Where Mercy Flows
Chapter One
THE JUDGE ALWAYS had the final say. Right or wrong, he was God. His
truth was a hard, unbending line that never wavered. Not even for
me.
When I was young I called him Daddy. Of course, I also lay in the
cool grass of summer and imagined that clouds were dinosaurs and
that just as the sky had no beginning or no end, life held limitless
possibilities for me.
My world was twelve acres framed by a wadable creek in a gully to
the east, the Stillaguamish River to the south, a stand of poplars
lining our long driveway on the west and Hartles Road to the north.
Our river came like a train from far away. It slowed as it rounded
the bend to pass our house on its way to somewhere-the ocean, I
guessed, and I believed as children do that my life, like the river,
was destined to flow as easily around each bend.
I knew little of death, except that Great-grandpa Dodd had died
while plowing the back quarter of his sixty acres. The job
accomplished, he promptly had a heart attack and drove the old John
Deere straight down the hill into the churning river. No one seemed
to mind much, because he was very old an ... read full excerpt from: Where Mercy Flows ebook
