Heading Out to Wonderful

Heading Out to Wonderland by Robert Goolrick sounded like a good story. It was, but...

...but what? Not sure. If I did not want to know how it ended. Story takes place in 1948. Stranger, Charlie,  shows up in small village.

Might say Charlie was homeless, paid  "a dollar a night" to park his truck by the river, slept in the back of his flatbed truck on an old quilt, bathing in the river in the dark. He has a locked suitcase full of money, soon buys the land by the river, acquires a job, soon purchases a house.

A man bought a wife from a dirt poor hillbilly with stipulation that she never leave him. "If she left him, she also left her own family homeless." "But every time she was about to say yes, she saw her mother's face, her father's face, homeless, displaced, dying on some alien porch somewhere, away from the farm where their mothers and fathers were buried and she couldn't do it."

Another coincidence. Not sure which novel it was where I read that wintergreen Life Savers make a spark when you bite into them. Same thing was mentioned in this novel.