The Beech Tree

By Don Phelan

The Beech Tree introduces you to the lives 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.

The readers are introduced to Johnny and Margo, the first characters to visit the tree, just before Johnny ships off to fight in The Great War in 1918. We follow Johnny and Margo, Johnny's lifelong, albeit socially taboo, friendship with his friend, “Bullet Joe” Rogan, a pitcher in the Negro Leagues.

Johnny introduces his granddaughter, Debby, to the tree in 1957, an era of bobby socks, roller-skating carhops and Elvis music, and Debby meets Mason in 1967's Summer of Love, just before Mason is drafted to fight in Vietnam.

For 30 years, Debby wonders whatever became of the boy who changed her life.

Then she finds out.

Review:

"Absolutely Fantastic" by Rebecca Askew on June 11, 2016
"Definitely five stars. I'd give ten if that were an option. The characters were so real, I could see myself in each of them. The trains, the places, the philosophy, and the tree, were so poignant. I cried, laughed, and cried again. A truly excellent book. This is the kind of book that makes you better for having read it."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Don Phelan
• Release date: May 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310124075

Don Phelan

In 2016, Phelan published his first fiction novel, The Beech Tree, voted No. 1 on Goodreads' '2016's Best Summer Reads.' Phelan has also published non-fiction, short stories, and poetry.

Book preview

Preface

On the first dune from Lake Michigan's white-sand shore, the beech tree held secrets of tourists and townies alike – their hopes, their fears and the curious connection between those who carved their initials into her smooth, grey bark.

CHAPTER 1

Straight-Line Winds of 1998

Frozen in fear, Ruth remembered Peoria.

In the pre-dawn darkness, 130-mile-an-hour winds bore down as a phantom train, tearing shingles off cottages and crumbling them into deadly missiles. Trees exploded under the wind’s attack, crackling as rifle shots while limbs twisted and spun through the air, hunting a target.

Just before sunrise, a sound like an oncoming locomotive had jarred her to life. There were no tracks nearby; she was certain of that. The deafening rumble vibrated deep in her belly. She knew the sound. Ruth remembered the sound too well. She fought the urge to throw up. There was no time for it. She tried to move but couldn't. For a moment, her legs didn't obey her brain.

Mark!! Mark!! Wake up! Get up! Get up! Ruth screamed as she forced her feet toward the floor. It’s a tornado!! She shook him, desperate to wake him as she grabbed her sweatpants and shirt. Wake up!

Built before housing codes became law, the cottage had no basement for shelter. The flimsy cottage would be no match for the storm bearing down. She knew they would die if they stayed there. She knew it. She felt it. She tugged Mark’s arm, pulling him from the couch. Mark landed with a thud onto the floor. Huh? Wha'?

Tornado! Ruth screamed. We need to get out of here!

Can I put some pants on? Mumbling, Mark staggered half-asleep through the room.

No!! Here!! She threw the gym shorts Mark wore the night before. He pitched forward as he tried to step into them.

Not now!! Ruth yelled. Put them on later!! Mark followed Ruth toward the door of cottage.

Forcing its way through the cracks of the old cottage, the blast of air pressed against their backs, propelling the two of them toward the door. Mark grabbed his purple hoodie from the hook just inside the cottage, tucked it under his arm and tugged the doorknob with his left hand.

Instantly, the knob was ripped from his grasp. Torn from its hinges, it was sucked, spinning, into the night's darkness.

Ducking and weaving as they stumbled against the gale, Ruth pulled Mark through the dense woods, searching for low ground, a depression, a culvert, anything which would permit them to lay flat.

I can’t see! In the darkness and horizontal rain, Ruth stopped. It seemed minutes had passed, zig-zagging through now-unfamiliar woods. There were no signs of neighboring cottages, now, just the smell of pine sap as tree trunks snapped and were sucked into the night.

The road! The road Mark screamed. Go to the road!

What?? Ruth couldn’t hear him, but it didn’t matter; panic had set in and she pulled him farther into the darkness.

Darting into a clearing past a stand of pine trees, she saw it through the driving rain – their refuge. A huge tree had just blown down in the storm. Still attached to the tree’s trunk, the root ball was torn from the ground. It left a dirt cavern beneath it. She dove in as Mark followed behind her, pulling the hoodie over his head and tugging the rayon shorts up past his feet.

Huddled tightly, they covered their heads and faces and hunkered down as the torrent swirled around them, flinging debris with deadly rage. The storm dismantled the fragile cottage. Its windows shattered, sending shards of glass over their heads. The clapboard siding squealed as if pried by a crowbar from the cottage’s skeleton. They held one another tightly and prayed the wind would stop.

