Susan Carol McCarthy - True Fires

Table of Contents

For Mabel Norris Reese,
my hero

PRAISE FOR TRUE FIRES

A vivid portrait of mid-century corruption, and of some brave enough to risk everything for justice.

Kirkus Reviews

Insightful [and] fervent ... Flawless dialogue, warm characters and compassionate wit all service a moving story about the powers of love and justice.

Publishers Weekly

LAY THAT TRUMPET IN OUR HANDS

Winner of the 2003 Chautauqua South Fiction Award
ASanDiegoMagazineBest Fiction Book of 2002
A Deadly Pleasures Best U.S. First Novel of 2002

Reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird... A beautiful book about personal courage.

Orlando Sentinel

The best fiction always bears a strong resemblance to real life. In Lay That Trumpet in Our Hands, McCarthy blends fact, memory, imagination and truth with admirable grace.

Washington Post

Appealing ... An engaging approach that blends power with simplicity, truth with innocence ... A very respectable debut.

Tampa Tribune

Poignant and disturbing.

St. Petersburg Times

Poignant and beautifully written.

Lebanon (MO) Daily Record

A strong debut.

Kirkus Reviews

Evocative ... The sincerity of her tale and its simple telling would make the book as interesting to young adult readers as it will be to those who remember or want to learn about the tangled moral questions of the 50s.

Publishers Weekly

Reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird, McCarthys debut novel is engrossing. ... McCarthy realistically portrays race in a small Southern town, showing how good people are tainted by generations of hate without making her characters into cartoons. ... Teens and adults alike will enjoy this tale of growth and triumph.

Library Journal

Its the rare book that can move me emotionally, impress me with its literary quality, and fill my heart with the hope of human trust, bravery, and dignity. Lay That Trumpet in Our Hands is such a book. ... I can virtually guarantee you wont be disappointed.

Deadly Pleasures

In this deceptively simple tale of a girls maturity during evil times, McCarthy shows us something more: a community banding together under fire, and a family willing to shoulder a terrible responsibility. Lay That Trumpet in Our Hands is, in microcosm, what the civil rights movement meantand meansto all the men, women, and children involved.

Laurie R. King,
author of Folly

One cannot come away from reading this book without recalling To Kill a Mockingbird, the 1960 novel by Harper Lee that won a Pulitzer Prize. They are both excellent books and this reviewer recommends that you read them both.

Senior Lawyer News

Susan Carol McCarthy in her debut novel has written a breathtaking tale based on real events. ... A poignant novel of the Souths dark days.

Southern Scribe

With a graceful style, McCarthy spins the tale of a murder that forever changes the tiny community in which it takes place.

San Diego Magazine

Deeply moving.

Daily American

The outermost guard sees it first. The carefulfootfall, the crack of twigs, the crush and crumbling of dry leaves. She turns and, imperceptiblyto the intruder, sends the alarm. One comes!

The message is passed from guard to guard,from outer rim to inner wall, from watchful eyesto anxious hearts. One comes!

Those assigned the colonys defense ready theirweapons. The rest stand and wait, prepared todie, if need be, rather than surrender their treasure. Sensing the alarm (The children, are theysafe?), She Who Decides emerges from herchambers.

The outermost guard presses forward, peeringthrough the woods and sees, It is He!

Once again, word flies to and through thecolony. Relief spreads. He Who Provides comes.To collect the golden tablets glistening in the sun.They will offer no resistance so long as the children, their treasures, are safe.

1

Outside the wall of windows, the unrelenting flatness sets Daniels mind to dreaming, sketching mountains, ridges, and rain gullies in the wasted space between the sparse Bermuda grass and the vast staring-down sky. Suddenly, a flare of lightblazing sun careening off polished car chromeyanks Daniels eyes out the open doorway. The light glares in the face of the skinny boy on his left and the girl with the yellow hair in front of him. As the two-toned car comes to a stop in front of the school office, the skinny boy points; the girl gawks. And the two of them whisper, not to Daniel, never to him, The Sheriff, K. A. DeLuth, their tones at once fearful and reverential.

Haw, Daniel scoffs inside his head, yall call that a Sheriff inFloridy? Looks like he couldnt tell a still from a smudge pot, andwouldnt bother dirtyin his boots to try. Up home, Sheriff Jim isPaps fifth cousin and hes got two stills. One to keep, he says, and oneto share, when the revenuers come through, needin somethin to bustup. That stills been moved around and busted up more times thananyone can count. Sheriff Jim brags hes got the least still still inAvery County!

Daniel snickers at ol Jims familiar joke but stops as the skinny boy and the yellow-haired girl turn on him, their flat eyes hard with disgust.

Hes been at this school ten days now, but nonetheless, the depth of their contempt surprises him. The first two days, his fellow fifth graders had seemed entertained, charmed even, by his tales from up home in Pigeon Ridge, North Carolina.

Pigeon Ridge? You got lots of pigeons up there? theyd asked.

Nary one. Hed grin. But we got more ravens than you kin shake a stick at. Know why the ravens so black? Th Ol Cherkee says he got burned black, stealing fire from heaven for the folks on Grandfather Mountain.

Oh, theyd liked him fine then. But, the day after that, the girl with the hair as bright and shiny as a river trout turned on him, her blue eyes squinty, her nose squinched, and asked, real loud, Dont you have anything else to wear? That question and his answer turned everything sideways. The grins of the others were gone. Now, their eyes either glittered with bone-naked revulsion or skittered off elsewhere as if he werent even there.

Daniel the Lone Ranger hed become, laying low behind a mask of amused mockery he didnt really feel, feeding the hungry rumble of his homesickness constant helpings of memory and imagination.

Outside, the Sheriffs door slams shut. Hes got a fancier car than ol Jim, Ill give im that. And, Daniel notes as the big man hitches up his broad belt, an even fancier gun.

The sight of the Sheriffs pistol with its pearly white handle sends the boys mind wandering. In his lap, his palms fold, one up, one down, several inches apart. In his mind, he grasps his own little bolt-action .22, its barrel ice cold as he crunches through the crisp freedom of the October woods; brown nut grass, stiff with first frost, crumbling beneath his feet. Here, sun slants bright through the half-bare hickory grove. And just there, the tail of a fat fox squirrel flickers. Daniel stops, takes aim, lets the squirrel back his way round the trunk into full view, then,