two long rows of folks standing and walking along the sidewalks along both sides of the streets.  The traffic wasn’t heavy, but we crawled along anyway.  After we had a few minutes to observe, we concluded that there were two groups of protestors.  The group on the left sidewalk was clearly the Ku Klux Klan or a look-a-like group.  Many of them were wearing the typical garb, also known at the glory suit.  It consisted of a floor-length, solid-white robe, and a white, sharply pointed hat that included a full-faced cloth mask with eyeholds.  I could tell several of the men’s (women’s?) suits were decorated with a round badge bearing an insignia with a cross.  About half were carrying signs.  The one that caught my attention said, “God is white.”  The other side of the street were the counter-protesters no doubt.  This would have been my team if I had had to choose.  They looked like normal folks, dressed casually.  They too toted signs.  I saw, “God is colorblind,” and “Choose Love, not Hate.”  

As we drove on we saw law enforcement personnel interspersed among the crowds on both sides of the street.  When we turned east on 8th Street we were met with a police roadblock that checked our IDs.

When we were released, we were directed to a parking spot across the street from the Park.  We grabbed our lawn chairs and ten minutes later were enjoying some blue-grass, some gospel, and some country music, sitting less than a hundred feet from the huge stage that had been assembled at the back side of the Park.

After nearly two hours of listening and watching singers of all ages and varying degrees of talent, Tifton’s mayor took the stage, welcomed everyone, and introduced Kyle Turner, the current U.S. Representative for Tifton and the surrounding District.  The Mayor also said Turner’s challenger in the upcoming election, a Mark Wilford, would address the crowd after Turner’s speech.

Representative Kyle Turner gave the crowd a brief biography of his time in the U.S. Congress.  He had been elected as a Republican to the House of Representatives in 2002.  For his first six terms (12 years) he said he never crossed the aisle, always voted straight Republican.  He stated that he now realized that strategy was and is short-sighted.  He described how, in 2015, he voted with his fellow Democrats for increased spending to fund President Obama’s decision to increase troop deployment to Afghanistan.  And, in 2017, he had voted against President Kane’s legislation to repeal Obama Care. 

By now, I was feeling sorry for Turner.  The crowd was turning against him.  They virtually threw tomatoes at him when he said, “I know many of you are diehard fans of President Kane, but many Republican representatives and senators are deeply concerned this nation is in deep trouble unless we return to the core principals of the Republican party.  Kane is leading us off the cliff.  It is bad enough to watch his selfish, egotistical, often crude and nasty conduct. 

But, what is worse, is how he is dividing our Nation.  In my nearly eight terms in Congress I have never seen such hatred spawning between conservatives and liberals.  My dear fellow citizens.  If we don’t return to honesty, kindness, respect, and rationality, America is going to fall just like the Roman Empire did two thousand years ago.”  I was glad to see Mr. Turner escorted off the stage by two burly security guards.  Alone, the crowd would have devoured him.  I could barely hear the last few sentences of his speech, the crowd was in such an outcry.

According to an older couple who were sitting next to us, a couple, by the way, who had not engaged in the shouting against Representative Turner, gave us the run down on Wilford, as the Mayor reappeared and quieted the crowd.  Mark Wilford was from outside Macon, a little town called Rock Hills.  He had never run for public office but owned and operated a successful construction company, a paving company that worked both state and federal highway projects.  Wilford had become known in and around Macon because of his support for Kane, having run ads in the Macon Times Newspaper ever since Kane announced his candidacy.  Wilford, at least once a month, had run a half-page ad with accompanying diatribe of sorts castigating the existing Republican Party.  Our neighbors said Wilford knew as much about government as Kane did.  They predicted he would likely lose the upcoming election but might have a chance in 2020 if he hung around.

I give it to Mark Wilford.  He knew how to play a crowd.  He was a spitting image of Kane.  Not so much in looks but how brass he was.  If I had kept my eyes closed I would have thought I was listening to President Kane at one of his rallies.  Wilford said that Kyle Turner was the perfect example of what was wrong with the Republican Party.  It was men like him who had kowtowed to the Democrats for all eight years of the Obama administration.  Wilford also compared Turner to the same old politics of George Bush, detailed how all politicians for the past forty to fifty years were career politicians who had sold this country down the river.  Wilford asked the crowd, “do you think if we keep going in debt like we’ve been doing the last fifty years that we will have an America in ten years from now?”  The crowd screamed, “No, No, No.” 

Wilford cited example after example of how America was a kick-ass Christian nation that had been appointed by God to provide hope and freedom to a Communist and Fascist world.  Three or four minutes following this rabbit had me thoroughly confused, but the crowd was far more adept at discerning Mark Wilford’s reasoning than me.  He ended his speech by asking the crowd to vote for him on November 6th for U.S. Republican Representative for the Sixth District of Georgia. 

After the political speeches, the youth from two local churches presented skits illustrating the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  At 7:30 p.m., we enjoyed a spectacular firework show that left us both patriotic and hungry.  After asking our friendly neighbors for a referral to a place in Tifton to eat a great steak we drove to The Pub on 18th Street right off Highway 41.  It was a converted warehouse that touted wood-smoked rib-eyes and Suds, a local brewed beer.  We avoided the beer but enjoyed as good a steak as either of us had ever eaten.  At 9:30 p.m., we were enjoying a very good local band when Regina left for the restroom.  When she returned she introduced me to Tricia Mooney from Valdosta.  It seems her and Regina were college friends and, out-of-the-blue, or as fate would have it, placed them both in the same bathroom over forty years since they had last seen each other.  Tricia joined us, and for the next two hours the two of them talked non-stop as I sat and listened to what the band described as bluegrass country.

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 Help a starving artist.