In just ten minutes, the microburst had turned their safe haven into thick, sticky mud. Minutes passed as hours, but an eerie calm arrived with the sunrise.

Trembling, Ruth clung to Mark as they slowly climbed out of the root ball's hole. Surveying the storm’s damage, Ruth turned toward her husband. Blood poured down his face and onto his sweatshirt from a gash in his forehead.

Oh, my God, Ruth reached for Mark's face, what happened?

What happened to what?

Your head. You're bleeding. A lot.

I am? Mark touched his face, warm with sticky liquid. Oh wow. I am. Mark hated the sight of blood. His vision was blurry and his head throbbed.

Ruth pressed his sweatshirt hood against the wound, Keep pressure on it, she ordered.

He didn’t remember anything else till he heard the voices.

Mark? Mark? Are you in there Mark? Can you hear me?

His lips were moving, he was sure of it, he thought. Yes, I’m here, he answered, but he didn’t recognize who was asking … or why.

CHAPTER 2

Yoopers and Trolls

Mason's hair stood on the back of his neck. He knew better than to ignore it.

He remembered the feeling from thirty years ago, moments before the attack in the Southeast Asian jungle. The M.A.S.H unit’s patients were sitting ducks, their every move being watched from the thick elephant grass by the Viet Cong until night fell.

Now, it was something else causing his uneasiness. Nearly hidden behind the houses, a dark green sedan was parked alongside the bike path facing the school yard. Mason’s stomach knotted. Mason knew the car didn’t belong there.

Mason stared hard at the dark sedan before resuming his game of four-square with the fourth graders stuck in make-up classes from the previous school year. It was the first Friday of summer vacation for most of the students who attended the elementary school on Grand Haven’s east side. There wouldn’t be any vacations for Mason’s kids until their make-up classes were completed two weeks from now. Some had to make up too many sick days or the days they played hooky.

The rest, they were off to the beaches, summer camps and weekend trips with their families.

Some of the families were headed for Upnorth, Michigan. It wasn't a city; it was the nickname for everything north of M-46 – the east-west highway which dissects Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. The highway is considered the gateway to lush green forest, rushing rivers and crystal-clear inland lakes and, of course, the Mackinac Bridge to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Yoopers – residents of the state’s Upper Peninsula – refer to downstate residents trolls. After all, they live beneath the Mackinac Bridge. The banter between the two peninsulas was occasionally good-natured. Usually not.

Just past noon, it was lunch recess for the unfortunate few left behind and Mason taught them schoolyard games Mason played himself as a kid – four-square, tether ball and dodge-ball.

Mason batted the orange rubber ball back and forth into his younger opponent's squares, his long, grey ponytail flopping from side to side as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The school’s principal didn't approve. She believed Mason playing recess games with the students undermined her teachers' authority with them. He didn't care. He wasn't a teacher. He was a volunteer teacher's aide and, if the principal didn't like it, she could tell him to leave. So far, she hadn't.

Who’d have thought they’d lead ya, Mason hummed as he rocked back and forth in the chalk squares, back here where we need ya’. He likened himself to Gabe Kotter in the 70's sitcom, Welcome Back, Kotter. Kotter returned to his beloved Buchanan high school in Brooklyn to teach remedial students destined for life on New York’s mean streets. He named them Sweathogs, the kids society had already given up on. Buchanan's school administrators had given up on them, too, and Kotter believed that was the greatest sin of all.

These kids at Ferry Elementary were Mason's Sweathogs. The principal had plenty of well-heeled parents who attended Parent-Teacher Conferences and volunteered for fundraisers or simply wrote checks with commas. She groveled for those parents' approval; she had neither the interest nor the time for these kids. Mason was all they had. They needed everything he could give.

Mason was good with the kids. The kids liked him and he liked them.

Unlike the mainstream teachers who saw the kids as time wasted on science and math, Mason had a knack for transforming mathematical formulas into real life situations to help the kids understand. As much of his mind as he had lost, he hadn't lost that. Most teachers lobbied against computers in classrooms; Mason embraced them. He believed computers opened the children to worlds of discovery.

Every spring, without the help of the Principal or the teachers, Mason organized a bake sale to raise money to buy computers for the school. He knew selling a few cookies would never pay for more than a new keyboard or two but at least it was something. It was more than the school board was doing.

He liked teaching them, his Sweathogs, to read, too, especially the ones who struggled. Old Man Hostetter made him read; for the Old Man, not being able to read wasn't an option. He said if Mason was going to work in a news stand, he better damn-well know how to read. Mason could see Old Man H’s scowling face when he was compressed into a fetal position in the tiger cages.

In those tiger cages, Mason realized that reading was never about the store. It was Old Man Hostetter's way of getting him to learn. His boss wanted Mason to learn more than he learned in school. He challenged Mason to question everything he was taught, to dig deep to find the truth.

