THE TURNING OF BELVA GOODE

About the Book

It is the mid-1900s in Cyclone, a small coal mining community in mountainous West Virginia. Belva is proud of her large family and remains in love with Bill, her husband of thirteen years. They are dirt poor, but that is a common condition for many couples in those backwoods who are bound in a cycle of poverty and youthful marriage. Bill loses work during the winter and their financial situation becomes even more desperate. When Belva unexpectedly is offered a job as waitress in the local hotel’s dining room, she commits to it before she tells her fiercely proud coal miner husband.  Bill, like many of his peers, considers any wife working outside the home an insult to a real man’s ability to take care of his family. A conflict of pride and poverty – and the fact that Bill’s pretty wife is now serving tables occupied mostly by hungry men - begins to take its toll. And now Tommy James, a former suitor and wildly successful real estate developer from Kingsport, is making unusual and frequent returns to town – and the hotel dining room. Whether beautiful, but vulnerable, Belva is being driven or led, the result is a tragedy in which the burden falls heavily upon the couple’s twelve year old daughter, Agnes, who must assume added responsibilities at home as she watches the deterioration in the relationship between her parents - both of whom she loves deeply. It is how Agnes finally comes to terms with the senseless and destructive events that follow, and finds the love she thought she had lost from her mother, that redeems the turning of Belva Goode.

The book includes Bonus Short Stories set in the same time period and location. Some are humorous; some are touching. All are memorable.

About the Author

Gene Hensley was born at Windom, Wyoming County, West Virginia, in 1935.  His childhood in that remote area among its loggers and miners, its churches and poolrooms, brought him contact with many of the characters who populate his stories. They reflect the simple life in the mountains of Appalachia at the middle of the 20th Century in both colorful and tragic situations.

Although he worked hard to escape the poverty and challenges of his youth - earning two college degrees, a professional certification and eventually retiring as president of a large community bank in southern Indiana - Gene always felt compelled to tell the stories of those hardy individuals who left such an imprint on his memory.  And if not now, when?