Family Matters

My last post of 2014 is a couple of days late. That’s what a long holiday, too much TV football, and grown children returning to the hive will do for you. The computer keyboard gets shoved aside for a game of some sort, the kitchen countertops stay covered with artery-clogging snacks, and chaos reigns for days on end. Or so it seems.

But we love it all, and view these few wacky days as another example that sometimes, maybe all the time - family matters. Read those two words as an adjective-noun, or as a noun-verb, either way, family matters seem to dominate the end of the year around our house.

In the real world of right now, our older son’s beautiful young wife is expecting the birth of their first child in five weeks or so. The little guy will be our first grandchild, so we’re really happy. Meanwhile, two days ago, our younger son proposed marriage to a beautiful young lady with whom he has been smitten.

The big question came just after they climbed the narrow iron spiral staircase to the balcony in the historic 115 year old Lockhart Public Library Building. The clever lad carved a hole in the pages of a hardback copy of Wuthering Heights and hid the ring inside. Then he recruited an accomplice to stash the book on a shelf full of dusty old leather-bound novels. Happily, the sparkly ring survived an unguarded hour or two hidden in the pages of the gloomy Victorian epic of romance and revenge. The beautiful young lady said “Yes,” so there’s an April wedding ahead in 2015, paving the way for more grandkids.

By the way, “Wuthering Heights” is more than the name of Emily Bronte’s lengthy novel. It is also the name of the English country home in which much of the action in that novel takes place. Wuthering means blowing strongly, so here in Texas we’d call a wuthering height a real windy hill. A house up there in the 1860’s would probably look like the spooky house in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho movie, only dustier. And maybe without an old dead lady in a rocking chair.

In my American Victorian era Civil War tale, Tangled Honor, a good bit of the action occurs in the McBee family home in Lexington, Virginia, which can’t help but bring family matters into the story. The McBee house in my book doesn’t have a name since it’s in town, and is a widow’s home. I could have called it Widow’s Heights, I suppose, but I didn’t put it on a hill. There is an old lady in the McBee house, the Widow McBee, of course. And she has a rocking chair, but her heart was still beating last time I checked in on her.

Anyway, the Captain McBee Civil War novels have become as much a family story as a war story, which might be off-putting to some readers who enjoyed the purely military plot of my first book, Whittled Away.  Granted that family stories can get convoluted really fast, and those story threads in a novel can grow and take over more of the plot than the writer, at least this writer, first intended. On the other hand, family relationships have a way of blowing up or changing rather quickly and unexpectedly, and that’s not so very different from war.

Since we are at the end of 2014, I’m remembering that this past year has been the 150^th anniversary of the last full year of the Civil War. The year 1864 was an ugly year for America, a really ugly year for the South. The military campaigns of 1864 were exceptionally brutal as Grant and Sherman relentlessly attacked, and the Confederacy reached the point of desperation, yet dug their heels in, refusing to yield.

The states of Virginia, Georgia, and Tennessee in particular endured terrible months of the war impacting the civilian populations as large armies foraged for food, stealing whatever they could find to feed the soldiers, then destroying the farms. Small towns and large cities were targeted by artillery. I bet almost all of us remember the stunning panoramic film shots of Atlanta burning created for the film Gone With the Wind.

I’ve not written about 1864 in the McBee saga yet, but in June of ‘64 the little town of Lexington, Virginia was shelled and many of the buildings were burned down by Union soldiers with orders to destroy the Shenandoah Valley, the breadbasket of the Confederacy.  Any lingering attitude of chivalry, of keeping the war between soldiers-only, was long gone.

So, as my closing wish for the year, I’m promoting “Remember and Learn.” Remember because the 600,000 military deaths and untold thousands of American civilian deaths were important. They were too important to let drift away, forgotten in the fog of passing decades. Shame on us if we let the significance of those deaths leave our national memory.

 Learn because we certainly don’t want to again go down the nightmare road of internal war again. Us waging war against us, never again.  You bet we have huge issues dividing our country today, some of the issues not so different from the divisive issues of 150 years ago.

But now we know what happened right here in our heartland when politicians let stubbornness overcome compromise and reasonable debate. Now we know that even endless, repetitive, seemingly futile debate is infinitely preferable to picking sides and shooting at each other. Let’s don’t ever go there again.

Family matters. Noun-verb. Family matters, and we are a national family. (Pretty corny, I know. But I believe it.)

We need for 2015 to be a long happy year, not just a happy new year.

 

 

 

 

 

Lucy Pickens

Today I should be writing a post about how soldiers celebrated Christmas during the Civil War. Truth is, I sidestepped that topic in both my Civil War novels, so I haven’t researched it. But there’s two more Christmas’s to be considered in the last two books in the McBee set, so perhaps by this time next year I’ll know if Christmas trees and jolly ole Saint Nick were part of the 1863 or 1864 Christmas scene in Virginia during the war.

Instead of Christmas 150 years ago, I’m back-stepping to the topic of beautiful women in the 1860’s. I receive a daily e-mail from the Texas Historical Commission about something interesting or significant that occurred in Texas history on that date, sometime in our state’s history.  A few weeks ago, the topic was a Texas beauty named Lucy Holcombe Pickens. Here’s the text:


On this day in 1862, the Confederate government issued $100 notes bearing a portrait of the renowned Southern beauty Lucy Pickens. Lucy Holcombe was born in 1832 in Tennessee. Between 1848 and 1850 the Holcombes moved to Wyalucing plantation in Marshall, Texas. Lucy became highly acclaimed throughout the South for her "classic features, titian hair, pansy eyes, and graceful figure."



In the summer of 1856 she met Francis Wilkinson Pickens, twice a widower and twenty-seven years her senior. Her acceptance of his marriage proposal, it is said, hinged on his acceptance of a diplomatic post abroad. President James Buchanan appointed him ambassador to Russia, and Pickens and Lucy were wed in 1858 at Wyalucing. Lucy was a favorite at the Russian court, but Pickens resigned his diplomatic post in the fall of 1860 in anticipation of the outbreak of the Civil War. Upon his return home he was elected governor of South Carolina.


