Storms forge heroes. Baseball tests them. Love redeems them.
A freak storm. A sudden death. An innocent boy is accused of murder.Wounded - The second Novel in The Long War series - A coming-of-age Novel about False Accusation and Redemption. Set against the red clay ballfields of the post-war American South and the high-altitude wilderness of Colorado's San Juan Mountains, Wounded is a coming-of-age novel rooted in place. The American South of the 1950s — with its codes of honour, its injustices, and its grudging beauty — is as much a character as Ricky Belisle himself.
Haunted by shame and driven by a need for redemption, Ricky Belisle leaves behind everything he knows—including the woman he loves. Chasing a future on the dusty ballfields of the American South, he finds a world of temptation, corruption, and injustice where the only certainty is the game.Like The Grapes of Wrath, Wounded follows a young man displaced by forces larger than himself — economic, legal, and natural. Like To Kill a Mockingbird, it asks hard questions about the gap between guilt and innocence, between what a community believes and what is true. Like The Great Alone, it puts its characters in landscapes where survival is never assured.
For fans of The Great Alone, The Grapes of Wrath, and To Kill a Mockingbird, this is a sweeping story of resilience and second chances. Wounded is Book Two of The Long War Series, set during the Cold War years 1947-1991. It follows Spirit Falls (Book One), set on Michigan's Upper Peninsula during the Korean War. The series follows four characters through a world of secrets, shifting loyalties, and the long slow cost of conflict fought not on battlefields but in the hearts of ordinary people.
Storms forge heroes. Baseball tests them. Love redeems them.
He walked north along the rural dirt road from which frost boiled out of the ground. Melt waters stood high in the ditches and flowed fast through the concrete culvert and across a long field into a tamarack swamp. Thirty or so heifers and young steers grazed on brown grasses. A light sprinkle began to fall through the mist. He pulled his black watch cap over his head and looked west over grazing youngstock. He was young and tall with short, shorn hair. His features seemed vaguely Indian––some slight epicanthic fold, black hair, and brown skin––though the winter had been long and cold.
He walked tall but with wariness, as one who'd had his first encounter with how unfair life might be. He stared beyond the pasture into the grove of tamarack, beyond which lay the dells of the Spirit River, the gouged riverbed like a mirror crack; on the far side, one life had been lived; on this near side, a different life was to begin here, today.
The grazing herd lifted their heads as one, looking, a sense of nervousness touching one, the next, then all. Rick looked where the herd looked. Would he see a single groggy and peevish black bear or a pack of dogs exit the swamp grasses? He listened to the sound of the rain, the wind rustling the swamp grasses.
The eastern tree line seemed to separate from the earth and rise into the sky, like the birthing of a mountain in a moment rather than an eon. Bellowing, the yearlings bolted, electric fence wires pinging as the animals ran through them. The emerging mountain became a prehistoric pterodactyl, grey as the sky, wings stretched from north to south horizons, screaming, talons extended. The Air Force B-52 bomber, flying so low that he thought for a moment he might touch its fuselage with a finger, passed overhead and disappeared into the fog bank in the west.
Ricky straightened from his crouch, legs tensed, heart pounding, and looked around. He turned north towards the Milwaukee Road rail line, which joined the Chicago and Northwestern switching yards at Ishpeming.
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