The Preacher's Road: a Novel of Texas Family, 18211934)

Bastrop County, Texas - September 29, 1897. A Baptist preacher steps onto the platform at Rosanky Depot and does not come home. The man who shoots him will claim self-defense. A jury will let him walk. And the preacher's widow will carry what happened for another thirty-seven years.William Richard "Dick" Whitehead was a circuit preacher, the postmaster of Jeddo, a father, a trail rider, and once - at a bridge over Peach Creek - a killer himself, acquitted by a jury of his neighbors. His father survived a Comanche raid on the Concho in 1867. His widow, Martha, married at seventeen on a hot July morning three months after the war ended, buried her husband and most of her world, and outlived them all.Spanning four generations and more than a century - from the Tennessee hill country of 1821 to a Texas graveyard in 1934 - The Preacher's Road is a novel built from the author's own family: real names, real dates, real newspaper accounts of real shootings, with fiction filling the spaces the record left silent. It is a story about faith and violence living side by side in the same man, about the women who endure what the men set in motion, and about how a family's memory outlasts the people who made it.The preacher's road runs through Jeddo, and Jeddo is where it ends.