Tares Among the Wheat

Superstition, mysticism, and religion weave like tangled vines through the tales of Amelia's newly discovered ancestry. As a widow struggling to sustain herself and her ten-year-old son, Amy's modest life is tragically disrupted when a dubious lawyer determines her late mother, adopted at birth, was the estranged daughter of the recently deceased Lexington McClary. Although the net worth of the once enormous estate is petty, Amy decides to travel several hundred miles to attend the funeral, in the hope of at least learning a semblance of her newfound ancestry. After the interment, alone in the secluded rural cemetery, Amy trips and bashes her head against a tombstone, suffering a coma and complications requiring medical care and convalescence for several months. While precariously recovering, Amy is visited in the depth of nights by a mysterious woman who tells stories of Amy's maternal grandparents, their families, and acquaintances. The tales of her ancestors reach back nearly a century and include their immigration from Ireland to New York City and their migration westward to Indian Territory. Poignant remembrances of her own life and the altered world into which she regains consciousness portray the unconquerable but elusive human spirit, confronting failure in the wake of triumph, tragedy dispelling romance, madness shaming war of its glory, and the cruelty of murder in defiance of reason.

This second volume concludes the two established primary framed story-lines that traverse the entirety of the novel. Herein, mysteries of mysticism, religion, and ancient legend, as introduced in the previous book, are granted explanation and plausibility. As the story lines converge toward simultaneous conclusion at the end of the novel, other mysteries arise and are resolved. Events and experiences described in this volume include extremes of sorrow, horror, joy, and romance. In this saga, as in life, there are those who meet more suffering than comfort, but the balance of the aggregate, inevitably and eventually, tilts toward triumph, justice, peace, and contentment. Redemption, as in reality, is both compromised and realized. Episodes herein expose the cruelty of humanity as the torments of warriors and the crimes of civilians. Ultimately however, the unconquerable collective of human decency, determination, and faith prevails. Senseless murders punctuate the merciless decade of the horrific Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. In this volume those murders, as well as other crimes, fraud, assault, and theft, are brought to the justice of mortals, while the non-statutory transgressions of greed, power, vanity, and selfishness are left to the infallible and certain justice of the Almighty. Surprises for the reader, pleasing and teasing, are unveiled in this volume. These story lines also reclaim the obvious axiom, our predecessors often do not succeed for themselves, in their own lifetimes, but they plant the fields of wheat for their descendants to reap the harvest, and since no soul takes anything from this earth in his departing, is not one's legacy the only true tangible success?