Book excerpt: In 1865, Confederate soldier Clyde Blake leaves the Civil War behind and heads west to settle a town he names Willow Creek. Among the belongings he carries with him is a doll – a doll that comes to be known as The Silent Witness. Just under one hundred years later – on a warm summer night in 1963 – six-year-old William Blake first hears the story of his great, great grandfather’s Civil War service and how Willow Creek came to be Willow Creek, but hears nothing about The Silent Witness. And in 1990, William finally comes to know The Silent Witness and all not revealed back in 1963; that’s where our journey both begins and ends. What lies in between 1963 and 1990 is the saga of a family called Blake. Hippies and pot, feminism and family values, homosexuality and HIV, God’s will and personal responsibility – all collide as, one by one, and sometimes two by two, members of the Blake family struggle with the search for peace inside the turmoil that is life, until ultimately, William, the last of the family’s tortured souls, finds his peace in what his mother tells him would come to him in whispered words of wisdom.