By selling the jewels that had been given her in Russia, Lucy helped outfit the Confederate Army unit that bore her name, the Lucy Holcombe Legion. Her portrait was also used on the one-dollar Confederate notes issued on June 2, 1862. She died in 1899.


I was easily able to find several period photographs of Lucy with a quick internet search. The images confirm her beauty, although her portrait in profile selected for the paper currency is much less flattering, in my opinion. The photo on the left certainly displays her severely contained “titian hair.”


If I had found the image on the right before the front cover was completed for Tangled Honor, I would have been sorely tempted to find out if the portrait is in the public domain. That portrait is of a young woman whose features and hair style would mark her as very attractive in 2014, over 150 years after the image was made.  I would have loved to have used it on my book cover instead of the sassy model wearing modern eye make-up.


It is fun to consider that a young woman from a plantation in Marshall, Texas would end up being given jewels by the Russian Czar of enough value to help arm and supply a regiment of Confederate soldiers in South Carolina, as the young, beautiful First Lady of that state. Not to mention being the only woman whose image graced any Confederate currency. She also wrote poetry and a novel under a penname. There is a biography of Lucy Pickens, Queen of the Confederacy, published in 2002 by the University of North Texas Press.


The biographer included a short quote in the Epilogue. “Submission is not my role,” wrote Lucy at some point. No doubt, my fictitious Faith Samuelson would have agreed with that quite un-Victorian outlook by a woman in the 1860’s, although I suspect it helped that the historical Lucy’s non-submissive role was aided by virtue of her being  a beautiful woman of substantial means. The book excerpts on Amazon lead me to believe Lucy Pickens was exceptionally beautiful, exceptionally intelligent, exceptionally rich, exceptionally spoiled, exceptionally influential, and exceptionally Southern.  I’m glad to have learned about her.


Meanwhile, back in Lockhart, Texas three days before Christmas, may I wish “all ya’all” a Merry Christmas! 


Peace Be With You.                  

 

 

 

Cheese Grits and Raw Bacon

Grits. Baked cheese grits to be exact. With bacon bits added for the first time. Cheese grits are a McBride family holiday tradition going back forty years. Some December back in the early 1970’s when Nita and I were childless newly-weds, my mother served cheese grits at Christmas. They stuck, so to speak. 

In the ‘80’s our pre-teen sons loved the dish, probably because grits are not green. In the ‘90’s our teenage sons loved the cheese grits because…well, what’s not to love? The dish is butter, milk, and cheese held together by a tasteless white grain, and it has no nasty little bits of green pepper or onions that deterred our sons from eating meat loaf when they were kids. Or now.

In 2014, the venerable baked cheese grits dish reached a new high with the add-on of six strips of crisp crumbled bacon.  After all, since bacon is the new chocolate, why not add it to everyone’s favorite dish of sin. We’ve already twice made and served bacon enhanced cheese grits this season, and have been directed by our 30-something year old sons that grits are expected on Christmas Eve.  And we’re not arguing.

If you want the recipe for Mama McBride’s cheese grits with value-added bacon, just shoot me an e-mail. I promise your dog won’t have much licking to do to clean the bowl after your human holiday feast.

Speaking of bacon and my book in progress, I am this week writing about a march made by my soldier characters in mid-February in a snowstorm.  This bit is real history, and I’m using a couple of primary source memoirs to keep my account accurate, while putting my characters into the middle of it. That’s the fun of writing historical fiction. I get to plug fictitious characters into well-documented historical events. 

In this chapter as in the real event, the men are not given time to cook their issued rations. Instead, after a freezing cold night trying to sleep wrapped in wet wool blankets in the open, they resume their trek, munching on “sea crackers” and raw bacon pulled out of their haversacks. We don’t munch on raw bacon these days. Rather, the whole scenario of marching and sleeping in the open in mid-winter in crappy weather and eating raw bacon makes a good reminder of just why two Civil War soldiers died of accident, exposure, or disease for every one soldier killed in combat. Bad water and spoiled meat killed far more soldiers than did lead bullets or exploding cannon shells.

For those with a military bent, in real life a captain, who normally  only commanded a single infantry  company of some fifty men, was ordered by Major General Hood to lead a column of some one thousand broken-down and exhausted stragglers the last ten miles, while most of the division went ahead.  Because of the extremely poor condition of the stragglers, the captain was given three days to make the short march. Ten miles was about half what a large column of Civil War soldiers were accustomed to marching in one day, so being given three days to go ten miles is indicative of the sad condition of the straggling troops.

As a novelist who wants to include the march in my story, I’m left to sort out why General Hood dipped so far down into his command structure to select this officer, the real-life man who inspired my main character, John McBee, to lead a thousand-man column. Why did Hood pick a lowly captain to lead a thousand stragglers? Why not a major or a colonel with experience commanding such a large body of men? On the other side of that coin, did the captain accept the assignment as a compliment, or as an insult that his first command beyond his own company would be a bunch of limping, hurting men who couldn’t keep up? 

I’m finding that getting into the heads of historical characters is a honey-trap for writers of historical fiction. It’s fun to guess at a famous man’s motivation for a decision, but it’s also risky because not every reader will agree with my interpretation and may not find the resulting actions as credible to the famous person. But adventure novels are all about getting our guys and gals into honey traps and back out again. There’s a bit of James Bond or Emma Peel in most of our main characters.

Talk to you next week. Happy shopping.

Pearl Harbor and Dickens on the Square

Sometimes one day changes everything for a country. A single day becomes a pivot point that sets inexorable forces in motion. I’m writing this post on December 7th, which 73 years ago was also a Sunday and was one such day: The morning the Japanese navy launched a surprise bombing raid to destroy the biggest battleships in our fleet while they were moored at Pearl Harbor. It was a morning that changed everything for the USA and the world.

So today I’m adding a scratchy photo of my dad, Tech Sergeant Frank McBride, US Army Air Corps, sitting in a jeep somewhere in France during his 2 ½ years overseas during WWII.  Pop is still with us, 94 years old and doing fine, one of the ever-shrinking cohort of WWII veterans. With Pop in mind, today, Pearl Harbor Day, seems a good time to pause, remember, and thank those guys, even if it’s not Veterans’ Day or Memorial Day.

