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 Schoolteacher, written in 2018, is my fifth novel. I'll post a chapter a day over the next few weeks.
Book Blurb
In the summer of 2017, Katie Sims and her daughter Cullie, moved from New York City to Katie’s hometown of Boaz, Alabama for her to teach English and for Cullie to attend Boaz High School . Fifteen years earlier, during the Christmas holidays, five men from prominent local families sexually assaulted Katie. Nine months later, Katie’s only daughter was born.
Almost from the beginning of the new school year, as Katie and fellow-teacher Cindy Barker shared English, Literature, and Creative Writing duties for more than 300 students, they became lifelong friends.
For weeks, Katie and Cindy endured the almost constant sexual harassment at the hands of the assistant principal. In mid-October, after Cindy suffered an attack similar to Katie’s from fifteen years earlier, the two teachers designed a unique method to teach the six predators a lesson they would never forget. Katie and Cindy dubbed their plan Six Red Apples.
Read this mystery-thriller to experience the dilemma the two teachers created for themselves, and to learn the true meaning of real justice. And, eternal friendship.
Epilogue
Somehow, the calf steeled me for Cindy’s funeral. What I had feared would come close to killing my four children, and me, transformed into a type of celebration. It was the first time I had understood the oft-heard Southern Baptist expressions: ‘she’s in a better place,’ and ‘she’s dancing in the arms of Jesus.’ Not that I fully believed them, but during Cindy’s send off, I chose to believe the dearest friend one could ever have lived on and was at peace. I will forever be thankful for Mr. Harrison and every teacher, teacher’s aide, substitute, administration and janitorial worker for their outpouring of love. Mitt McCoy of McCoy’s Funeral Home said it was the biggest gathering in Boaz history, for a funeral. He was thankful I had encouraged him to hold the service inside the high school gymnasium.
After returning to school on January the 2nd, reality set in. At first, I couldn’t get back in the groove. During the first week, I cried every day during my planning and lunch periods. I was alone. I wasn’t supposed to be alone. Once again, my students came to my rescue. This time it was Friday afternoon and my twenty Creative Writing students marched into my room at ten minutes after one and demanded that I help them. “Are you going to abandon us? People die all the time. You are still living. We will never complete Real Justice unless the best writing teacher in America shows up.” They certainly knew how to embellish. One calf and twenty students were all it took for Cindy to smack me down tight in my saddle. I was finally ready to ride.
And so were our four children. Alysa, I already had clearly recognized that she was a spitting image of Cindy, spoke her mother’s words, “fail to plan and plan to fail.” She took charge of Anita and Arlon and inspired Cullie to team up and march forward. I’m proud to say that their school grades didn’t falter at all. Home life was almost as good, even though prayer time (which I hated Cindy for at first) was where the pain showed through. But really it was healthy. Each in their own way, they let it out. They knew they had my full permission to express themselves. I especially learned that teenage girls’ emotions were close cousins to those of forty-five-year-old women. Crying one minute and laughing the next. I still needed work in the laughing department.
Cindy had left her finances just like she had promised. Matt Bearden helped guide me through the process, made much easier because Cindy, with his advice, had set up a trust. I was the trustee. She left everything to her three children, but they were granted generous benefits to be directed by me. The sprawling ranch-style home and eighty acres were to be used as their home for as long as they wanted. Once they all reached age twenty-one, they could sell it and divide the proceeds. Cindy’s life insurance policy was sufficient to pay off the existing mortgage. She left her portion of our ‘red apple’ earnings to me as a direct bequest, no strings attached. With the money left in trust from Steve’s life insurance, to be used for the health and welfare of their children, along with a little over a million I had now at Wells Fargo Bank, I think we can make a go of it from a financial perspective. And, this didn’t include the nearly one and a half million dollars I had received from Raymond and Cynthia to settle my threat of suing them to settle Darla’s estate. I still didn’t know how Cynthia escaped prison after Nathan Johnson, Nathan L, spilled the beans before returning to Texas a free man.
At the end of May, at the end of my first year of teaching at Boaz High School, two big events took place. First, Wayne asked me to marry him. He had spent the months since Cindy’s death dancing lightly around the subject, indicating at times, what he was seeing in our future. I let him lead. I knew how I felt. Almost from the first time I heard him say, “Katie is now a good time to talk.” I wanted him to know, absolutely know, he was ready to move on without Karen. On Friday, May 25th, he finally verbalized the long-anticipated question. I accepted immediately. Before we started our walk back towards Cindy’s house (I still call it her house), from that same spot we had seen the newborn calf, my mind grabbed one of those unmoored dots that seemed to hover around my head. Friday, May 25th, 2018. It was exactly forty-six years ago to the day that Darla, my dear mother, had attended her 1972 high school graduation party at Club Eden. It was there, I had been conceived. Now, here I was conceiving something else, something I hoped would someday produce something, certainly not a baby, a lifelong love affair that would bring hope and happiness to many a destitute and sad stranger.
Today was also May’s second big event. The steak supper I had promised the beginning of school. I could almost quote my words, the words I had said to my tenth graders the first day in English class: “There will be an all-you-can-eat steak supper at my place in the country for every student who pursues Literature this next year like you were a starving man. Or woman.” I hadn’t excluded one of my 245 students. I had even invited all of Cindy’s students. It was a grand affair and would have been totally impossible if it hadn’t been for over forty deputies from Marshall, Dekalb, and Etowah counties. It was beneficial being engaged to Sheriff Waldrup. The giant picnic was well worth the nearly $6,000 I spent. My favorite part was the reading of Real Justice. The idea wasn’t mine; it came from my twenty Creative Writing students. They, behind my back, and Wayne had arranged to have a fifty-three-foot flatbed trailer brought in along with a PA system capable of reaching Guntersville Lake. I think the twenty of them, along with about fifty volunteering outliers, read for nearly eight hours, several hours after ninety percent of the folks had left. I was proud of their determination to read the entire book. It was a very good book for a first novel. I was more than proud.
It’s now Monday morning, August the sixth. The first day of my second year to teach at Boaz High School. What a privilege. What a privilege to be Katie Waldrup. What a privilege to have such a wonderful life with four beautiful children, and what can I say, a beautiful man.
But, one thing will have to change. No playing beneath the sheets at 4:30 a.m. That time is still reserved for The Thread, the slightly remodeled little closet beside the laundry room the gorgeous redhead had used for her reading and writing before I moved in.
THE END.
The Pencil-Driven Life 