Holy Vengeance

By Tony Masero

1921 and black gold has been discovered and the oil boom is on. Derricks grow where once forests stood.
Reverend Joel Denver has seen the light. His wicked past is left behind him or so he thinks. Then he learns his estranged father is calling to him and he determines to visit. Returning to the small town he left behind, along with his many sinful misdeeds, he finds that things have changed radically. Oil has been found and the vast fields are under the control of one wealthy and despotic man who wants to take the family farmland. Joel resolves not to give it up without a fight but it calls for him to revive the person he once was in his wayward and violent past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tony Masero
• Release date: Oct 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215985472

Tony Masero

It’s not such a big step from pictures to writing.And that’s how it started out for me. I’ve illustrated more Western book covers than I care to mention and been doing it for a long time. No hardship, I hasten to add, I love the genre and have since a kid, although originally I made my name painting the cover art for other people, now at least, I manage to create covers for my own books.A long-term closet writer, only comparatively recently, with a family grown and the availability of self-publishing have I managed to be able to write and get my stories out there.As I did when illustrating, research counts a lot and has inspired many of my Westerns and Thrillers to have a basis in historical fact or at least weave their tale around the seeds of factual content.Having such a visual background, mostly it’s a matter of describing the pictures I see in my head and translating them to the written page. I guess that’s why one of my early four-star reviewers described the book like a ‘Western movie, fast paced and full of action.’I enjoy writing them; I hope folks enjoy reading the results.

Book preview

HOLY VENGEANCE

Tony Masero

1921 and black gold has been discovered and the oil boom is on. Derricks grow where once forests stood.

Reverend Joel Denver has seen the light. His wicked past is left behind him or so he thinks. Then he learns his estranged father is calling to him and he determines to visit. Returning to the small town he left behind, along with his many sinful misdeeds, he finds that things have changed radically. Oil has been found and the vast fields are under the control of one wealthy and despotic man who wants to take the family farmland. Joel resolves not to give it up without a fight but it calls for him to revive the person he once was in his wayward and violent past.

Cover Illustration: Tony Masero

Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations,

or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or

mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the

written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

Copyright © Tony Masero 2023

Smashwords Edition

Chapter 1

On that day it was a day like any other and come morning the old man strode slowly over towards the barn. He carried under one arm the Winchester shotgun he had brought back from his time with Pershing and the 1st Ohio Cavalry when he had elected to go south of the border to track down Villistas with the help of some Apache scouts he knew. But that had been five years back in 1916 when, even though an elderly man for soldiering, he had felt it his duty ever since hearing that they had burned Columbus and killed Americans. Those had been different days though when he had been fit and active before the more recent troubles had worn him down and crushed his spirit.

He was in no hurry on this fine day and he looked around as he walked and drew breath of the clean air. It was early and the day was fresh. There was dew on the grass and the geese were honking in the yard as they fought with the chickens he had just fed. He loved this place and had so much invested in it. Sixty-four years, all the years since his birth, man and boy except for duty time before his country’s flag.

He was a stocky, well-built fellow given his years. Dressed in faded dungarees that were like him and well past their prime, work stained and torn and one might almost say that despite their ruin he still found them comfortable. In likewise manner his white hair had grown long and untrimmed over the collar of his woolen work shirt. An unshaven grizzle rode his chin, none of it a normal state for such a man who was normally stiffly upright in a military fashion but he had gotten like that now and it was a demonstration of how little he cared about himself or his surroundings. Bowed over by a lifetime of hard farm work, his back was bent with broad shoulders sloping and his hands, that were thickened and hardened with the labor, felt the stiffening advance of years. There was a touch of arthritis there now and he flexed his fingers to ease the stiffness as he passed the empty corral with its fallen bars and leaning posts, now host only to a scattering of ground ivy and clover.

