After a few rewrites this draft is approaching
something which should resemble the final version… Click on the page, Blood Vines, for much of the first chapter. Please leave feedback on however much you read. This is a rare opportunity for your comments to actually effect the final published product! Give me the goods. I can handle it, and I rarely cry myself to sleep at night on my huge pilla’.
… King was well aware of the fact that he was not where he had left off. The pages of his life had been turning like a novel left rustling in the evening breeze on the back porch – pitching forward and back again he wasn’t even sure what page he was on, and had only a slightly better idea what the story so far had been.
In the midst of those pages, some 30 years in, Joseph King arrived in Bethel, Texas during the summer of 1963. Fresh from Southwestern Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, with white skin, white shirt and only the occasional dark thought, he took the long way around to get to the small town that would be his new home – a bus to Beaumont and a handful of hitched rides along sleepy state and county roads crowded by thick, mostly second growth, longleaf pine forests. Dingy truck stops, coagulated cherry pie and a comfortable pace put King at ease. The tattered edges of country folk calmed him. Four years of city living in Ft. Worth had not brought King any closer to the city. The scrub oak and mesquite of his childhood were being replaced with the hundred foot tall cypress and sweet gum of the Pineywoods, but the smell of oily overalls, stale sweat and cigarettes was the same wherever the road wound….
😀