Now back to the war that also changed everything for the USA, that is to say, the war that insured that the USA would remain a sea –to-shining-sea nation. The war that, to borrow a phrase my author friend Jeff Brooks chose for the title of a fine Civil War novel, prevented the USA from becoming a permanently “shattered nation,” a nation irrevocably split asunder into two countries. Thank goodness the four years of death and sacrifice finally ended with the USA still a single nation.

It’s easy to understand why the USA mobilized everybody and every industry to fight back at the Japanese and Hitler’s demonized Germany 73 years ago. On the other hand, it has never been easy for me to understand why 153 years ago, America’s southern states did much the same thing, mobilizing everybody and every industry, to sever the national bonds and strike out on their own. It’s not for lack of trying. I’ve read an ample number of history books in which learned historians attempt to explain the “why” of it all as they describe the progression of events leading to Fort Sumter.

Nonetheless, I still have never quite “got” it. I’ve never understood the thinking that brought about the all-out effort to abandon the American national identity that had been growing for eighty years since the ragtag collection of colonies broke away from England, and through death and sacrifice, became a single American nation. But the Civil War surely did happen, and maybe we are stronger now for the terrible pain we brought upon ourselves back then.  I hope so.

Yesterday I spent five hours in the 112 year-old Clark Library here in Lockhart, as one of several local authors who were part of the annual Dickens on the Square celebration. Twenty-five years ago a feisty city librarian started the early December festivities to raise money for the library, blatantly imitating the Dickens on the Strand celebration in Galveston. I don’t know how things are going in Galveston, but here in Lockhart after 25 iterations, Dickens has become part of our town’s culture.

It helps that our library building is a Texas landmark that has a stage in front of a huge stained glass window, a U-shaped balcony, fine woodwork, and has been well-maintained and renovated. Just the place for we local authors to hawk our books inside the building, while outside a day-long series of choirs, dancers, ice sculptors, glass-blowers, animal shows and such take place on the street, sidewalk and library lawn. There’s a parade on Friday night to kick off the weekend and huge Yule log is ceremoniously set ablaze. It’s a fine time, and not too shabby for a little town usually only remembered for our surplus of BBQ joints.

I am pleased to have sold all the copies of my two novels that I brought along. Of course, Lockhart is a town of only 12,000 folks, and having lived here for over thirty years, almost every sale was to someone I knew by name.

I confess that it was most fun to sell my novels to a few middle-aged men and women who had been teenagers at Lockhart High School in the ‘80’s while I served as the school’s principal. It was a personal joy to watch the dawning recognition that, yeah, he’s still around, and has become something besides an old principal who has lost his faculty. 

Turkeys and Bears, Muskets and Books

Thanksgiving came and went at our house with all the expected goings-on: We all over-ate, the dog-ass Cowboys lost in Dallas, as did the Longhorns in Austin, as even did the Aggies in their newly adopted state for Thanksgiving football rivalry- Louisiana.

On Friday, our younger son Ben and his girlfriend Meredith went to a local outdoor gun range to live fire black-powder muskets. The range was a beehive of activity, and really loud. It was fun to occupy a shooting station sandwiched between guys and gals blasting away with their ultra-modern military-looking rifles. They had boxes of ammo to feed into long clips that enabled those black (or camouflaged) beauties to spew lead out at an amazing rate. Pity any home invader at their houses.

Meanwhile, we lined up our paper cartridges of powder, a tin of brass priming caps, and a few dozen cone-shaped and well-lubed lead Minie balls. They are “Minie balls” because a French officer named Minie invented the bullet’s cone design with 2 or 3 ribs circling the hollow base of the lead cone. The hollow base was so the tail of the cone would expand when the powder exploded right behind it, and the ribs were to grip the grooves cut inside the barrel to spin the bullet for accuracy. They are lubed with tallow to make them easier to push down the barrel. How’s that for high tech? But it was definitely 2G technology in 1861 because repeaters and breech loaders were already in limited use, but were too expensive for the army to produce in huge numbers.

Back to the range, we pulled the ramrods and laid them on the table, ready for use, because without them, muzzle-loading muskets are just long steel and wood clubs. Not even good for golf.

Loading the muskets is labor intensive, for sure. The army manuals during the Civil War called for “Loading by the Nines.” Nine steps: Put the musket butt on the ground; Remove a paper cartridge from the leather cartridge box; Tear the cartridge open with teeth; Pour loose powder down the barrel; Remove ramrod from under the barrel; Cram the lead bullet and paper down the barrel and return the ramrod; Move musket to the ready position; Remove priming cap from leather box on belt; Put the priming cap on the cone. Now you’re loaded and can aim, fire, and repeat.

Another side story, maybe even true: The US army took almost any willing recruit-if they had four front teeth. If any of those teeth were missing, the recruit was labeled 4-F, as in without four front teeth, and deemed ineligible for service. The Rebs were less discriminating, it’s said. They only required one top and one bottom tooth, one over the other, to pass their physical.

Back to the range again, the upshot of our slow loading was probably a 50 to 1 ratio of the number of rounds fired by our shooting neighbors’ modern rifles to us. Rapid musket fire is 3 bangs per minute, starting loaded.

As to the success rate of the 1860’s technology as evidenced in Ben and Meredith’s marksmanship, it was a bit shy of perfection: At 50 yards, they got a third of their shots somewhere on the rectangular targets. It’s said that for each Civil War soldier actually hit by a fired Minie ball, a man’s weight in lead was exchanged. From our experiences on the gun range, I don’t doubt that one bit.

Ben did pop the Big Bad Bear target a couple of good ones right on his snout. After a few shots fired, both quickly learned that black powder residue gums up a barrel, making it progressively harder to ram the next Minie bullet to the base of the barrel, making slow loading even slower and harder the longer you do it. The stories of Civil War soldiers emptying their canteens down the barrels to clean them during long battles are true enough, as I suspect are the tales of a quick pee down the barrel when a man’s canteen ran dry.

