It had been more than a year since Mom had passed away, and I was finally ready to start organizing her things. Her clothes were still in the closet, and the same sheets were on her bed. Her favorite coffee cup was still in the Keurig, waiting for another brew. While looking through the piles of documents on her desk, I reflected on the amazing life she had lived. A single mom with two children throughout the late 1950s, putting herself through college and later working for NASA on the Apollo program as well as the Department of Energy on the nuclear weapons testing program. She would go on to speak before the US Congress and write a book concerning her time at the Nevada Test Site. To say that she was an overachiever would be an understatement.
While looking through the piles of documents on her desk, I came across some handwritten notes concerning a Bible that had been in the family for more than 250 years. I remember the day Mom had received the Bible and we always wondered about the bullet hole. We figured that Grandpa Love had acquired it while preaching throughout the Ozarks in the late 1800s.
For more than fifty years, Mom had attempted to track the Bible back to its original owners, but real life had a way of complicating the process. It was not that long ago that she had made several trips to Arkansas, searching for clues.
As I read through the old family notes, some dating back more than 100 years, I decided to take the files to the kitchen table for a more thorough examination. While making a cup of coffee, I removed the Bible from the safe and placed it on the table next to me. It was there I decided to continue Mom's work. Eventually, I was able to identify seven generations that had carried the
Bible. I discovered who'd had it, when they'd had it, and where they were beginning in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1766, to Tennessee, USA, where it remains today. The following novel is based on that research.
