Tunnels in the Briar Patch (The Adventures of Roland McCray)

By Blaine Coleman

These stories follow the life of a boy named Roland McCray growing up during the massive social changes of the 1960’s in a southern town that’s immersed in Civil War history. Roland enjoys the things that all children do- rides his bike, flies kites, plays in the fields and woods, and catches frogs and salamanders in the creek behind his house... But Roland notices that the world he sees around him and the things adults do don’t match what he’d been told in school and church. He learns that people aren’t always honest and that prejudice between races and religions hasn’t completely changed in a hundred years.. Doubts grow in his developing conscience about what to believe and he’s influenced by his grandfather’s way of life: faith isn’t a thing to be shown, the way it is at his church, but is a quiet, unwavering certainty that all things work out for the good of those who truly seek the good in life. Roland wants that same certainty his grandfather lives and begins to seek his own Path, his own way to finding the good in life and living the way God intends he should live. A nostalgic tale of a young man growing up in the south and losing his religion to find God.
“These stories are woven in such a way that you feel what the boy feels, they are not all lightness and brightness, but more like real life remembered in all of its shaded details.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blaine Coleman
• Release date: Jul 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311196484

Blaine Coleman

A lifelong resident of Virginia, I grew up in the rural southeastern part of the state with a large extended family. I majored in Religious Studies and minored in Creative Writing-fiction at Virginia Commonwealth University. I now live in a rural area near Richmond where six year old beagle, Leah, and her new companion beagle, Billy, have room to run. I spend my free time with my favorite activity, gardening, participate in Midlothian Wordsmith's Workshop, and read and write as often as possible. At university, I was fortunate to have many incredible writing teachers, the most recent being authors Clint McGown, and Sheri Reynolds, bestselling author of RAPTURE OF CANAAN among others. I learned from Clint McGown that prose can be as beautiful as poetry and I gained a love of southern fiction from Sheri Reynolds.In 2012 I began writing stories about a boy growing up in the south in the 1960’s. Those stories became the collection THE ADVENTURES OF ROLAND MCRAY. All three volumes are also in print and audiobook. My books are available in or can be requested at many Public libraries and paperback versions can be ordered from several major offline book retailers.I also have a new book that is a radical change from the ROLAND MCCRAY series- FALLING WATER (Stories and Poetry)- a well-received collection of unusual short stories and poetry that is also available in print and audiobook (beautifully narrated by Charles Kahlenberg). Among other projects, I'm currently working on a science fiction novel that I hope to complete in 2017.

Book preview

What others have said

Blaine Coleman’s writing is reminiscent of Ray Bradbury, especially the novel Dandelion Wine.

"Roland’s imagination and empathy, the vibrant descriptions and the way the story is told makes this book special to me."

"Told in a lyrical style that makes life events feel like a fairy tale."

"Before you know it, you as the reader are swept into a colorful, dramatic, and ultimately satisfying emotional truth."

"This author opens his hands and reveals highly polished pearls."

Tunnels in the Briar Patch

The Adventures of Roland McCray

Volume I

Blaine Coleman

Text and Artwork copyright 2013 Blaine Coleman

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

This book is dedicated to all who love literature.

Each chapter is a complete story in and of itself and is focused on an important event or experience in young Roland’s life that helped influence his moral and social growth. And though each story carries its own meaning, the vignettes, taken together, create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

These tales draw the reader in to the unique and often innocent worldview as seen through the eyes of a young boy named Roland McCray, as he attempts to understand the southern culture and religion he encounters growing up, and to find meaning and apply his values of honesty and thoughtful caring to his experiences. More tales of Roland’s adventures are available at your favorite online retailers, and in print at Amazon.com as well as in select libraries.

§

This tales of Roland McCray would not have been possible without the editing assistance and advice of others. I want to thank Heather Curran for her excellent editing advice with writing and crafting these stories, Anita Young for her many readings and suggested edits on the final draft, Jerry Bryson, Jarod D. Crews, and Paul Ellis for their encouragement and invaluable input, and Gail Geiwont, for her brutally honest and helpful insights. And a special thanks to Steve Johnson for tirelessly reading these stories and searching out my many grammatical errors and typos.

Table of Contents

Crater Hill

My Wheel

Poke it with a stick

Butterflies

Walls

Snake on a Fence

Of Cults and Klans

Moving Day

Roland and the Rapture

Susie

Preview of Book 2

"And the bird responds to

The unheard music in the shrubbery."

TS Eliot

The trouble with life isn't that there is no answer, it's that there are so many answers.

