Tyrone Dust

Tyrone Dust is a story about a romance that is set in and around a tragic event in the small hamlet of Tyrone, Texas County, Missouri. The story begins on a fateful Independence Day of 1931. This event, the death of Earl's father and a second wife leaves Earl in charge of the family, three much younger siblings, a grandmother and an aunt and uncle (in a lesser sense, who are really tenants of the estate of Earl's grandfather and father). Earl has been in hard pursuit of the "love of his life", Eva. Earl has been groomed into the operation of the family business of farming/ranching, furniture movers and sales, and livestock trading. Eva's parents discover Earl's misspent youth and become hard and fast against the relationship their daughter. The nightmares of the gruesome death of his father, the daytime visions of that day, his feelings of inadequacy in his new found role as family leader, lead to a dependency on moonshine to assuage these feelings poison his everyday performance and his pursuit of the woman he loves. The story revolves around an ancient trail, track, called the West Plains to Rolla Road, that has been a conduit for commerce and cattle drives, from north central Arkansas, from the mid 1800s into the 1930s when more modern roads supplanted it.

-- John Fine