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Do you ever have that moment you'd swear you've met someone before but don't know where ... or why?
Author Self-Published
May 2016
On Sale: May 8, 2016
Featuring: Johnny McGee; Deborah Loftis; Mason McDonald
332 pages
ISBN: 1519423888
EAN: 9781519423887
Kindle: B01F9NMR4Y
Paperback / e-Book
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Fiction
For more than 100 years, a beech tree stood on the first
dune in from the Lake Michigan shore. The tree was known
by tourists and townspeople alike as the place to carve
your initials to memorialize your undying devotion. It
came to be known as The Beech Tree. In 1998, the tree was
destroyed in a freak storm of straight-line winds. The tree held the secrets of hundreds of people who
carved their initials into her smooth, grey bark. The
Beech Tree chronicles the (fictional) lives of a select
few of those who visited the tree and shared their lives,
their loves, their hopes and dreams, beneath the tree’s
dark green canopy … and their curious, inexplicable
connection to one another. When the book’s characters
encounter another who has visited the tree, they
experience a “déjà vu, don’t-I-know-you-from-somewhere?”
moment. Only the readers are privy to this interaction as
they experience the characters from a birds’-eye view. The readers are introduced to Johnny & Margo, the first
characters to visit the tree, just before Johnny ships
off to fight in The Great War in 1918. We follow Johnny’s
& Margo’s life together through the births of their
daughters, to Johnny’s devastating loss when Margo dies,
and his subsequent three-year bender. He finds comfort in
a sailor-tongued barkeeper named Marie, before being
rescued from the Kalamazoo Insane Asylum by his friend,
Charles “Bullet Joe” Rogan, a pitcher in the Negro
Leagues. Johnny and Bullet share a lifelong, albeit
socially taboo, friendship, through decades of racial
divide. Bullet is brutally beaten during the Freedom
Rides and Johnny comes to the aid of his battered friend. Johnny introduces his granddaughter, Debby, to the tree
in 1957, an era of bobby socks, roller-skating carhops
and Elvis music. Ten years later, she meets Mason – Mick
– during the Summer of Love, and their romance blossoms
until Mason gets a letter from the Draft Board:
“Greeting.” Despite their pledge to meet back at the tree
in two years when his tour is complete, neither of them
shows up. Mason is lodged in the Hanoi Hilton, a savage
Vietnamese POW camp. He endures unimaginable torture
before being rescued five years later. Meanwhile, Debby
is struggling as a single mom in New York, raising a
young man who was born nine months after she and Mason
met; a young man with unmistakable resemblance to Mason.
She names her son Mason but calls him Mickey. Mason once
dreamed of using his love of mathematics to be a computer
pioneer, but today, lives out his life as a brain-damaged
beach bum who prefers the end of the beach “where the
queers hang out.” The queers, as he endearingly refers to
gays, love him in return and call him “Captain,” even
though he was never more than grunt Army. The doctors
cannot determine if his brain damage is the result of his
exposure to Agent Orange, snake venom, heredity, or all
of the above. Thirty years after they spent a summer together, Debby
returns to the Michigan shoreline community to finish out
here last years of work before retirement. After the
derecho -- the freak storm – she happens into Hostetter’s
News Stand for a Sunday paper. She strikes up a brief
conversation with a fellow customer. A half an hour
passes before she realizes she’d seen his eyes before.
They are her son’s eyes. “Mason!!!” Debby screams, “Was
that you, Mason??” Debby summons her son, Mickey, to come
to West Michigan to find the love of her life – Mickey’s
father.
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