Missing Isaac

Fraser Luesse Valerie

Description

There was another South in the 1960s, one far removed from the marches and bombings and turmoil in the streets that were broadcast on the evening news. It was a place of inner turmoil, where ordinary people struggled to right themselves on a social landscape that was dramatically shifting beneath their feet. This is the world of Valerie Fraser Luesse's stunning debut, Missing Isaac.It is 1965 when black field hand Isaac Reynolds goes missing from the tiny, unassuming town of Glory, Alabama. The townspeople's reactions range from concern to indifference, but one boy will stop at nothing to find out what happened to his unlikely friend. White, wealthy, and fatherless, young Pete McLean has nothing to gain and everything to lose in his relentless search for Isaac. In the process, he will discover much more than he bargained for. Before it's all over, Pete--and the people he loves most--will have to blur the hard lines of race, class, and religion. And what they discover about themselves may change some of them forever.

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 02 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781493412617
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2018 by Valerie Fraser Luesse
Published by Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.revellbooks. com
Ebook edition created 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-1261-7
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Endorsements
“Valerie Luesse has an ear for dialogue, an eye for detail, and most of all, a profound gift for storytelling. She breathes life into these colorful Southern characters and this quirky Alabama town from the first page, and then she has you. As the senior travel editor at Southern Living , Valerie knows how to take readers on a journey, and with Missing Isaac she has taken that skill to a whole new level.”
— Sid Evans , editor in chief of Southern Living
“Welcome debut novelist Valerie Fraser Luesse to the legions of gifted Southern writers before her. Missing Isaac is the first of what we hope will be many more tales from this talented writer.”
— Nancy Dorman-Hickson , coauthor of Diplomacy and Diamonds and a former editor for Progressive Farmer and Southern Living magazines
“Looking both acutely and compassionately past the upheavals that defined the South in the troubled 1960s, Valerie Fraser Luesse’s beautiful story of a white boy’s quest for a missing black field hand reveals the human heart that always beat beneath the headlines. In the process, she movingly illuminates not only the spirit of a special region but the soul of every human being who ever dared to care. Missing Isaac will break—and then heal—your heart.”
— J. I. Baker , journalist and author of The Empty Glass
Dedication
For Dave and my parents
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Endorsements
Dedication
Part I
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Part II
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Ads
Back Cover
Part 1
One
O CTOBER 10, 1962
A sleepy purple twilight wrapped around the farmhouse, its tall windows glowing with warmth from somewhere inside. It was suppertime, and the cool October air smelled of cotton lint and field dust. Inside was an eleven-year-old boy playing checkers with his grandfather. As was his custom lately, he wore a flannel shirt many sizes too big for him.
“Pete, honey, you’ve got a closetful of clothes—why do you insist on wearing that old hand-me-down of your daddy’s?” his mother asked.
“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “’Cause he gave it to me, I guess.”
There was more to it than that, of course. The truth was that Pete’s father was both his hero and his best friend. There was no one he admired more than Jack McLean, no one he so longed to emulate. Not only that, but he thoroughly enjoyed his father’s company—and Pete could tell the feeling was mutual.
So there he sat at his mother’s kitchen table, wearing his daddy’s shirt and holding a tentative finger on one of two red checkers still remaining on the board. “Okay, Daddy Ballard,” he said to his grandfather as he lifted his finger and leaned back in his chair. “Your move.” Their checkers game had become a weeknight ritual.
“You sure, son?” his grandfather said with a grin.
“Yes, sir.”
Pete’s mother peeled a colander of potatoes at the sink as a radio played in the windowsill.
Mrs. Kennedy attended a charity luncheon in Washington this afternoon. The First Lady wore an autumnal suit of red wool crepe . . .
Daddy Ballard made the only remaining move left to him. Pete’s face lit up when he saw his opportunity—the long-awaited winning jump.
“I won! I finally won!” he cried as his grandfather laughed. “Wanna play again?”
His mother shook her head. “Now, Pete, you know your daddy’ll be home before too much long—”
She was interrupted by the blaring of a truck horn. It blew and blew all the way from the county blacktop, and you could hear the tires slinging gravel as they sped up the driveway and into the backyard. Pete looked at his mother, whose face had frozen in fear and dread.