The barn had suffered a fire in the not distant past. Its boarded walls were charred and blackened and sad to say, generally speaking, that the barn was in pretty poor shape. Even before the fire, cracked boards had hung askew and there had been holes where the weathered roof had needed fixing. Spiders thronged the shadows and their webs caught the early morning sunlight in a spectacle of wavering feathers. Amongst the detritus on the bare earth of the barn floor, galvanized milking buckets lay empty on their sides and dry hanks of stiffened and twisted rope drooped from nails in the empty stalls. Relegated to one side of the barn stood a battered and rusting Fordson tractor and a dirt-covered Kovar Harrow that looked worn and forgotten, as they stood silently gathering nothing but dust. Used vegetables crates were stacked under a spread tarp and he searched through them and selected the soundest to sit himself upon.

Taking a deep breath he looked around at the inside of the barn and thought of the animals it had entertained throughout his lifetime. Of his wife and child, both now long gone. His stern wife resting under the stone set aside for her, an obstinate woman to the last and wishing to be placed beneath the old oak tree across the yard and then his only child, his son, wandered off to he knew not where. The place was as old and broken as he was now, loveless, withered and crippled by worry and time.

He looked at the loops of rope and then at the beams above but none of them were sturdy enough any more. It was better to rely on the shotgun for a sure thing and thinking this he placed the stock between his feet on the floor and rested the barrel under his chin.

Chapter 2

The reverend Joel Denver took his place at a kneeler in the empty church. He clasped his hands in prayer and gazed into a middle distance trying to contact the place in his soul where he believed God lived. The musty taint of the place intruded with a dull atmospheric pressure, it was a simple chapel bare of decoration with plain glass windows and no symptom of religion other than the large wooden cross hanging above the altar table. Empty of congregation, it retained that dusty stale smell now that was so different on the days of worship when there was a crowded multitude in the place. Then there was the taint of sweat from overheated men uncomfortably squeezed into their best suits and their hair slicked down with the clove aroma of Bay Rum. A gentle, more lavender scent came from the ladies dresses that were lodged with herbal pomades in a dresser all week. Noisy too with babies wailing and mothers complaining crossly as youngsters ran riot, their boots rattling on the board floor.

He was a gaunt man this preacher, tall with deep-set eyes, hollow cheeks and long hair and a dense beard. There was gray in his beard even though he was not that old, he thought it was more a bequest of his past. A righteous mark well deserved and a constant reminder of what he had been.

He was relieved he had found religion and had been given this path to follow. The congregation here in Bolito was mostly rural folk, quiet, steady and conservative in their ways. It suited Joel and was no challenge to the outer beliefs he displayed as pastor, even though secretly he was constantly troubled in his heart. Troubled by the wretched sinner he had been and the terrors of the past that still followed him relentlessly it seemed. No matter how arduous he was in his prayer or how many contrite acts of charity he carried out it was always there, that echo of guilt like the tolling of some funereal bell. Even when he stood at the lectern and presented the parishioners with his version of the Bible’s way, somehow it never quite rang true. It was the same as the chiming of that guilt-ridden bell that resounded constantly in his head.

The afternoon light was streaming through the church windows, striking beams of light against the motes of dust that quivered in the unmoving air like tiny flecks of gold. There was a peace here, more properly a kind of aloneness for Joel, the kind that he usually experienced daily in his solitary life and then, for a moment quite inexplicably a sudden stillness fell over him, a great silence that seemed to fill him. It had a tangible density to it as if the Universe had sucked into itself a momentous breath and held it for a while in its mighty lungs. He thought for a moment that he was about to have either a heart attack or perhaps a vision but he was not sure which. A pulsing beat rolled through his body, a strange surge that pumped his heart and seemed to swell his chest and expand his eyes. They were sore, his eyes, as if rasped by grit or sand that brought tears and he could not see clearly beyond the blossoming sunlight that filled the chapel.

‘It is His forgiveness,’ the distant thought occurred. ‘Oh, Lord, am I forgiven all those past transgressions? He has come to me and my years of penance will at last be coming to an end. At last - at last a true visitation, praise be to God.’

But even now as he said them the words sounded hollow on his lips, they had the ring of preacher to him and of the kind of superficial platitudes he often needed to present to his congregation as a so-called man of God. There was no God here, this was no more than a play of window light cast by the sun and yet it had meant something. It struck another darker chord.