Going back in time a week, the weekend before Thanksgiving I opened my outdoor book shop at a Civil War reenactment just outside of Hempstead, near Houston. My inventory was limited: Just my two Civil War novels. To encourage folks to stop and shop, I set out a musket and some gear on the table next to the stacks of books. Not unlike at the gun range, dads and kids are drawn to the long muskets and like to handle them. Then it’s my job to turn their attention from guns to books. Good luck with that, huh?  I confess it’s a bit of bait and switch, a time honored marketing tradition.

Of course, the weather included a couple of rain showers passing through on Saturday, impacting the number of people who came out to watch the reenactment. Nonetheless, enough people looked past the muskets to buy books that I can say I popped the bear a couple of good ones right on his snout, sales-wise.

Promoting my own writing to others across a table doesn’t come naturally, but it is fun to gab about the Civil War, and it’s not even too bad to be told over and over about other people’s ancestors who were Civil War soldiers. Heck, I do that too. I even went so far as to craft a novel around one of them, so I can’t complain as I listen, waiting for my chance to work in a word about Tangled Honor or Whittled Away. I’m shameless, but a sale is a sale.

Over and Done, or Done and Over?

No reflections on the world this week, just a huge Hallelujah! It’s over and done! Or maybe it’s done and over. Whichever way the old saying goes, Tangled Honor is put to bed. Done and over. Over and done. It’s now posted for sale on Amazon both as a paperback book and a Kindle e-book download. Man, am I glad.

After taking over five years to write Whittled Away, I’m really happy that Tangled Honor only took about fourteen months to write and publish. A good part of the reason I stuck with writing about a chapter a week was my membership in the Lockhart Writers’ Circle that meets weekly. Every other week it was my turn to submit about one or two chapters of manuscript to four other people to read and critique. Big thanks go to Tam Frances, Gretchen Rix, Janet Christian, and Wayne Walther. None of them are big fans of military historical fiction. Yet, they were my accountability group, and were extremely helpful in seeing the boo-boos in the manuscript and making word-smithing suggestions all along the way. Their candor was needed and appreciated, and their praise when the story clicked with them was needed even more.  

Of course, it was my wife, Sweet Nita, who read the whole printed proof over a couple of days while I was away with the manly men at Big Bend National Park, and asked a simple question that saved the day. She wondered why so-and-so at the end of the book knew something no one told him. It was a key something to the whole story.

I assured her someone had told him and she just missed it. I confidently took the printed proof to find it and show her. I looked, only to realize I had left out a whole key chapter near the end of the book. Somehow I had deleted that chapter from the manuscript during my “clean-up” efforts. Talk about a boo-boo and a thank-you owed to Nita.

To kick off my personal marketing of Tangled Honor, I rented a booth at a Texas Civil War reenactment near Houston last weekend to peddle the new book and Whittled Away to other reenactors and the spectators who came to the reenactment. Naturally, it rained off and on all day Saturday and a big fire ant mound surfaced right in the middle of my booth, but Sunday was a beautiful day, and I sold enough books to call the effort a success. More than that, it was just plain fun to talk to others about something I've written.

I’m now into Chapter 5 of the follow-up novel to Tangled Honor, with a plan for it to be over and done by the end of September of 2015. I’ll keep you posted.

Master and Slave

Why Tangled Honor for a book title? One reason is the friction between the main character and his ‘man-servant’, which is a polite term for his personal Negro slave. Why am I exploring the rapport between a forty-year old white Confederate officer and his twenty-year old half-white slave? It’s not something I just dreamed up one morning to write about.

  

For one thing, it’s an historically sound relationship to construct in a novel because thousands of Confederate officers took their personal man-servants with them to war. It was not at all uncommon.

But mainly, it’s because I have learned that my family tree includes a real pair of men who found themselves in exactly that situation. The historical Confederate Captain John J McBride and family slave Levi Miller were the real men who inspired me to write Tangled Honor as more than a war story. Their lives were indeed tangled together. 

In real life, for health reasons, young John J McBride emigrated from Lexington, Virginia to Leon County, Texas in the 1840’s. When the Civil War started, McBride enlisted and was elected 1st. Lieutenant in the Leon County Hunters, a group of men from his county in Texas, which became Company C of the Fifth Texas Infantry.

With two brothers and his mother still living in Lexington, Virginia, McBride, an actual man, secured the use of a family-owned slave to serve as his man-servant for the duration of the war. McBride was soon promoted to captain and was twice wounded in famous battles, at Second Manassas in 1862 and the Wilderness in 1864.  Both times, the real man and slave Levi Miller got the job of serving as McBride’s nurse.

The color image of the bearded guy is a post-Civil War oil painting, still in the family, of Captain John J McBride. 

The black and white image is a post-Civil War photo of Levi Miller, gathered from an old postcard that lauded him as the last Negro Confederate soldier.

We know so much about Levi Miller because he did something unexpected, and it was noticed and recorded.  In 1864, he crossed a ‘killing field’ to deliver rations to McBride’s company while they were deployed in the defensive trenches near Richmond.  Captain McBride was not present, having been seriously wounded two weeks earlier.

The enemy fire was too heavy for Miller to run back to the wagons, so he stayed in the trench, and was there when Union soldiers charged. Levi Miller picked up a rifle and fought with the Texas Confederates around him, even to the point of using the bayonet in hand-to-hand combat.

Long after the war, Miller applied for and was granted a Confederate soldier’s pension by the state of Texas for that specific incident. It helped that his story was corroborated by the Confederate officer who witnessed Miller take up arms with the soldiers in his master’s company.

After the war, Captain McBride returned to Texas, and Levi Miller settled in Winchester, Virginia, about a hundred miles north of Lexington, and worked as a water dipper at a health resort for the rest of his life. At his death in 1921, the story of his Confederate pension was written about in the local newspaper, and has since become an example often referenced by those who insist that hundreds, or even thousands, of black men fought as Confederate soldiers.

