Lone Star Book Blog Tour: River, Sing Out by James Wade (Excerpt and Giveaway)

PROLOGUE FROM
RIVER, SING OUT
BY JAMES WADE

In an age far removed from the age of men, the world was yet unsettled, and the land drifted overtop the sea, and beneath the soil ancient lithospheric complexes of rock collided and pulled apart and collided again. Mountains did emerge, oceans rising and falling away, and steam erupted from the bowels of the earth where great fires burned in that inner furnace. And always they had burned, since the first whit of calcium came spilling forth from the cosmos, fleeing the last gasps of dying stars, abandoning its elemental hosts so that a new form might come barreling into existence—an astronomical explosion passing through the vestiges of forgotten galaxies, gathering to it allochthonous minerals and energies ripe for creation.

And in that great long ago we were all of us water creatures, and such truth held within us for millennia as we did gather and pool along the sea. And as the rivers reached out across the dry world, we followed—never straying too far from the flowing life what created us.

For the world we know now is a world receded. The very ground upon which we stand is a borrowed commodity, loaned to us by the ocean and its tides. The ebb and flow of earth and all its creatures brought about by the shadows of moons and the dust of stars, the consequence of elemental warfare on celestial plains.

Thick deposits of marine salt were drowned by the growing coastal waters and their waves of green. Silt to sand to swamp. Marshlands and hardwood forests spread north from the widening gulf, nine hundred miles from the great ocean to the east. And there the yellow pines made their last stand against the desert valleys and jagged uplifts, and there in such climate all their own, the forests grew and thrived and covered the country in deep, impassioned glories of green—eclipsing the horizon, veiling away all markers of the world without.

One such nativity leading to another, until at long last the river did manifest. In what would become Eastern Texas, the Neches was born dripping and gathering, collecting and pooling and drawn by gravity into the dirt, and there carving out its own bearing—a great pathway to the sea. From the hills of Van Zandt County, then some four hundred miles to the Gulf of Mexico, and along the way joined by creeks and rivulets with pathways of their own, and all connected in this selfsame destiny, wherein all stories share an ending, all lives a like fate.

And through these ages untold, the river did act as the lifeblood of those alongside it, those sons of Adam who pulled from its basin rice and timber and great tracts of each. Then came the oil and refineries and the promise of fortune, and the river was dug deep and unnatural along the estuary where it spilled into the ocean, and the water turned at once brown and polluted.

Soon the dams and spillways were built for the creation of lakes and reservoirs and the populations to come. And come they did, and forests felled and banks muddied; and the people abandoned the river, lost in some modern notion of promise and progression. So the river drew to it a sinister force, and along its banks grew deep roots of poverty and perturbation. And there the story begins and ends and begins again, as each rhythm of the earth’s turning draws the water darker still.

James Wade lives and writes in the Texas Hill Country with his wife and daughter. He is the author of All Things Left Wild, which is a winner of the 2016 Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest, a winner of the 2021 Spur Award for Best Historical Fiction, and a winner of the 2021 Reading the West Award for Best Debut Novel. His fiction has appeared in various literary journals and magazines.