Chad V. Boughman & Dirk Ruff
Helen writes,
We are very excited to welcome Chad V. Broughman as our featured AWS reader at Bos Winery on August 27 at 7 pm and our fiction writing workshop instructor at Grass River Natural Area on August 28 at 1 pm. Chad is a great fiction writer, and his novel, The Fall of Bellwether, is a great read. Set in a fictional town in Michigan’s upper peninsula, it follows the lives of five men and women prior to the start of the Civil War. Chad is able to do so much in this novel – portray this brutal yet breathtakingly beautiful landscape, create characters that are flawed but sympathetic, and move you through a narrative that twists and turns, but never loses sight of the overall theme.
If you like historical fiction, you will love The Fall of Bellwether. Here’s a short excerpt:
The Fall of Bellwether by Chad V. Broughman
Excerpt from “Chapter One: God Sees You”
It was in 1841 when the damp winds lashed at town square, tipping hats and rustling papery leaves against the scaffold. Ada saw Elinor’s bonnet lift and a lock of reddish-yellow hair spill over her eye. She watched her trying to reach for the ringlet, to tuck it away, forgetting that her hands were bound. Surely the rope bit her skin.
“Don’t let ‘em see you hurting,” Ada said.
Elinor leveled her shoulders and blew at the loose curl.
“That’s my girl.”
Ada knew Elinor was confused. Her only child stood blank-eyed, the shackles heavy as headstones on her wrists. She thought, my daughter will die the same way she lived, her simple mind unable to grasp the evils of the world. Perhaps her daftness was a blessing after all.
Ada surveyed the crowd of pinch-faced hypocrites. Brown smoke hung over their heads. The ghostly remnants of dynamite blasts from Bellwether’s copper mine layered the air like sediment. She looked from face to face, marking the wrath in the onlookers’ eyes. The same good people who sat next to them at church just a few months before, nodding while her husband preached from the pulpit with fire and flair. These same upright folks who said––“Hello, fine ladies”––whenever she and Elinor crossed their paths at the postmaster’s or the mercantile.
Today, they were judge and jury. Executioners.
Though Ada had managed to shield her daughter from the town’s fury for months, ultimately, she had failed. And Elinor would pay with her life. Ada’s instinct was to cover her girl’s eyes to hide the cold-bloodedness. Her muscles ached that she couldn’t as her hands were tied, too.
“Heathens!” someone shouted.
“Swindlers! Crooks!” Deacon John cried, raising his fists in the air.
Others cast their eyes to the dirt, unwilling to spur on the rage, yet not brave enough to stop it.
Ada looked just in time to see the deputy slip the noose over her daughter’s head then pull it snug. The fat knot bulged at Elinor’s dainty neck like a tumor on a rose.
But Elinor merely looked up at the deputy and smiled. “Ma says I’m going home to be with God.”
When the coarse hemp rasped against Elinor’s jowl, Ada saw her twitch, bow out her chest and stand taller. “Never stole anything,” Elinor told the deputy, then looked to her mother for approval.
“No you didn’t, baby,” Ada called out, working past the swell in her throat.
The deputy yanked a hood over Elinor’s head.
“Mama, I can’t––I can’t see!”
Our local AWS author featured in August is Dirk Ruff, a poet and essayist whose writing focuses on our natural world. And we are so glad he does. Dirk is able to help us see, and see again, familiar places all around us. He delights in the small details: the stream bed, the forest floor, the way the light plays through the maple leaves. He is always searching for connections between what we carry on the inside and what we perceive on the outside, the relationship between our world and ourselves. And this exploration is important work. You’ll get the chance to hear him read with Chad on August 27.
Here are a few poems he plans to share:
Transcendence
I left in a mist,
the shrouding of unknown
that always finds us
and drapes over our shoulders
at 4:30 in the morning.
The road,
its centerline and outer white,
blend, merge, disappear, and then
form their parallel lives
as deer cross
and raccoons hold funerals
on the shoulder.
The sun rises
as her rays foreshadow the arrival,
and I wish to follow the moon
as he sinks –
behind the outlines of spruce,
to a place I have never been –
where the spirits roam unfettered
and fog blankets,
a protection against harsh outlines
of all the things
that have come to pass.
My soul
waves in the rear-view mirror,
his feet,
on the moon’s
side of the ledger.
Eden’s Susan
The Brown-Eyed Susan in the garden
receives forty suitors
in equal time.
Their pollinator wings
whisper
and she returns
this
with the gift
of life.
To be regifted
as surrogates
raise her children.
They may show her sway,
or tone of bearing
despite being a lilac bud
or rosebush
in the neighbor’s yard.
Yet we do not compel her
to cover up,
or turn away
her black and yellow callers.
But we receive her,
naked
and unafraid
in the sun’s full gaze.