Joel experienced a sudden sense of the presence of death.

He had known that sensation many times before in the past but he had hoped that particular memory had been laid to rest. Yet here it was again, the sinking sensation and the welcoming dark cavity of the grave. The blackness seemed to swallow the bright streaks of sunlight that cascaded through the chapel. A tomb-like odor filled his nostrils, its stink wretched with the brown stained gloss of earth-damp bones.

Then a thought broke uninvited into his mind.

There was the memory of being shunned and cast out. Of a barked shout that slammed the door and sent him barefoot down a stony road. Of a bitterness so binding that it had turned his head and given him a survivor’s alternative to any sense of grace. For the rest of his early life he had worn that stamp in the form of a careless indifference that had frozen his heart and given him power over the death of others.

All this tumbled through his confused brain and yet he could not get the thought from his head.

Strangely it was a man he had not seen in many years that came to mind. A lost figure, undefined and indistinct, molded from the shadows that filled the corners of the room.

It was his father that he thought of.

Chapter 3

Mrs. Lewellyn was there.

Joel still in some form of shock over his recent experience climbed unsteadily to his feet as her heavy steps came thumping towards him down the aisle, their tattoo as base as a pistol shot and at once oblivious to the quiet and to all the soft energies that flowed through the place.

‘Morning, Reverend Denver, sorry to disturb.’

It was not so, she was not at all sorry and within her doubtful attitude was the dominant belief that it was she alone that owned this place and God Himself was relegated to a corner.

This abdominal display of arrogant femininity was a small unattractive woman both sturdy and fidgety whose normal mission was to energetically clean the place and who, it seemed, was also determined to attend to him as well as the chapel. She was a religious devotee that was always dressed in hat, long skirts and a work apron and wearing an indeterminate expression approximating stern disapproval.

At night she brought him a meal, he could not refuse her and yet it was against all his attempts at fasting as a form of self-flagellation. With such an act of denial he had believed he could pay for his past sins and the anger that still lay deeply buried and burning in his breast. Despite all his crippling attempts at mortification it was her small and perhaps misguided shows of kindness that kept him on the verge of humanity.

‘Is anything wrong, Reverend?’ she asked, noticing his vagueness.

‘Uh, no - no, Mrs. Lewellyn. I’m just….’ He ended vaguely, his mind still locked in the idea of his father.

‘Well,’ she said, eyeing him slightly suspiciously. She held that kind of intrusive personality that would not be satisfied until her prying had some rational explanation. ‘I must sweep out. Your supper will be ready at seven.’

‘Too good of you, Mrs. Lewellyn. There is no need you know.’

She waggled her switch broom and brushed it indolently across the floor, ‘No problem, Reverend. As my husband used to say – it is God’s will that we serve.’

Her husband had passed from their childless marriage seven years before and she still carried his emblem as a ward against all that was wrong with the world.

Joel lowered his tone a few respectful notches, ‘So true,’ he allowed her.

He left her then with his mind still replaying the strange occurrence experienced before the altar table. He had not seen his father for long years not since the old man’s soldierly return from Mexico and by then Joel was old enough to repay the cold upbringing of his home by quitting the place.

From that time of leaving that was when he had gone to the bad.

With a heart so full of the taciturn coldness he had learnt at his family’s knee he had stretched out his youthful freedom not caring if he lived or died. It was easy to begin running wild with the local bad hats and soon his attitude earned him a name, a name that was called to the test on more than one occasion. He had first killed then.

Fed by liquor and the empty center of his existence, Joel Denver had shot down three men in the space of a twelve-month and walked away from the deaths without a care. They had all been strangers, one a man caught at a gambling table and unable to meet his losses, that was in Soakes Shebeen where Joel worked part time, officially to keep the drunks in order. The next had been from a word overheard on the sidewalk and one that Joel perceived as insult and the third had been a troubled lover of some hussy he had been dallying with at that particular moment in his life.

After that they had come to him then, all the rootless ones who wanted a leader, collecting to his earned name