Books/ Slack Water
Book 3 of the Ebb Tide Series
Slack Water
The law that shaped his whole life is finally lifting, and Troy Hammersmith isn't certain who he is without it.
A Lieutenant Colonel on Florida's Gulf Coast has spent twenty years building a life inside Don't Ask, Don't Tell: a son, a partner at the same base, a fluency in concealment. Then the repeal arrives. The third and final Ebb Tide novel is about what men do with a freedom they spent two decades learning to live without.
A Southern literary novel of the Gulf Coast, by Cade Morrow.
Available in print and eBook.
About the book
The law is finally changing. Troy Hammersmith has spent twenty years building a life inside rules that named nothing. Now the rules are shifting, slowly, procedurally, publicly, and he is not certain what the man he has become will do with the space they leave behind.
Sam is ten. Casey is still at Eglin. The Gulf is still patient.
Slack Water is the third and final book of the Ebb Tide series. It opens in the summer of 2009 and closes in September 2011, in the weeks after Don't Ask, Don't Tell is repealed. It is a novel about what it costs to have been right all along, and whether the men who carried the longest silences know how to set them down.
Read the opening
Chapter 1
The Coffee Was Already Made
There is a half hour before the light when the gulf goes still. The tide has run out as far as it means to and has not yet turned, and the water lies along the flats without pulling in either direction, and the watermen, who keep a word for every condition that bears on the work and none for any that does not, call it slack water. I had stood on my father's porch at that hour for fifteen years. I had watched the slack arrive more mornings than I had counted, the sea holding between the ebb and the flood with the patience of a thing that has nowhere it needs to be, and I had not understood, until that summer, that I had been living in it.
It was July. At five-thirty the dark was already going gray at its edges, the pre-dawn color that is not night and not morning, and the heat was standing offshore the way it stood in July, waiting, so that the air on the porch was still bearable and would not be by nine. The smell came up off the flats the way it always came up. Salt, and the honest rot of the low water, and under both of them the faint sweetness of a gulf morning before the sun has decided what it is going to do to the day. I had smelled it ten thousand times. I had spent nine months not smelling it, which is the only way I know to explain why I noticed it at all that morning, standing in the door with the coffee, letting it arrive.
He was gone before the light. I had half-woken when he left, the way I always half-woke, to the small economical sounds of a man dressing in the dark without a lamp, the bootfalls kept soft from fifteen years of not wanting to take the rest of my sleep with him, the screen door eased shut on its spring so it would not clap. Then the jeep turning over once and catching, the tires on the shell drive, and after it the quiet a house keeps in the hour between the one man leaving and the boy waking, which I had learned to value the way you learn to value the slack between two tides.
The Ebb Tide Series
Slack Water closes the arc that began with Still Waters and deepened in Landfall. Where the first two novels lived inside the era's silence, the third watches that silence lose its legal force, and asks the harder question of whether the habits of a concealed life dissolve with the rule that required them, or stay. The title names the still half hour when the tide has run out and not yet turned: the held moment the whole book lives inside.
Three novels. Twenty years. One question the era wouldn't let them answer out loud. The Ebb Tide series follows Troy Hammersmith, career Air Force intelligence officer, careful man, practitioner of the long silence, across the years that Don't Ask, Don't Tell shaped and nearly broke, on Florida's Gulf Coast Panhandle. New to the series? Start with Still Waters.
- 1. Still Waters
- 2. Landfall
- 3. Slack Water
See the whole series on the Books page
Book details
- Author Cade Morrow
- Series Ebb Tide, Book 3 (final)
- Genre Southern literary fiction, LGBTQ+ fiction
- Setting Florida Panhandle, Gulf Coast, 2009 to 2011
- Length About 56,000 words, 11 chapters
If you like
Place-rooted American literary fiction in the unadorned, interior tradition of Kent Haruf and Marilynne Robinson, here turned toward a love and an institution the era kept unspoken. Adult literary fiction with a gay protagonist, not genre romance. It completes the story begun in Still Waters and Landfall.
About the author
Cade Morrow writes Southern literary fiction about men navigating love, identity, and the long shadow of lives kept quiet. His work is set along the Gulf Coast and the Deep South, in south Mississippi, rural Alabama, and Mobile Bay, and his Ebb Tide trilogy follows two military officers across twenty years of a relationship the country would not allow them to name. Read more about Cade.
Finish the Ebb Tide series.
Find it on Amazon