What do we live for? Some kind of association or meeting with people who love our books, that’s what. Drink to an alcoholic, blood to a vampire, the drug of choice to a junkie – it’s what we live for, but unless one is at the very top of the fiction-scribbling food chain, one doesn’t get to sample it very often. Or often enough to get blasé about them, which is why Blondie and I spent two hours on the road, heading down to Beeville for a book-club meeting. This was at the house of another writer from the Independent Author’s Guild, Al Past, who wrote a trilogy of his own – Distant Cousin, which is also set in Texas but isn’t historical, it’s more of a science fiction-suspense-roman-a-clef sort of thing. Besides that, he is a musician and a wonderful photographer; he did the cover pictures for the Adelsverein Trilogy, all three of which were snapped not fifty feet from where the book club meeting was taking place in their living room.

Oh, we so envy his house: he and his wife, Kay, built it themselves way out in the country over the last two or three decades, in the middle of pastures that used to be – and still is ranchland. The main room is one big tile-floored area – dining room, living room and concert-hall, with a pellet stove in the middle (near the piano and the harpsichord) and a kitchen at one end, screened off by a block of cabinets and a buffet. The living room end features a deep window-seat and a many-paned glass window looking out over a terrace and a green meadow beyond. Miraculously, this room pulls off the hat-trick of being roomy without making people feel they are rattling around like peas in a gourd, and full of stuff without feeling cluttered. Al has the usual book-lined study through an arched doorway on one side, and the bedroom wing is through another arched doorway on the other. And marvelously, there is a three-story tall Italianate tower attached to the end with the broad window-seat; three teeny rooms stacked one on top of each other, and a teensy balcony through a French door on the top floor. Al says, aside from maybe a church-steeple and a couple of cell-phone towers, it’s the tallest structure in Beeville.

Most marvelously, most of the book club members are friends of Kays’ – a strong element of teachers and librarians, who know and love books and read a lot of them, and have friends who also know and love books. Everyone had read “The Gathering” – and one gentleman had bought all three. He was especially keen, as his family had come over with the Adelsverein Germans, although they had not carried on to New Braunfels and into Gillespie County. His ancestors had been among those who got a little way up from Indianola before washing their hands of the Adelsverein as a bad deal, and setting up on their own. He had brought a book about the Adelsverein Germans to show me – and I wish that I had the time to have set down to read it, because it was one of the few that I had missed in my scouring of the San Antonio City Library system of every scrap to do with the subject.

One of the nicest comments, and which I cherish because of the source, came from one of the book club members who had loaned her copy of “The Gathering” to a friend who was a dedicated re-enactor and a fanatic about local history. She reported that her friend began skimming through the first couple of chapters, becoming more interested the farther he went, murmuring, “Oh… that’s right… absolutely correct … yes, that’s right… and so is that…” Finally, he looked up and asked, “Well, who is this Celia Hayes woman, and why haven’t I heard of her before?”

All I can say is that I am hiding out in plain sight – and I very much prefer getting details right; there are readers who will notice and it makes the story very much more convincing. Besides, when I am working in real historical figures as side-characters and historical factoids, I usually wind up with something that is even more interesting and dramatic than anything I could possibly create. Historical reality has a way of trumping imagination.