KINGWOOD

Excerpt from Ch. 1

The old man at my bedside was not a shadow. He had wavy gray hair that fell to his chin, and gray stubble obscured his jawline. His denim shirt was unbuttoned at the neck, revealing a leather cord necklace. On it hung a large bear claw in a silver fitting that was decorated with a small circular onyx. He looked taller and more heavily muscled than me, my father, or my brother.

Grandfather. It seemed plausible; he was about the right vintage. I had never met the man and I had grown up hearing contradictory things about him. Gram had warned me off of him, saying he was “cursed,” that his trailer park at the edge of Kingwood State Park was a dreadful place from which nothing good ever emerged, and Hunter and I were better off staying as far away as possible.

My father’s reminiscences about his boyhood, however, had an idealized quality that might have been as much a product of later hindsight as actuality. He had often spoken of my grandfather as a powerful man, admired by his community. Still, I got the feeling that something had happened between them that had made my dad run away as a teenager. He had often referred to us as “exiles” from Kingwood, so I understood that we could never go back, but he wouldn’t say why.