An excerpt from the memoir A Tree in a Storm (unpublished)
“You don’t know your own cousin?”
There’s a particular gift that some people possess, a way of asking a question that feels less like curiosity and more like cross-examination. The kind where guilt is already assumed, and all that’s left is your confession before sentencing. It was 1993 and I was casually shopping in store in St. Louis when it happened. I was living back at home and had just started my first year of graduate school. I didn’t know who she was. I didn’t recognize her. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it. But she recognized me.
Her name was Dorothy, my second cousin. She was the daughter of “Wash”, legally Washington Neal, my grandfather’s younger brother.…
No planes left to fly, for two weeks we of the 21st Pursuit Squadron stumble across Agoloma Bay on shaky legs, our bodies weak from dysentery and a diet of rice mashed with the occasional monkey or lizard. We’ve cleaned out the west coast of the Bataan Peninsula; nights, the Japanese have been trying to clean us out across Bataan’s neck, sending invasion barges along the China Sea and Manila Bay coasts. They’re closer to cracking our front lines every hour. Agoloma Point, Captain Dyess announces one night, back on base at Marivales. Grubby-kneed, he sways, slaps a mosquito from an arm already dotted pink with bites, then the map. There’s about fifty holed up there, plenty of snipers to boot. We gotta strike from behind enemy lines if we’ll have any chance in hell.…
He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep. Suddenly waking – choking on some saliva that slid down his windpipe. He rolls clumsily off the sofa and lands hard on the threadbare shag carpeting on all fours.
Struggling to breathe through his nose while at the same time barking hoarsely in an effort to expel the slime trail of drool invading his trachea.
Once he stops coughing. Catching his breath. Aware of the strange click coming from the phonograph console, a relic from the 1970s that had belonged to Jennifer. It was one of the few possessions she had brought into their lives when they moved in together in the late 80s.
He remembers now that he’d been listening to The Very Best of Loretta Lynn.…
The truth was not that we were the only ones. It was that we were the last ones: the only ones left.
The whales knew.
In their infinite wisdom, and with characteristic empathy, the whales recognized not only that the doom was upon us humans, but that they had the ability not to stop it but to mitigate its effects. In a world of growing despair and certainty of the end of all, the whales realized that they of all creatures had the ability to be harbingers of joy to those whose world-weary civilization was about to collapse upon itself.
Enthralled, shouting with delight, the passengers on the Queen of Capilano ferry in Howe Sound watched in wonder as two humpbacks breached in tandem; just the week before, other commuters had witnessed a pod of orcas frolicking in the blue-green waves. …
The wars never end, nor does the bloodshed, and it makes men rich. The world has gone crazy.
The children continue to starve, their cries fill the air, Elsewhere food is wasted. The world has gone crazy.
The water, air, and food are poisoned. The oceans and its life are dying. Mankind can’t see the forest for the trees, that are falling to the axe of its own greed. The world has gone crazy.…
