Review Roundup: Christmas and Candle-making

Wolf Creek: O Deadly Night (Volume 10)
By Ford Fargo
Western Fictioneers, November 2013
$9.99 paperback, ISBN 1493727133
$2.99 Kindle, ASIN B00GFF6SYG
$2.99 other e-formats, ISBN 978-1493727131
188 pages

Wolf Creek series editor Troy D. Smith has a gift for intriguing, often pun-laden, titles. That gift is displayed right up front in Wolf Creek’s tenth overall volume and second Christmas anthology, O Deadly Night.

Like the first collection of holiday-themed short stories (A Wolf Creek Christmas), O Deadly Night visits some of the Kansas cattle town’s familiar denizens and introduces a few newcomers.

At the rate newcomers were spilling from the woodwork in the previous Christmas anthology, it seemed Wolf Creek might explode before 1871 ended. Thankfully, the pace of immigration seems to have slowed by O Deadly Night. Only two new characters are introduced: farmer Hutch Higgins (written by Big Jim Williams) and Irish drifter Kelly O’Brian (Charlie Steel). O’Brian, formerly a track-layer for the railroad, may become a rancher in partnership with his long-lost brother and an easterner…if the three of them survive a white-slavery ring operating way too close to Wolf Creek for comfort. Steel’s “Irish Christmas at Wolf Creek” introduces the sort of never-say-die character Wolf Creek needs with the body count rising as it has been lately.

In Williams’ “Sarah’s Christmas Miracle,” Wolf Creek gets another man trying to live down a shameful past in anonymity. By the time Higgins gets his Christmas wish—a miracle cure for his dying daughter—readers will be privy to the farmer’s darkest secrets, but the citizens of Kansas have no idea the kind of trouble Higgins’ mere presence could attract.

While Cheryl Pierson’s contribution, “A Home for Christmas,” doesn’t exactly introduce new characters, the stars of the story have played only minor roles previously. When Kathleen Hyder decides to leave her abusive, minister husband, she little suspects a chance encounter with a childhood friend, Cherokee Lighthorse officer Carson Ridge, will lead to an affair of the heart. Readers who have followed the series from the beginning probably will delight in seeing judgmental, mean-spirited Rev. Dill Hyder get his comeuppance, and Kathleen and Carson fairly sizzle together.

Chuck Tyrell’s “The Angel Tree” is the most touching of the six stories. Soiled dove Brandy, who previously appeared only long enough to deal with series regular Billy Below’s embarrassing gunshot wound, befriends a group of starving urchins. Outcast because their mothers work as whores in the low-rent cribs, the kids are convinced an angel will deliver them from infamy on Christmas. Tyrell wrings sniffles and smiles from readers with this heartwarming tale.

“The Spirit of Hogmanay,” by Clay More, drops readers into the middle of Dr. Logan Munro’s busy holiday and a minor mystery involving some expensive scotch. As usual, More entertains and educates, providing fascinating—often surprising—medical details laced with Scottish wit and no little charm. Hogmanay, the Scottish New Year’s observance, is a melancholy period, but More spices Munro’s experience with hope for the future.

Smith’s “O Deadly Night,” which lends its title to the entire volume, is the darkest of the tales. As 1871 draws to a close, Marshal Sam Gardner is called upon to put a literal end to a local troublemaker. The deed must be done, and Gardner faces that knowledge with typical stoicism. Afterward, reaction from the townsfolk has him doubting himself and mankind in general. Usually a wiseacre to the core, the marshal reflects on the year in an uncharacteristically morose exchange over a drink with Munro.

O Deadly Night is an entertaining end-of-the-year read—but more than that, it displays the depth and breadth of life in Wolf Creek in a new way. Taken together, the two Wolf Creek Christmas anthologies hint that 1872 may be one heckuva year in Kansas.


“The Art of Dipping Candles”
By Judy Alter
Self-published, February 2011
$0.99 Kindle, ASIN B004M18Q1I
$0.00 other e-formats, ISBN 9781458181565
6 pages

A Comanche raid on a North Texas farm leaves lasting scars on a mother and her preteen daughter in Judy Alter’s ultra-short, powerful “The Art of Dipping Candles.” Told from the young girl’s point of view, the story resonates with fear, a mother’s all-consuming love for her children, and a daughter’s aching loss.

Alter has said she based the story on a real incident that took place in the 1880s, but the emotional punch is universal and timeless.

Read this one. It will haunt you.


Kathleen Rice Adams is a Texan, a voracious reader, a professional journalist, and an author. She received a review copy of Wolf Creek: O Deadly Night from the publisher. Her opinions are her own and are neither endorsed nor necessarily supported by Western Fictioneers or individual members of the organization. Links in the review are for convenience only; they do not produce affiliate revenue.

Short Story Sunday- "The Art of Dipping Candles"

Troy D. Smith

Today I'm going to tell you about another of my favorite western short stories- believe me, this is one everyone should download and read. It is one of the most powerful, affecting works of short fiction I've ever read, and it still resonates with me almost twenty years after I first read it in the late, lamented Louis L'Amour Western Magazine.

"The Art of Dipping Candles" is by Judy Alter, winner of -among many other things -WWA's Owen Wister Lifetime Achievement Award, and for 22 years the director of TCU Press. The story is based on the true story of a woman whose family was attacked by Comanches, and how she used the art of dipping candles to protect them.

Here is an excerpt:

My mother doesn't make candles any more. Her candles used to be the smoothest and straightest in North Texas. They burned bright with an even flame and never smoked. Ma ran candles in the late fall, when Pa had killed a steer and she had rendered the tallow. She'd make more candles than we needed for daily use for the whole year, just so we could have them all around the house at Christmas. Sometimes, in the summer if she could find beeswax, she made a second batch, but beeswax was hard to come by.

Ma knew just how much clay from the Red River bottoms to put in the kettle so the candles would have some color, and she knew how long to wait for the dirt to color the tallow and then settle to the bottom so that the candles wouldn't be gritty. In front of our cabin Pa had built a stone pit just sized to hold the kettle above a fire, and Ma spent hours there, dipping a wick over and over again, hanging the finished candles to dry, admiring her handiwork when she was done. Sometimes she poured the hot tallow into a mold and it would set in a hour or two on a cold December day, but there wasn't any art in that, she said. Ma liked to dip her candles by hand.

"Mama, can I dip a candle?"

"No, Elizabeth, you haven't the patience yet to make it smooth and straight. Someday . . . ."

I sat and watched and waited for the day I was grown enough to dip candles. To be able to dip a candle was the mark of a woman to me. It wrapped up in one skill all the things that a woman did, and I dreamt of the day I had a husband and children of my own to care for. When I was grown, I would dip candles.

Ma was dipping candles that December day when Pa had gone for supplies and Jeb came screaming across the prairie.

"Ma! Ma! Indians! Indians!" he shouted, running so hard and desperate that I thought sure his lungs would burst. His eyes seemed near bugged out of their sockets, and his voice, just beginning to deepen, was now higher than mine. Any other time, I might have laughed at him for squeaking. "Mr. Belton says they struck the Simpsons and they're headed this way." He collapsed on the ground, his breath having completely left him.

***

You can get the whole story for 99 cents at Amazon and Smashwords .