All three of them had heard it—the split-second transformation of ordinary sounds into a cry of alarm. Truck horns, tires churning gravel, men yelling to be heard over machinery—these were everyday background noises on the farm. But when something went wrong, when someone got hurt, those very same sounds took on an urgent tenor. You could hear it. You could feel it in your bones.
“Y’all in there? Come quick!” It was Isaac, one of Daddy Ballard’s field hands, who helped Pete’s father work the cotton.
The adults bolted for Isaac’s truck, with Pete leaping over the tailgate and crouching in back before they had time to tell him not to. Cold wind blasted his face as they raced down the narrow strip of pavement to a dirt road that divided two sprawling cotton fields. He had to hold on tight as Isaac drove straight through the cotton, bouncing over furrows and tearing through tall, brittle stalks to get to a giant ball of light glowing in the distance.
So many trucks were beaming headlights onto the accident that it looked like a football stadium on Friday night. Chains rattled and clouds of red dust swirled everywhere as the field hands and Pete’s uncles—summoned from their own family farm—made a frantic attempt at a rescue.
“Shut that engine off!”
“Get the slack out! I said get the slack out!”
“Back up, back up, back up!”
“Can you see him? I said can you see him!”
Daddy Ballard held Pete’s mother back.
“Jack!” She screamed his name over and over and over.
At the center of it all was a massive red machine, his father’s cotton picker, turned upside down in a sinkhole like a cork in a bottle. One of its back wheels was still spinning against the night sky, like it was trying to run over the moon. Pete could hear—or maybe he just imagined—clods of red clay splashing into the watery sinkhole far below the snowy clouds of cotton. And he knew, without anybody telling him, that his father was lost.
Spotting him standing beside the truck, wide-eyed and horrified, Isaac came to pick him up. But with nowhere to take him, Isaac just walked around and around the truck, Pete’s legs dangling like a rag doll.
“You gonna be alright. You gonna be alright. We gonna make it alright.” Isaac was shaking.
Pete heard a loud, booming crash as the trucks pulled the picker over onto its side to clear the hole.
“There he is! Lower me down! Hurry!” That was Uncle Danny, his father’s oldest brother. Isaac had stopped in a spot that kept Pete’s back to the accident. “Pull! Ever’body pull harder!”
There was a momentary silence before Pete heard the sound of water dripping off of something heavy. It reminded him of the sound his father’s Sunday shirts made when his mother hand-washed them, plunging the saturated cloth up and down in the sink.
Soon the field hands began to moan. “Sweet Jesus. Mister Jack . . .”
Only then did Pete realize it—Isaac was soaking wet.
Two
O CTOBER 12, 1962
Pete stood next to his mother at the head of a long line of family just outside the First Baptist Church of Glory, with Daddy Ballard and Aunt Geneva, his mother’s only sister, behind them. It felt oddly like Vacation Bible School, when the kids all lined up to march in and pledge their allegiance “to the Bible, God’s Holy Word,” before adjourning to their classrooms to memorize the names of the disciples and decorate bars of soap to give their mothers on commencement night.
Pete had tried hard to get all of his crying done last night—privately, in his room, sobbing into a pillow so his mother wouldn’t hear. He couldn’t bear the thought of making this day any harder for her than it already was. Grown men in the line were sniffling and dabbing at their eyes, but Pete remained stoic. Except for the sweat. He could feel it soaking the dress shirt underneath his suit coat. And because he had forgotten all about the white handkerchief in his pocket, he wiped his damp brow with the sleeve of his coat. How could it be this hot in October? That didn’t make any sense. And why wasn’t everybody talking about it? Grown people usually went on and on about the slightest hiccup in the weather.
First Baptist was a pretty little church—red brick with double white doors, arched windows, and a big iron bell hanging beneath the steeple. Just last Wednesday, the church held a business meeting and voted to modernize by starting a central air fund, but for now the windows were slightly open to circulate the autumn air, and Pete could hear Miss Beulah Pryor finishing up “Heaven Will Surely Be Worth It All” on the organ. Soon she would play “Precious Memories,” which was what she always played when families marched in to bury their dead.
As she began the opening strains, the undertaker opened the church door with one hand and summoned the family with the other. The sun shone so brightly in Pete’s eyes that the man’s face was just a featureless shadow. All he could see clearly was that spooky beckoning arm. His legs felt like they were turning to sand, and he didn’t think he could move,