Carry My Bones

Description from Amazon

Carry My Bones Paperback

J. Wes Yoder (Author)

J. Wes Yoder’s debut novel brings us to the back roads of Alabama where there’s a killing…almost.

It begins with three men trying to escape a crime that wasn’t quite committed. The youngest, Merit Banks, has brought the two other men – the one who raised him and the one who served as his mentor – together for the first time. Gideon Banks, a criminal and a folk-potter of moderate success, doesn’t think much of his adopted son, a boy who was brought into his life for the sole purpose of fixing a broken marriage. Judge Riley, an old field-power and the singer of a thousand songs, thinks much more kindly of Merit, having taken him under his wing long ago.

For the length of a college football season the three drift highways, back roads and deer trails, befriended many times by other solitary southerners, alone in their work, their addictions, and their restlessness. In Birmingham they meet a young woman who is naively charmed by their tale, and bored with her upper-class upbringing, takes them in.

Sheltered in a house of grand portraits and heated floors, the three are afforded the time to face their separate struggles: the old Judge a fever, Gideon his guilt, and Merit the girl who would ruin his ideas about isolation forever.

Set in the present-day south, Carry My Bones is a moving story of three men wandering in and out of other people’s lives – all the while gathering new ideas about their own.