Obsessed By A Promise

My first ten pages are attached in PDF format.

Treatment: Obsessed By A Promise

Outline:

Outside a cathedral door in depression era (1929) New York City on Easter Sunday, an eleven-year-old, homeless boy, J.T. Saunders called BLUE, peers through the keyhole in the church door to determine the near end of the pastor’s message. He runs back to the alley to get his gang of homeless children and sends them to the steps to beg as the doors open. Fearing the appearance of police, he warns his four-year-old brother Bo to stay back. Bo insists on coming along and an argument ensues over their dead father’s belt. Repeating their dead father’s words, “You’re not a man until you can keep your pants up,” Blue reluctantly agrees and puts him on the steps next to Stel, a gang member. As church bells peel, a police paddy wagon careens around the corner and captures the gang. Blue barely escapes and vows he’ll find his brother.

Blue’s gang is taken to an orphanage and put on the last Orphan Train to leave New York City. As Blue begins searching for Bo, their father dies in prison.

From here on, the Orphan Train experience parallels and interweaves through J.T.’s fifty-year search.

Throughout the growing up years, Blue spends every waking moment searching for Bo. The search preoccupies his thoughts, directs his actions, his business and destroys his marriage. By 1979, he is the owner of a successful land development company and has the resources to hire help to find his brother. No one understands that more than his only son, Jake.

Jake, now early thirties, has worked for his father for the last two years. When his father sends him to Blainesville, Mo., to oversee a land acquisition, he reluctantly agrees.

In Missouri, Jake arrives determined to get in and out as quickly as possible. He plans to rely on his charm and smooth-talking style to sway the unsophisticated farmers. Jake quickly learns he’ll need a different approach when a local (Trey Waters) approaches him in a store, tells him he has what Jake is looking for and points to a box of suckers.

When Joy, a young woman who becomes more than an attraction at a bar, invites Jake to a family picnic, he discovers that Joy is related to the very people who are key players in the land deal, Trey Waters and his sixty-nine-year-old mother, Matilda.

Jake’s initial discomfort dissolves with their open acceptance of him. He’s baffled that they make him feel included even when they know who he is and why he’s intown.

Jake’s ongoing contacts with the people in Blainesville give him a sense of home and family he’s never had. He becomes convinced that the current land deal is bad business for the town and creates a compromise defying his father’s instructions.

Meanwhile, after consulting with his private investigator, J.T. travels by train to a number of towns, tracking new leads. He finds hope in the third town where he learns the location of a woman who turns out to be Stel, the little girl who was in his 1929 gang. His hopes are dashed when Essie (Stel) refuses to speak to him. She’d harbored over fifty years of hard feelings that he, J.T. (Blue) had abandoned her and Bo so many years ago.

J.T. returns to Blainesville in time to disrupt the major business deal Jake is finalizing. An argument erupts, key people walk out. Furious with his father, Jake jumps into his sportscar and takes off.

J.T. returns to his hotel room to a message that Essie (Stel) has changed her mind and will talk to him. As the train pulls out of town taking J.T. back to see Stel, it passes an accident scene. Unbeknown to J.T., the driver in the badly wrecked sports car is his son, Jake.

Stel reveals whereabouts of one of the nuns from the Orphan Train. J.T. travels to meet with the nun. The nun has Bo’s belt buckle and shows J.T. the grave where Bo is buried.

Shocked with the knowledge of Bo’s death J.T realizes he’s wasted his whole life searching for nothing. He returns to Blainesville vowing to make things right with his son, but finds Jake is at death’s door.

J.T. can’t deal with the loss of his brother and the potential loss of his son, too. He’s baffled by the outpouring of support for Jake by the people of Blainesville. He resists their overtures until he gets the opportunity to take Jake’s place in the rebuilding of a local farmer’s house, one that had been destroyed in a fire. The comradery and affection between Jake and Trey inspire J.T. to make feeble overtures to connect with the men in a personal way. His awkwardness elicits mentoring by both men, showing J.T. how to be a father and a friend.

J.T. takes a second look at Jake’s business compromise, sees the value in it, prepares the papers and heads to Matilda’s for her signature. While there he sees a cross stitch on the wall that asks, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” J.T. is tortured by the question and his failure. Matilda misreads his grief as concern for his son and assures him that she will be there for both of them. J.T. talks about his lost brother and his new found opportunity.

Jake regains consciousness to the news from his father that he, J.T., is negotiating the land deal that Jake spearheaded. Jake recovers quickly.

Jake’s release from the hospital ends at a “thank you” picnic for the rebuild of the Pratt house on which both Jake and J.T. worked. Jake and Joy no longer hide their affection from each other. There soulful glances are the subject of much teasing.

J.T. learns that his long-lost brother is in fact alive when he overhears Trey’s comment to young Billy, “You’re not a man until you can keep your pants up!” Shocked and stunned, J.T. reaches into his pocket and hands the belt buckle to Trey. Trey examines it and slowly begins to remember his past and his older brother.

Matilda comes forward to share how, as a young widow, she’d come across the give away of Orphan Train children and couldn’t resist saving this little blue-eyed boy from a disastrous family.

As the family rejoices, Trey (Bo) asks J.T., “Why did they call you blue?”

“My eyes,” J.T. says, “because of my eyes.