Almost all historians dismiss that opinion as baloney, as do I. The only groups of black men who carried rifles and fought in the Civil War were the US Colored Troops in the Union army, and there were some 200,000 of them, most of them freed slaves. Maybe those who espouse the ‘Black Confederate’ theory are merely color-blind and confused.

Back to Levi, he is listed in the 1860 US census as a “mulatto.” In that census there were three choices for ethnicity: White, Negro, and Mulatto-half white. That means Levi Miller had a white father. Since Levi was owned by a family with a father and three grown sons, there is a reasonable chance that one of them fathered Levi, if Levi’s mother was also a slave owned by the same family.

Sitting here at my laptop, even 150 years later, it is uncomfortable to reflect on the particulars of my McBride ancestors in Virginia and Texas owning slaves until the bitter end of the Confederacy. It may have been four generations back, but it still feels close to home. Family history with warts.

As to the story of John and Levi in Tangled Honor, what kind of relationship would a master and his man-servant develop while camping together in the army for nearly three years?  Would the relationship be influenced by the two men knowing, or even suspecting, that they were related as half-brothers or cousins or even, perhaps, father-son? Would such a kinship even be acknowledged in the culture of the South, where “one drop” of Negro blood put one in the caste of slaves? 

I find those questions troubling and terribly fascinating. They are compelling me to build a three-novel story around Captain John McBride and Levi Miller. Three years of war together, three books to tell the tale.

Since it’s nearly Thanksgiving, how about a food metaphor? There are just enough known facts about John J McBride and Levi Miller to make a fine pie crust, just waiting for me to spoon in layers of tasty story fillings that run together as I bake the whole pie. I mean, three pies, and the first one, Tangled Honor, will be available next week as a Thanksgiving dessert.

Three Texas-centric Big Bend Takeaways

 

Last evening I got home from a 5-day camping trip to Big Bend National Park in far west Texas on the Rio Grande River. Big Bend is a beautiful and prickly place that Nita and I have been visiting off and on for the past forty-four years. We started going there as dumb-ass college kids who didn’t have any camping gear and slept in the car and on picnic tables. We got better, though, I promise.

This time I camped with 25 “manly men” from around my town, on an annual pilgrimage to the land of rocks and cacti. Unlike Nita and I four decades ago, we had an excess of camping gear. But we still were reminded that nature is the queen. One guy, who can be so smart it’s scary at times, slept a couple of nights in the gear trailer when his tent flooded the first night during the rain. Anyway, this trip had three new things to add to my stack of interesting threesomes:

First, we went on a six-mile hike yesterday on a trail called “The Basin Window Trail.” This trail meanders through a lot of scrub brush, headed to a remarkable place where a stream run-off plunges over the edge of a cliff to the desert floor, way down below. It has always looked to me like the last hundred yards of The Window trail was a part of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and being anywhere close to the edge of the slick rock drop-off scares the pee out of me. I’d rather face an angry orc than creep out on the smooth slick sloping rocks to look down the cliff.

About half-way along our hike to The Window one of our fellow-campers, who is a retired wildlife biologist, stops us, points at a  long black cigar in the middle of the trail and says, “That’s a cougar’s first poop after a feed.” Uh-huh. He went on to tell us that the black cigar is full of the victim’s blood and other easily digested stuff. Later the cougar will poop like a great big dog, just normal old poop. Whoopee. Then, last before feeding again, the cougar will defecate a hair-ball looking mass of bones, cartilage and hair, the stuff that doesn’t digest well. Then, the big pussy cat will find another meal. Ain’t science fun? The three stages of cougar poop. Wow.

The second threesome of note was at Fort Davis, which is a post-Civil War cavalry fort north of Big Bend. It was home of several hundred cavalry and infantry whose purpose was to deter and when necessary, pursue and “punish” marauding Indians, mainly Comanches and Apaches.  The post was vacated in 1890 and became a National Park site in 1961. That would be shortly after Texan LBJ became Vice-President.

Several of the buildings have been restored and furnished to reflect their original purpose, buildings such as enlisted men’s barracks, officer apartments, the commissary, and the hospital. The hospital has the expected array of operating tools and devices for healing through torture. And because of good record keeping, the display includes specific instances when various ailments and complaints of real soldiers at Fort Davis were treated in the best medical fashion of the time.

The threesome here relates to laudanum, that early version of opium that was widely used during the Civil War as a pain-killer. General Hood is said to have made ample use of laudanum after his battle wounds that resulted in a leg amputation and a useless arm. But Hood did father several children after the war, so he was not utterly incapacitated, or he had a very creative and cooperative spouse.

The laudanum in the Fort Davis display was described as the treatment of choice for three different cases: In the first case the laudanum was taken orally as a pain-killer. Check. The second time, laudanum was poured into a soldier’s ear to treat an ear-ache or ear infection. Hmm, I guess so. The third was a case in which abdominal pain was treated with a good dose of laudanum applied as an enema. Zowee! Three avenues for the same drug to work its magic.

The last of the three Texas-centric bits was music. It was my joy to twice be in the audience when another of our campers, Fletcher Clark, strummed his guitar and sang. Fletcher’s another old guy like me who has been a professional troubadour in Texas for a long time. In one era of his life, he and a recently deceased Texas musician semi-legend Steve Fromholtz were part of Far Flung Adventures, the rafting company out of Terlingua, Texas. Far Flung takes people on rafts through the narrow canyons of Big Bend on overnight trips. Decades ago Fletcher and Steve provided sandbar concerts during the evenings and otherwise made themselves useful.  

This time, Fletcher sang Fromholz’s signature ballad, A Texas Trilogy, a song on par with Don McLean’s American Pie. Hardly anyone else sings it because it’s long and hard to do well, and the record is not played much. That made hearing Fletcher sing The Texas Trilogy, first at the Starlight Theater in Terlingua, then at our camp the next night, just like white cream gravy on a tender chicken fried steak. And that ain’t hardtack.

 

 

 

Chasing Historical Rabbits

One of the fun aspects of writing historical fiction is not knowing when I’ll need to make a quick detour to Wikipedia. I’m only three chapters into the manuscript of Redeeming Honor, the middle book in the McBee Civil War trilogy, and I’ve already taken some fact-chasing side trips, chasing historical rabbits, so to speak. 