Ruth Benedict

Crater Hill

When I was young, my Mom took me and my sisters to church services at Crater Hill Baptist. It was a small place- just a little white clapboard church that sat on Crater Hill across the road from Petersburg National Battlefield, but we just called the park ‘the crater’. I hated going to preaching; the chapel was always crowded, warm and stuffy, and we’d have to sit still while the preacher droned on and on. It was bad enough that I could only hear about half of what he was saying, but what made it worse was that sometimes it seemed like he’d never finish the sermon.

The church was in walking distance of our house, which Dad liked; he didn't go to church, anyway, and was glad that Mom wasn’t putting miles on the car just to go to preaching. And I liked the church being close, too, because that meant we only had to go when it wasn’t raining or too cold out.

Crater Hill Baptist wasn’t big enough to have a Sunday school, but every summer the church held a two week long Vacation Bible School out on the lawn and it was open to everyone. They’d spread blankets on the grass for us to sit on, and a church volunteer would open a Bible story book and show us the illustrations while reading a story; we were allowed to ask questions, if anyone wanted to, after the story was finished. One day, Mrs. Brown (our volunteer that day) read us the story about Noah’s Ark, and then showed us the pictures; the first showed Noah and his sons building the Ark, the second, a line of animals walking two by two into the ark, and the last one showed a crowd of terrified people running towards the Ark, a flood of water sweeping in behind them, and Noah standing on the deck, watching while the people were swept away.

Mrs. Brown, I said.

Yes, Roland?

Why did Noah only save the animals, but sealed the door so none of the people could get on it?

Because all of those people were wicked, she said. God saved Noah and his family because Noah was a good man: he was the only good man God could find.

So, there wasn’t anybody else good in the whole world?

Did you even listen to the story, Roland? God knows what is in the heart; He knows who is good and who isn’t. People might fool each other, but no one fools God. And Noah was the only man faithful to Him. But after the forty days and forty nights of rain ended, all the wicked were cleansed from the earth and God promised He would never again destroy the world with another flood. And he gave Noah a rainbow as a sign to remind us of the flood, of the wickedness that brought it down on all of the Earth.

Okay. Thank you, Mrs. Brown, I said. If nothing else, I was taught to always be polite. But after hearing that story, anytime it rained and kept raining for two or three days, or a week, the way it sometimes did, I’d think of Noah and his ark, and worry that I might be one of the people left behind. And I still really wasn’t sure what the story about Noah and his Ark meant, except maybe to explain why we have rainbows.

I liked the stories about Jesus the best, though. It seems like he was always walking from place to place, kind of the way my grandfather always ambles around his neighborhood, visiting his friends and relatives who lived nearby. But Jesus wasn’t visiting friends, the way my grandpa did; He was teaching the crowds of people who followed him, and healing the sick and the lame. My favorite story was about a day when Jesus was teaching and healing people and a lot of parents sent their kids over to Jesus so he could bless them. His followers told the parents to stop doing that, because Jesus was busy with important work and shouldn’t be distracted by a bunch of kids, but Jesus was angry with those who tried to send the kids away. He said to let the children come to him, because the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs, too. The picture with that story showed Jesus dressed all in white and sitting on a garden bench surrounded by flowers. Children of all ages sat with him, on his lap and beside him on the bench, on the ground at his feet, and others stood close enough to hear Jesus speaking. My grandmother had the same picture, larger, and framed, hanging in her home and I thought it was the prettiest picture I’d ever seen.

After story time, we’d all get cookies and punch, of course, or sometimes even popsicles, so a lot of kids from my neighborhood would go to Vacation Bible School, even though most of them didn’t have to attend preaching.

The church held its Bible School in June every year, which was a good thing, since any later in the summer in southeastern Virginia, it would be too hot to be out in the sun for hours. I’d just sit on one of the blankets spread out over the grass, feel the warm sun on my face and a light, cooling breeze off the field in the Battlefield Park across the road. It was a great place for flying kites and there would usually be people doing just that. Some people flew fancy, colorful box kites, which I thought were really neat, but most of the kites were simple, brightly-colored paper kites with two crossed ribs and a tail made of knotted cloth, the same kind I had. And since that field was the only place near my neighborhood without power lines or trees in the way, a lot of times me and the other guys flew our kites in that field, too.

