TWO wars, a century apart, wreak havoc in the personal lives of Will and Brenda. They each rebound differently: one being twice lucky, the other accepting second best the second time. In Burgess Falls, Rich Polk, author of The Boarder on Monroe Street and Mantis Prayers, applies his literary romance style for the first time to historical fiction. This Two-in-One novel depicts how things have changed—and often, how they have remained the same, much as the river that plunges over a cliff in central Tennessee.

Will is a slave of Governor James K. Polk, given the opportunity as a young teen to leave the fields of Polk’s Mississippi plantation to work as a house slave in Columbia, Tennessee. Will works hard to adapt, from wearing shoes and stockings to polishing silverware and serving tea in fine china. With Polk’s election to the U.S. Presidency, Will is returned to the plantation where he is reminded of the worst aspects of slavery. Four years later, he returns to serve the ex-president and his wife, who quickly becomes a widow. Will serves Sarah Polk through the Civil War and all the turmoil the War Between the States brings to Nashville. After emancipation, he works his way east as the railroad builds toward Lebanon, eventually settling near Burgess Falls. The aftermath of the war presents Will with an awkward but not all that unusual set of circumstances, to which he must apply his minimum education but a robust sense of humanity.

In alternating chapters is told the story of Brenda, a baby-boomer growing up in Cookeville a hundred years later. Glen, the young man she idolizes, is killed in the Vietnam War, and she falls into deep depression and self-pity. She must decide if Luke, the boy she has known all her life, the class clown who enjoyed teasing and tormenting her, is the right person to rescue her from a life of misery. She understands she cannot reveal to him her true feelings or what happened at Burgess Falls. Luke, it turns out, has some secrets of his own.