Bret Anthony Johnston’s new novel, We Burn Daylight, re-imagines Waco in 1993, crafting a world where San Saba sits at a safe distance from a fictionalized version of the Branch Davidian compound.
In the book, retired McLennan County sheriff Huey Moreland and his wife Meredith live on ranchland somewhere between the Colorado and San Saba Rivers. “They had land near San Saba and took in what others wouldn’t,” Johnston writes through the eyes of their grandson, Roy.
The Morelands’ daughterin- law, a hospice nurse, often inherits orphaned pets from her glory-bound patients. “If she couldn’t find homes for the animals, we carted them out to my grandparents,” Roy observes of his mother. Among the menagerie–including a macaw, an unseen wiener dog who haunts the story like a specter, and a charismatic tuxedo cat named Panda–are two beloved yet unnamed horses, a bay and a pinto. “The plan had been to eventually take them to my grandparents in San Saba,” Roy explains, but the horses remain pastured near Waco, where the bulk of the story’s action takes place, including the siege.
Roy’s father is the fictional acting sheriff during the events depicted in the book. “Grandpa Huey had worn the badge before that,” Roy tells the reader. The elder Sheriff Moreland occasionally drops in on his former jurisdiction, having “made the drive in from San Saba.”
“Granny needed her sewing machine tuned up, so I hauled it to the Singer shop,” Huey tells Roy on one such trip into Waco.
Though a minor character, Huey is a man recognizable to anyone with roots in central Texas: “Huey was taking mason glasses down from the cupboard. He wore a sheathed hunting knife on his belt. He talked about life in San Saba– the pecan harvest, the petty politics of a small town, a friend whose memory was failing, how he’d lifted a rock and found a tangle of scorpions.”
Roy describes sitting down with his father and grandfather to an overly peppered breakfast- for- dinner featuring fried bologna. “Huey said grace, then we dug in.” Even as Roy realizes where his father learned to cook, Huey pronounces: “Eggs aren’t part of supper often enough.”
Though the reader never sees the story from Huey’s point of view, the retired lawman’s perspective does become increasingly important as the eyes of the nation turn toward Waco.
“Huey had fought in Korea. War heroes won elections. Not that anyone would run against him. Voters in McLennan County equated the name Moreland with the sheriff’s office.” The Morelands, Johnston’s standins for the Montagues, represent law, order, and righteousness in a city that does not know what to do with the religious sect just outside of town.
Divided into four parts aptly named for the horses in Revelation, We Burn Daylight melds religious iconography with that enduring tale of starcrossed teenage love, Romeo and Juliet. These details flesh out the fictional rendering of a media-saturated story, three decades after the smoke cleared. Characters like Huey, as recognizable as a neighbor down the lane, imbue the historical record with familiar humanity.