Scatterbones

By bill bice

June 1967. Grieving the loss of his mother, thirteen-year-old Junior Murdload seeks comfort in the perfect solace of an abandoned cemetery. There, amid crumbling tombstones, he meets Zeke Pretus, a mysterious, old black man with a treacherous, glorious past. Six weeks later, in the shadow of an ancient, Alabama cotton mill, Junior will bury him. But the old man cannot rest in peace until the scattered, sacred bones of a girl lost some forty years earlier are unearthed. Though his breaths are numbered, Zeke's first, and only love, Viable Lebatrie, returns to her beloved home in Huntsville. For fifty years, she had survived the southside of Chicago. Though weary and not without shame, she had always cherished Zeke, the Dallas Mills gravedigger. But at the tender age of sixteen, she had needed, and deserved, a man with prospects . Zeke would be about eighty now, she surmised--if not dead. Still, chambered in her dreams, burrowed beneath a dark veil of sorrow, his haunting, green eyes shimmer like moist emeralds. Employed by the Murdload's, Viable will learn that Junior has befriended Zeke. Resolving to comfort the dying man's last hours, she is shocked to discover a secret that changes her miserable life forever.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0BCSCZ6G9
• ISBN13: 9798832718477
• Release Date: September 2022
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 294 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.7" x 6.0"