Since the new book starts with the arrival of thirty-six new recruits to Captain McBee’s company, I needed some names to attach to green soldiers. That sent me to the historical roster of Company C of the Fifth Texas Infantry. I wanted to identify which men were recruited during the one successful effort made to send junior officers back to Texas from Virginia and coax men with a $50 bounty to enlist for the duration of the war, which the South still thought they were winning and wouldn’t last much longer.

Company C reportedly snared forty new recruits, doubling the size of the company after a year soldiers dying of fatal illnesses like measles (yes, measles), pneumonia, and dysentery, not to mention battle deaths.  I gathered suitable first and surnames for my new fictional characters, who will reflect the same ages and often the same fate as their namesakes. Readers of Redeeming Honor will quickly meet Zebulon and Ed Bell (Zeb and Ed), who along with Napoleon and Alamo Brashears,  carry the first names of two sets of brothers found in the original rosters.

Chapter 2 had me sorting out that Mr. Bayer did not market and coin the word “aspirin” until 1899, thirty-four years after the Civil War ended. But key ingredients of pain relieving medicines were known before the Civil War, so I slipped Doctor Barton, the GP in Lexington, a vial of extract of willow tree sap, one of the sources for acetylsalicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin.

Not two pages later I was clarifying the steps of “harvesting” a hen to go in the cook pot. I have never been confronted with the need to wring a chicken’s neck or otherwise dispatch a hen or rooster, but when I was a teenager I went duck hunting with friends a couple of times. I still remember one cold morning riding in Bill Daniel’s 1961 Ford Falcon that had an air vent that was stuck open, blowing frigid air at my feet all the way to Lake o’ the Pines and back.  

I did bring back a dead duck that morning and remember the mess I made in the back yard gutting and half-ass plucking the poor bird. Mama wound up making me go bury it by the creek across the street. I think she just didn’t want to cook it in her clean kitchen. I didn’t mind so much since I’d been told wild duck meat, even the breast, was all dark, tough, and stringy. My first meal in Paris in 2009 dispelled that myth, but in 1967 what did I know?

Probably the most interesting historical rabbit that I’ve so far chased down regarding the material goods of the Civil War is the story of Charles Goodyear. He spent his lifetime trying to turn his discovery of how to “vulcanize” rubber into a successful manufacturing and marketing business. (He was the first American to learn that sulfur and heat were key ingredients to make rubber a practical waterproof coating on products like shoes and tobacco pouches) He impoverished his family and ruined his health with his decades of experiments with strong chemicals and acids, yet he did eventually create and patent a waterproof product that could be attached to canvas and was impervious to heat and cold.

During the Civil War, tens of thousands of highly valued waterproof vulcanized rubber “gum blankets” were issued to soldiers in the Union army. Besides good shoes, gum blankets were the first items that Confederate soldiers most often stripped from fallen Yankee soldiers.

In Whittled Away, I included a true account of some Texas Rebs stumbling across two huge piles of new gum blankets waiting to be issued to Sherman’s troops in north Georgia in mid-1864. In that long summer campaign of constant marching that was plagued by recurring torrential rains, the gum blankets were likely more valued than hard coins. Better to be penniless, dry and warm, than cold, wet, and unable to use your money.

I hope everyone votes tomorrow or has already cast your ballot in elections from local school boards and city government all the way up to those running for Congressional and Senate seats. It matters.

What I’ve read this week: I finished Jeff Shaara’s new Civil War novel about the battle at Chattanooga and Missionary Ridge: The Smoke at Dawn.

Cover Girl or Not

Two of my favorite musket-era war movies, Master and Commander and Gettysburg, have no women roles. My first Civil War novel, Whittled Away, has a few female characters with short ancillary appearances in the war story plot.  I have long believed the best war stories stick to telling about the soldier characters and the war, and not drift away into sidebar romances and other hi-jinks.

So, while I wrote the first two-thirds of Whittled Away, I kept the ladies out of the plot, conveniently forgetting that the Patrick Sharpe series of novels about the Napoleonic Wars are also favorites of mine, and Sharpe has an eye for the ladies.

At some point in writing Whittled Away, detailing the ongoing heaviness of the war depressed me, and I decided that at least one character, and me as the writer, needed a little R and R. Hence, Chapter 28 was born.  I loved writing Chapter 28, and Lieutenant Navarro has repeatedly thanked me for putting him in the arms of Rose. 

Knowing my next novel was going to be another Civil War story, and remembering what fun it was to weave a romantic vignette into Whittled Away, I suspected that a woman character was going to be more than an afterthought and more than a temporary distraction for the new book’s main character, John McBee.

As you can see from the cover of the new novel, Tangled Honor, a woman shares the top spot. Not just any woman, but a smart and attractive woman, the dangerous sort of woman who has the capacity to hijack a war plot and turn it into a Harlequin romance. I’ve never actually read a Harlequin romance novel, but with each new chapter in Tangled Honor, I worried that I was writing one. Hell, maybe I did. I hope someone will tell me.

I did keep asking my writers circle companions if I was taking the fast lane to literary purgatory, and they assured me they were enjoying the intrigue brought about by the woman. Of course, that’s three women and a retired pastor talking.

I still worry what my reenactor friends will think about my sliding in a second plot line that is more or less independent of the war story of the Fifth Texas Infantry. These guys hold Hood’s Texas Brigade in especially high regard, bordering on reverence sometimes and may well see a woman as an unwelcome intrusion.

Regardless of those reservations, once the lady’s position in the plot was a done deal, our writers group also looked at four cover options sent to me by the graphic designer, a lady who had read the manuscript. Only one of the draft covers included an image of a woman. I called it the “Harlequin” cover.  Guess which cover garnered the most votes? Yup, she did.

We talked about whether I wanted to appeal to female prospective buyers, and I admitted that I did. I learned from feedback from people who bought Whittled Away that my writing voice seems to connect with women readers, even beyond Chapter 27.  Besides, a book sale is a book sale, and I do want my second novel to sell more copies than did Whittled Away in its first year. I was open to the idea that maybe a woman on the cover would attract more women buyers.