And that field was huge! Dad said it was a half mile long and about half that wide. The park service only cut the grass three times a season, so it was always about knee high. The field sloped down to where some brush and low trees grew alongside a small stream that trickled through the middle, and then the open, grassy area sloped back up to a line of old cedar trees. Behind those cedars were the flat tops of earthen ramparts that once surrounded a Confederate camp during the Civil War. Earthworks like those were common in the area; the sites of Confederate encampments were everywhere in southeast Virginia, and most of them weren't even marked. But the ones at the Petersburg National Battlefield were protected because they surrounded the bomb crater, a huge hole in the ground that marked the place where the last fort protecting Petersburg fell to the Union Army's advance, and the park was built around the site of that fort.

The other guys and I liked to ride bikes on the park road and sometimes up to the crater. Signs were posted all around to warn people to stay off the earthworks, to prevent erosion, but of course we didn't pay any attention to them; the flat tops and steep sides of the earthworks were more fun to ride bikes on than any place we had in the neighborhood!

I liked to ride my bike up onto the ramparts and to the crest on the highest side of the crater, then roll my bike forward, over the edge and drop, almost free falling into the pit, ever faster, with the wind in my face as the path came up to meet me, and leveled, but by then I'd have enough momentum to make it up the other side. I’d crest the rim, seeing only sky for a few moments before my bike wheels hit the gravel and I'd laugh, for the sheer joy of the ride, I'd laugh as I skidded my bike to a stop. That was the closest I could get to actual flying, and I loved it!

Then, I'd coast down the hill on the gravel path, warm sunshine alternating with the sudden coolness of deep shade from huge, old cedar trees. The path ran alongside the old tunnel, or what was left of it; flat areas were separated by long depressions in the earth where the tunnel roof had collapsed in the explosion. The original tunnel entrance was in a ravine at the bottom of the hill and the Park service had put cement-filled sandbags on each side of the ravine to replace the long gone sandbags originally used. The Park Service had put a rail around it to keep people out, but of course that didn’t stop us from climbing down into the gulley and looking through the iron grate into the tunnel.

Despite all the modern reconstructions, the original tunnel entrance was still there, blocked off with a steel grate to keep kids like us from trying to get inside it. The railing kept tourists from getting too close to the tunnel (it didn’t keep us away from it, though), and there was a metal box on a post with a button that could be pushed to hear a recorded narration of what happened in the battle. Most of what I knew about the crater I learned from that recorded message the Park Service had provided.

It was the fourth year of the war and Petersburg still hadn’t fallen to the Union Army. The city was surrounded by Confederate forts and the Union Army was having trouble resupplying units deep in enemy territory, so it really needed to take Petersburg. The siege on the city was into its tenth month, and the Confederate camp on top of the hill above the tunnel entrance was the last of a ring of forts that had protected the city. Desperate to capture Petersburg and shorten the war, the Union Army needed a new plan. They gave up on direct attacks and instead tunneled three hundred yards into the hillside, working quietly and only at night. The soil excavated from the digging was brought out on small mine carts and dumped into a ravine where a creek ran through the woods so it wouldn't be seen from the fort during the day. The park service had laid railroad ties into the ground like the original ones that had served as a path to empty the soil-laden carts into the ravine.

When the tunnel was finally completed, the Union Army detonated eight thousand pounds of dynamite directly below the Confederate fort, and the blast hurled six hundred cubic yards of earth into the morning sky. The crater left by the explosion was so large that more than a century of thunderstorms, fallen leaves, and erosion hadn’t healed the wound in the earth; it was still sixty feet across and more than half that deep.

The recording said that despite the Union Army’s effort, they made several mistakes: first, they set off the explosion early on a Sunday morning because the Northern soldiers thought the rebels would all be sleeping. But, they were wrong; the Union Army didn’t know that most of the Confederate soldiers would sneak into town through the woods late Saturday night to attend church with their families, and then sneak back to the fort under the cover of darkness the next evening, so not many soldiers were in the fort on Sunday mornings.

Second, the Union Commander sent in a division of troops who hadn’t even been trained to lead the siege, and in the confusion a great many Union troops were killed. So instead of the battle being a breakthrough to take Petersburg they’d thought it would be, the Union forces had to remain camped outside the picket line for another eight months.

The first time I listened to that recording, I looked up toward the flat-top hill that marked the crater. I tried to imagine what it must have been like that bright, horrible, Sunday morning. The recording said that the explosion first caused the ground under the fort to heave, and then it was still for about half a second. For half a second, the ground was still; I wondered what went through the minds of the few soldiers in the camp during that half second. Then, the ground lifted into the sky, launching the log palisades hundreds of feet high as the camp barracks heaved in unison, and everything tumbled