Novel Excerpts–The Boaz Stenographer, Chapter 49

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 49

Two could play this game.  The game Freddie Olinger was speaking of was hatred.  The answer to his question, “what motivates the typical Kane supporter?” had been flying around in his head for weeks.  He just couldn’t seem to catch it.  This morning, it landed, right on his Facebook Newsfeed.

A local man, one he, Vann Elkins, Walt Shepherd, and dozens of other residents went to school with posted to Facebook a photo of President Barack Obama.  The Post also included the definition of ‘buffoon.’  It was straight from Merriam Webster: 

1: a ludicrous figure: clown 

2:  a gross and usually ill-educated or stupid person acting like a ridiculous buffoon.

The moment Freddie saw this Post, he knew Kane supporters were racist.  He was mad that he hadn’t seen it earlier.  He should have.  There had been plenty of evidence to have already reached this conclusion.  There had been the riots in Charlottesville, Virginia.  Early on, almost the first day or week of Kane’s announcement that he was running for President, he had ridiculed Mexicans.  He was also mad that he had given too much credit to his theory that Kane supporters, were merely stupid, that they were idiots.  He now could put that erroneous idea to rest.  The truth is, when you combine white racists with their belief they are being marginalized, that they are the new minority, America is in deep trouble.  One thing Freddie had been right about for a while: America is headed for a Civil War that will dwarf the one that began in April 1861.

The ‘Obama is a buffoon’ Facebook Post was two weeks ago. 

Freddie had spent every available moment since then reasoning his way

to today.  It had not been an easy journey from one who was satisfied being alone and reading every hour when he wasn’t at Sand Mountain Tire & Muffler with Frankie, his Kane-crazy brother, to his current willingness to take matters into my own hands.  What had convinced him was rather simple after giving it a little thought.  Kane supporters are killers.  No, not exactly in the traditional sense.  Freddie suspected most of them didn’t pick up guns and shoot their enemies.  They didn’t take knives and ram them into the hearts of a black or brown-skinned man or woman.  But, what they did do is spew hatred every chance they got.  And, always, they harbor this putrid vile in their minds and hearts every second of the day.

What makes this more deplorable, if that is even possible, is these same folks are all, and Freddie meant 100% all, Christians, church-goers.  Somewhere along life’s way they have convinced themselves that God condones their hatred and justified them in speaking hate at every turn.  The supporters know, 100% know, they are doing God’s work when they are attempting to spread the ‘hate gospel’ and claw themselves back into power.  Freddie believed these white Christians, a strong majority of Southerners, think God himself appointed Andrew Kane as President.  It is therefore their mission to crown him as Lord and Savior of America, thereby restoring her to her former glory.

These people must be stopped.  Up until now, Freddie’s main plan to stop these folks from re-electing Kane was to study history and create posts to one of his fake Facebook accounts that hopefully shed a new light to what 99% of the folks around him were posting.  For days, weeks, months, he had continued with his plan.  But, he also grew to believe he had to do more.  Freddie convinced himself that he had a purpose, albeit small, but one important and one only he could do.  Freddie could stop one, maybe more, from continuing to spew their hatred.  He had convinced himself that if these folks, these ‘Obama is a buffoon’ folks, are willing to daily cross the line from respect, decency, and honesty, then he too could cross that line.  Some would say his line was in a totally different zone.  So be it.  It is time their hatred met real opposition.  It is time these racists felt some blow-back.

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 Help a starving artist.