Excerpts

WISHBONE (blurb)

High School football in Cane Branch, South Carolina, has always been king. Once a thriving community with a successful paper mill prior to the economic erosion, the town has become a shadow of its former self.

In a struggling community with hardships hitting everyone, it was football that once brought people together and made the hard life tolerable. But a rape and murder with two star football players and a nationally renowned coach at the center of the investigation, and an alleged cover up by town leaders, has divided the town. Hate, bitterness, and unrest eats at the heart of the community and the thing that once brought the town together has torn the town apart and opened a wound that could be fatal to the once proud community.

WISHBONE-PROLOGUE

South Carolina, in the summer time, sweats like the mother of a bastard child at an Easter dinner. Wind chimes hang lifeless on the wooden slat front porches as the folks sit on their rockers, fanning themselves with the past Sunday’s church bulletin  - and using it to swat at the flies - as the backs of their legs stick to the white paint of the old wooden rocker.  While the deep south, indeed, may be a slice of heaven in terms of the charm of the people, the climate is as close to hell as you’d ever want to be. 

In the small South Carolina town, there is a hierarchy, if you will, of the VIP’s, and it would behoove you to be acquainted with all three. The most important people in the world to the tiny populations of these worlds-of-their own towns are the Baptist minister, the pharmacist, and perhaps the most important of all, the high school football coach. One can help you overcome the sin and destruction in your life, one can help take away the aches and pains, and one, well, he can make you forget about all of the things you’re having to see those other two about every Friday night in the Fall.

You see, football, in this small Southern state, is religion, as much so as that red hard-back copy of the Holy Bible that rests in the slot on the back of the pew in front you at church, collecting more and more dust each week. And beginning in the month of July and August each summer in the sweltering heat, you can smell the freshly mowed grass and hear the faint sounds of the whistle in the distance and know that thing that is rivaled only to the second coming of Christ in Dixie, is coming and that thing is football season.