The fictional family, the Prevetts, serve to feed six of my novels. A matriarch, Sybylle, watches over the virtue of six daughters who come of age around the time of World War I. The Prevetts are all too human, and admonitions and persistent vigilance can’t hold back culture and flesh.

Behind A Still Face

The death of her suitor in WWI gives Helen Prevett the right to be sad, and now in her 80’s, she admits to looking sad for her entire life. She contends her still face covers more than the death of her suitor. Others need to know how a silent maid living in a quiet town battled her mother’s relentless exhortations to be virtuous and abide by the creeds of the Catholic Church. Suitors found her and she took enough to believe in love. But yes, the sad face seems indelible.

Blessed Virgins

Babe Prevett grew up knowing his Great Aunt Julia had a special friend, Sarah Cummins. In the late 1980’s, Julia tells Babe her story. She is discrete and cautious. Still a practicing Catholic, she implies that Babe should tell the world of the goodness of her love for Sarah. Babe realizes the trap set by the culture around him. Prurient interests push at the telling of such a story, but he must remain faithful to the goodness. Julia steps aside of the seeming contradictions. Babe wonders if he fails in retelling his great aunt’s story.

Hurting God

After life in the big city as a fashion buyer for a large department store, Edna Prevett would settle for a nice little dress shop back in bucolic Twin Pines. In 1950, she has turned 50. She looks good, voluptuous still when stood next to her quiet sisters. Artemis Shaecks thinks so and has thought so since she was in high school. But he’s 20 years older, married, and just as Catholic as all the Prevetts. Carl Prevett loves to tell his great aunt’s story. He’s a bit vulgar and cynical, but he loved Edna as she did him. He unfolds a tragedy that’s laughable at times.

A Vow Of Disobedience

Will Prevett declares a dislike for his father, Steven Prevett. On the tramp during the Great Depression, Will does not complain about the hard work in the wheat fields of Wyoming. Instead, he tells his fellow travelers his struggle to understand his father. Together, Will and Steven validate the rumor that the parish priest takes physical gratification with his drab but dutiful house keeper. Simultaneously, Will follows his father as he intervenes in the priest’s attempt to rid the town of a young doctor who performed an abortion. But Will stays vexed at the immorality of his father’s indifference, especially to his mother.

An Extreme Unction

Nata Prevett waits for death and releases a lifetime of worry, guilt, and fear. For Nata, the wife of Will, the mother to both Carl and Babe, being Catholic gets a second look. Her narration seems one breath away from heaven and hardly a step above hell. She feels free to wonder how she can take rewards of eternity while looking down at the eternal suffering of her mother, her eldest son, her brother, all sinners by definition in the eyes of the Catholic Church. Central to Nata’s anxiety is the extreme poverty her widowed mother experiences as she raised five children. Her decisions meant life or starvation, but they also violated the creeds pronounced in the catechism of Nata’s childhood. That same catechism explained the sacrament of an Extreme Unction, a final rite that saves one’s soul from an eternity in hell.

Corrine

Corrine Prevett wants to love somehow. An embrace with a best friend, Kadia, on a hot summer day does not last a lifetime. A suitor shows up for Kadia, seemingly appropriate in the 1920’s. No suitor shows up for Corrine, not in that same story line as Kadia, and not within any story written in the texts for young Christian girls, Catholic or Protestant. Corrine becomes the first and only librarian of the public library in Twin Pines for over 50 years. She could write a book about wanting to love. The many distractions of her life need to slip away for her to find that love.

Holy Boy

Note: Holy Boy departs from the Prevett series. I use the protagonist to honor diversity and human strength.

One boy observes Rickie Olland sitting on the bleachers during lunch hour. She looks younger than her 16 years. Her short and slender build plays into a deceptive plainness. She does not understand the attention of the popular and self-confidant boy. He can “Walk Like A Man,” and he knows “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” Facing her predator almost three decades later, she feels cornered by a man who now espouses deep religious convictions. Rickie struggles to narrate the debasement, and she must navigate the danger still posed by her predator’s dysfunction.