Men like women, and men like reading sexy scenes, I know that much. Women buy romance novels, so with those thoughts as justification, the face of dark haired beauty made the cover.

One of the writers circle ladies suggested the woman on the cover is too modern, wears too much eye liner, lip stick, cheek shadowing and has plucked eyebrows. I agreed and followed the suggestion to Google images of Civil War women in search of a more period-appropriate face.

The old photographs I found show a bunch of plain women. Even the younger women with attractive facial features were unappealing. Styles were extremely different in the 1860’s.  Women’s hair was usually parted in the middle and pulled tightly to the sides. The use of make-up was only for “soiled doves,” ladies of the night. Moreover, having one’s portrait made in the 1860’s was serious business, so all the ladies are solemn, not a smile in the bunch. There were certainly no challenging, come-hither looks on those faces. So I bypassed those images, thinking in for a penny, in for a pound. I’m not putting a homely woman on the cover of my novel.

To you, my blog reading friends, what do you think? By all means, leave a comment or shoot me an email as to whether the cover of Tangled Away is better or worse for the sweetheart in the top corner. I’m really curious if I made the right call.

By the way, the plan is for Tangled Honor to be offered on Amazon as a paperback and a Kindle e-book download by the weekend before Thanksgiving, about a month from now.

What I read this week:  Ghostoria, a collection of vintage era short stories of romance and the supernatural by Tam Francis (who is one of the ladies in our Lockhart writers circle)       

Swinging Cannonballs

Think of an iron cannonball with a curved handle welded to it. Think of a row of pairs of them in increasingly bigger sizes from about ten pounds to way over fifty pounds each. They are called “kettle bells” and they are old-fashioned weight training devices that are said to have started in Russia.

For seventeen years I would end half my sweaty workouts at The Old Texas Barbell Company by holding a kettlebell in each hand as I bent my knees and thrust forward with my butt, swinging the kettlebells up and back, to repeat ten times before going to a heavier pair of the cannonballs with handles.

I wrapped up my other workouts by pumping the long anchor-sized ropes up and down for sixty seconds, making waves up and down the long rope, rest a minute, then pump the ropes again, for three or four times.

In between it was the traditional barbells and dumbbells, curls and presses, and such. Nothing fancy.

Who but a guy named Mike would own The Old Texas Barbell Company, a  gym with no air-conditioning, no music, no treadmills, and certainly no TV’s. 

Last month, on Mike’s 72nd birthday he shut’r down. He sold the place, complete to the pressed tin roof, bare brick walls and plywood floor. He sold the building back to the BBQ joint next door, having bought it from them back in 1996 when he moved from booming bustling Austin to little lazy Lockhart.

The Old Texas Barbell Company was also a fitness museum. The laminated covers of dozens of old fitness magazine decorated the walls, along with old rowing machines. Odd shaped dumbbells and a couple of anvils were on display.  Most of the free weights came from the old Gregory Gym on the University of Texas campus, where the weight room was under the stage until the place was renovated. Dull burnt orange paint still clings to some of the bigger round weights.

Two huge painted canvas clothes illustrated an early strong man, and Carol Finsrud, Mike’s wonderful wife, who is a world-class senior pentathlon athlete. Wooden display cases housed Carol’s ever growing collection of gold and silver medals, and shelves held Mike’s body building trophies from his younger days.

The paper that tells of Milo, the Greek wrestler,  is my favorite piece on display.  In ancient Greece, Milo the young boy asked his teacher how to grow stronger than the other wrestlers. He was told to select a new-born bull calf, throw it over his shoulders and carry it once around the arena every day for a year. Seems to have worked.

I don’t do change really well, and I was stressed out that Mike’s gym would soon not be there for me to scratch my two-or-three times a week weight-lifting itch.  I’m no gym rat, in fact I’m a bit of a fat rat who cherishes his recliner. But for nearly two decades,  Mike’s has been part of my lifestyle, the place I traded gossip with other retirees and some youngsters, and the place where I went to exert some effort that made me sore in a good way.

After all, Mike’s gym was the place where one Saturday morning a phone call came wanting to know who was the lady in town who made the fancy decorated birthday cakes. Two people knew, but they named two different bakers. I’ve never figured out why that cake call came to Mike’s gym, except that Lockhart is a little town, where roots run deep, and people sometimes do things differently.

In the end, my depression about leaving the austerity of the Old Texas Barbell Company for the new modern 24-hour Snap Fitness facility was easily solved.  As Mike closed his gym, he built his own personal workout building in his backyard, and he invited some of his longtime clients to continue working out there.  He moved about half his collection of iron weights and kettlebells, even the ropes making the shift.  I bike to Mike's backyard gym two or three times a week now and see some of the same folks I’ve grown used to over the years, and I still sweat.

The new added extra is gigging Mike about the bathroom in the new gym having a marble countertop around the sink. I expect his wife Carol had a hand in that.

Where’s the connection between Mike’s gym and McBride’s Civil War novels? Besides, the cannonball shaped kettlebells, I dunno if there is one. The gym is one place where writing ideas percolate as I work through my list of exercises, but then, so is my bed, after my full bladder awakens me in the predawn hours.

I actually think I wanted to write about The Old Texas Barbell Company because it was an old-fashioned, no shortcuts, no frills, sort of place, run by a gruff, but welcoming guy, and I view me and my novels that way.

The Devil in Texas

I was on the Texas Civil War Heritage Trail Facebook page when I found the envelope pictured here. The envelope was labelled as having come from New York during the war, an example of patriotic stationery that was fairly common on both sides during the Civil War as a way for civilians to show their support to the war effort.

I laughed when I looked at the cartoon devil, thinking the winged and forked-tail rascal was great imagery. I also reflected on why the New York artist chose Texas for the Rebel state "honored" in his wartime logo.

