The Wrong Direction - A Prequel Story

History remembers the victory. This is the price that made it possible.

A prequel story to the Pearson Trilogy. Free.

Every year, near the end of a term, a student works up the nerve to ask the question the course never answers: how did you come to Durham? The short answer is that a letter came and he followed it. The short answer is a door politely closed in your face.

So he sets you down in Washington, in July of 1932, on Seventh Street, in heat that had killed the month and was working on the year. There is a man on the far corner in an army coat. In July. The coat had been good wool fourteen years before.

He crosses the street to avoid him. That crossing is the whole story.

Eight chapters, told by Anthony Brakes: The Man I Crossed the Street to Avoid. The Paid-For Man. The Army of the Owed. Camp Marks. The Twenty-Eighth of July. The Hallway. The Police Court. The Ticket South.

The Bonus Army of 1932, its encampments, and its eviction from Washington on the twenty-eighth of July are drawn from the documented record. Twenty thousand veterans of the last war, camped in the capital asking for pay they had been promised, and the army that was sent to move them.

It ends with a ticket south, and a man arriving in Durham in 1933 with something he cannot put down. Before the trial. Before the trench. Before the reckoning.

Roughly twelve thousand words. The trilogy continues in The Hocutt Catalyst, The Trench and the Conscience, and The Reckoning.

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