the Silver and Blood

The silver is real. The question of who sent it is the story. In the spring of 1865 the Reverend James Kirk Mendenhall steps off a steamer onto the Fernandina wharf with a parole from Appomattox in his pocket, an old ball in his leg, and a rosewood box he has not opened in the sight of any living soul. He left this Florida port town three years ago as a newly commissioned Confederate chaplain. He comes back to a garrison under the Federal flag, a congregation cut by a third, and a pulpit that has been kept, every Sabbath of his absence, by a young Union soldier from New Jersey who wants to marry his niece. That is only the beginning of what the war has done to First Baptist Church of Fernandina. Five years earlier, the church had received a silver communion service from Charleston and voted, by three hands, to send it north to Richmond to be melted for the cause. The one man who cared for it enough to pack the crate was the one man the church would not let vote. Then the Federal fleet came up the Sound, the town fell without a shot, and a pastor's wife with four small children found herself keeping a parsonage in an occupied city, writing letters to a husband at the front by way of a Union chaplain and a flag of truce. What no one on the island could have supposed was that the blue coats in the gallery would include six men who had learned their catechism, as boys, from the very pastor whose church they now occupied. From the fever camps at Yorktown to the surgeon's fly at Williamsburg, from a Federal press in the back room of the customs house to the sunken road at Sharpsburg, The Silver and the Blood follows a divided congregation, a family scattered by war, a courtship carried across enemy lines one censored page at a time, and a chaplain who carries a silver pistol under his coat and has never stopped paying for the one time he used it. Inspired by an actual communion set still in use at First Baptist Church of Fernandina Beach, and by the legend that surrounds it, this is a novel of faith under occupation, of what a gift to God costs to give up and what it means to be given it back, and of a table that a war could divide but could not, in the end, keep from being one table. The Lord will sort it out. That was the family's saying. This is the story of how long the sorting took.