In researching my books, I’ve been reading quite a bit of the history of the three Texas infantry regiments of Hood’s Texas Brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia. In battle, they were aggressive and fought fiercely, no doubt. In fact, General Lee himself referred to the Texans as his “Grenadier Guards,” quite a compliment coming from the commanding general.

The Texans also certainly had a reputation for a lack of discipline when not actually fighting a battle, and that was most of the time. The mystique of the Texas Rebs was surely enhanced by the fact that Texas was a true frontier that shared a bloody border with Mexico and rubbed up against vast lands controlled by the Comanche Indians.

So, I’m not too surprised, and admit to a bit of pride, that this Civil War envelope devil chose Texas for his banner.

Jumping to the present day, this past week I also surfed onto the Facebook page of a relative who is deep into far-right national politics, and is an outspoken critic of our sitting national president. That Facebook page is filled with venomous graphic images about the president, painting him as evil and anti-American in every possible way. There seems to be an endless number of these hateful images that are posted every week, as my relative exercises our First Amendment right of free speech.

It’s a Facebook page that troubles me greatly, as it reflects a person who seems so angry about national events that the normal Facebook subjects of family and vacations are mostly by-passed, in favor of turning the page into a place for ongoing and very negative political salvos.

The Civil War envelope of the devil would fit nicely on that Facebook page, unchanged except to replace the word “Texas” with the name of our president. Without doubt, the devil is an image easily and often used by political cartoonists to paint one side or the other as evil. The ploy was popular 150 years ago during our Civil War and is still so today.

I am disturbed by the vitriolic nature of many of the voices I hear ranting about political matters. I just wish they wouldn’t do that. I wish that politicians, TV, radio and internet pundits would stick to rational discussions and debates of the issues. I wish Congress would allow the art of compromise to reclaim its position of honor in Washington and our state capitals. I wish a lot of things, but these are truly important wishes, which I believe are shared by the majority of America's good people.

Meanwhile, I’ve dumped the title “McBee’s Bloody Boots” for the first book, now completed but not yet published, of the three that I’m writing about Captain McBee of the Fifth Texas Infantry during the Civil War. It’s now, and finally, (yes, finally, again) titled, “Tangled Honor.”

Birthday, Book, and In Loco Parentis

Today, October 6th, is my birthday. Hooray for me and for still hanging out on the green side of the grass.

Last Saturday night we attended the local “Evening With the Authors” event hosted by The Friends of the Lockhart Library.  The event is much anticipated each year and is very well attended. It takes place in a beautiful garden and includes eight or ten published authors who each have their own table and a host or hostess. The folks who attend grab a plate of tasty rations and a glass of Texas-made wine and visit as many of the authors’ tables as they care to, getting copies of their books signed and visiting with the authors.

Nita and I played host to Elizabeth Crook, a fine author who lives in Austin and has written several novels of historical fiction, my favorite being The Promised Lands, a real epic about the Texas Revolution.

Her newest novel is about the lives of several fictitious characters who were wounded or otherwise affected by the mass murder episode in Austin on the University of Texas campus during the summer of 1966.

That was the day a deranged man named Charles Whitman, dragged a footlocker of weapons into the elevator of UT’s Main Building and rode up to the observation deck atop the tall landmark UT Tower. He killed the guard and then proceeded to the open observation area that circles the tower. In the next few hours he shot randomly selected people on sidewalks from his secure sniper’s nest. He killed sixteen innocent people, and wounded thirty-two more. It ended when police finally stormed the observation deck and killed him.

Mrs. Crook’s work is not a retelling of the tragic day, but a novel that probes how being caught up in such insanity affects people long after the event. It’s not a war novel, but it sprung from an act of war-like violence, unimaginable in 1966 in the dog days of summer in a quiet college town in Texas.

Sadly, the past two decades have seen other school tragedies that have eclipsed even Mr. Whitman’s afternoon of horror. Columbine High School, Sandy Hook Elementary School, and many other murders of  students, who never questioned their safety at school, have changed our the culture of our nation’s schools.

 On the upside of this train of thought, Nita and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to and engaging in conversation with such a talented author. On top of that enjoyment, early in the evening, I was delighted and flattered to be asked to take part in next year’s “Evening With the Authors” as a local author.  That offer may have come on October 4th, not the 6th, but it was an unexpected gift that made my weekend.

As to the downside of spending an evening visiting with a writer about the first tragic mass murder on a school campus, I’m reminded for the term, “In loco parentis.”

It’s a Latin legal term that means, “in the place of parents.”  School teachers and school principals perform their daily duties “in loco parentis.” Teachers and principals are legally entrusted with the responsibility to act in the parents’ place in matters that affect the parents’ children.  It’s a core concept of education and normally it means making routine decisions in the daily supervision and care of the precious children who spend half their days at school each year.

I was once a school principal, and it was the most rewarding job of my career in education.  Thinking back, I’m confident that none of us who have served as school principals were ever asked in a job interview, “Which way would you go if some morning an insane killer entered your school and  started shooting your students?” 

Bear in mind principals don’t take classes in how to disarm intruders. Principals do not carry firearms on the job. More middle-aged women are principals than are burly men. Principals are educators, not soldiers or cops.

Nonetheless, in the spirit of “in loco parentis”, if I had been asked, I hope I would have said that I’d instinctively run towards the sounds of the shooting, without hesitation, without second thought, without waiting for police support. 

In such a rare nightmare, it should not matter whether a principal is “prepared,” or accompanied by an armed police officer. What should matter is that the principal, acting “in loco parentis, in the extreme, immediately does what a parent would do when their child is being threatened with by a gun wielding crazy man: Confront the gunman and try to stop him, even if that is confrontation is a suicidal act.

“In loco parentis,” even unto death. That sounds melodramatic, but it is exactly what the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School did one Friday morning a couple of years ago. That middle-age lady is my hero.  I hope that Dawn Hochsprung, the heroic principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School, will continue to be remembered  and honored all across America.

Because, acting “in loco parentis” in the extreme, she went into harm’s way and died a violent death trying to protect the children who had been entrusted to her care.  Mrs. Hochsprung was a parent, a principal, and in my mind, a citizen-soldier. God Bless Her Memory.