Books

A fable is a small boat. It looks too little to carry anything, and then it carries everything — a fox, a crow, a piece of cheese, and a truth that has stayed afloat for twenty-five centuries.

Thirty-one new fables in the old style, told in Aesop’s honor — and drawn so a child can hold the animal while you read. The timber grows in Juno Beach: ospreys that dive feet-first for fish, loggerheads on one of the world’s busiest nesting beaches, ghost crabs, spoonbills, and sharks’ teeth black as deep time. Every creature is real on this coast right now. Built to be read aloud. About five minutes each. One fable, one night, is plenty.

In 2007, John M. Henry left Fort Myers Beach on a blue BMW K1200LT named Grace and rode eleven thousand and eighteen documented miles across America — including a Saddle Sore 1000: a thousand miles in twenty-four hours — because his mother asked him to write something every night so she would know he wasn’t dead in a ditch.

Nineteen years later those nights became this book. Route 66, the Grand Canyon, Big Sur in a forty-mile-an-hour wind, the Million Dollar Highway, New Orleans two years after Katrina, and the long way home. Every mile. All the gear. The receipts still exist.

Jesus told stories and then walked away. He left the endings open — not because He was careless, but because He wanted the stories to keep working long after He moved on to the next town.

This book asks the question a Monday-night Bible study in Juno Beach could not put down: and then what happened? The morning after the prodigal’s party. The innkeeper’s ledger. The one-talent man’s defense. Thirty continuations — speculative, theologically careful, written to reopen the parables rather than close them.

The treasure fleet is drowned. The gold is the least of it. Someone wrote everything down.

On the night of July 30–31, 1715, a Spanish treasure fleet of eleven ships was driven onto the east coast of Florida by a hurricane. Somewhere above a thousand people drowned. The richest convoy on the ocean was strewn along forty miles of beach in a single night.

This is the novel of that coast — of a pilot who can read water the way other men read scripture, of a counting book cut in half so neither half betrays alone, of the false channel, and of the light that would one day stand above the teeth. Book One of the Salt Kingdom.