Someday, Mason promised as his body wilted in the metal cage in Southeast Asia, Someday, I'll teach kids like Old Man Hostetter did. I’ll teach them to read and wonder and ask questions. In the sticky dampness of the jungle, Mason yearned for a book, a magazine, a newspaper. He prayed to a god he often damned that he would keep his promise if he ever got out of hell. He figured he wouldn't need to, though. He wasn't going anywhere. That’s what he believed then.

This Friday afternoon, though, was warm for early June in Michigan. The sun was bright and the sky was deep blue. Grass and leaves were green and a light breeze carried the smell of the Big Lake past the red brick schoolhouse on the corner of Ferry Street and Pennoyer.

Tomorrow's forecast was hot and sunny. Saturday would be a good day for a ride to his favorite beach. Mason was certain Saugatuck’s Oval Beach would be packed.

Grand Haven State Park was just down the hill from Mason’s modest apartment and Oval beach was a thirty-mile ride south along the lakeshore. In the summer, though, Grand Haven was crowded with families and tourists. Oval Beach was a favorite of the locals. Mason preferred the locals.

As he absent-mindedly punched the orange ball into his opponent’s squares, Mason planned his weekend. Tomorrow, at dawn, he would fill one aluminum water bottle with Jamaican Blue Mountain and another with water. By late morning, he would be standing in the shallows of Lake Michigan at Oval Beach. He’d hit a blunt and sip his coffee as the sun rose higher into the sky. Yes, that is what he would do tomorrow.

Mason's kids were smiling and laughing as they made their way back into the elementary school for the afternoon session. Mason patted them on the back as he followed them in, Good hustle, good hustle, he encouraged.

When the bell sounded the end of the school day, Mason again stared hard at the dark sedan. Its tinted windows prevented him from seeing inside, seeing whether there was anyone in the car watching him. Was that a shadow of a person inside? He couldn’t be sure. He felt it, though.

Mason lifted his 20-year-old bicycle from the school's bike rack, buckled on his tie-dye painted helmet, and headed west toward Lakeshore Drive, frequently glancing over his shoulder to see if the dark sedan was following. It wasn't.

Mason loved his daily ride. It was always the same. He’d cross Beacon Boulevard, the town’s main thoroughfare, and stop at the coffee shop on Washington, to fill his metal water bottle with Jamaican Blue Mountain.

Before climbing back on the bike, Mason scanned the parking lot and streets for the green sedan. He saw nothing. He followed his usual path, peddling toward Holland, 20 miles south, on tree-shaded Lakeshore Drive. He stood on the pedals to push up the hill at Rosy Mound Nature Preserve. Beyond the rolling dunes of the preserve, he could see the lake and hear the mew of seagulls as they soared overhead.

Passing the Veteran’s Cemetery, Mason noticed most of the small American flags planted at each soldier's grave were gone. They had been tugged from the soft ground and carried east in the hard winds of the week before.

He passed Lake Michigan Drive, a main artery for tourist traffic, which ends abruptly at the water pumping station on the bluff of Lake Michigan. The red brick building, built in the wake of the Great Depression, stands watch over the lake as its pumps whine unceasingly, sucking as much of the lake's fresh water as possible and pushing it 30 miles east toward a million thirsty residents of Michigan's second-largest city.

Mason stopped suddenly and twisted around, looking for the dark sedan. Again, he saw no sign of it.

Relax, he told himself, it was probably just some old codger’s Ford. He smiled at the irony that youngsters most likely saw him as an old codger.

Mason especially loved this stretch of Lakeshore Drive. Canopies formed where trees from each side reached across the road and touched. The shaded, curved tunnel followed the lake's irregular shoreline. To Mason, his ride was exhilarating; a slight breeze carried the smell of the lake and fragrant lilacs into his path. Summer’s haze had arrived early this year and the air was warm and damp. Evenings were still cool.

In a few more miles, he would be sitting on the bench next to the beech tree. It had been thirty years – no, more than thirty – he'd been coming to the tree. Except for the years he spent in Viet Nam.

It took him until '75 to receive his Prisoner of War back pay from the Army. There was no hero’s welcome when he came home, just a check sent in the mail three years later. Mason bought the small patch of land where the tree stood from the Chicago industrialist who owned it, along with an easement which permitted anyone to walk to it from the road.

In the summer of '77, he built the bench. Every spring for more than two decades now, he scraped and painted the bench’s cast iron frame and brushed on a new coat of red oak stain.

There, on the first dune in from the shoreline, he'd spent the last 20 years sitting on the bench near the tree listening to the seagulls mew and chatter, feeling the hot sun and cool lake breeze against his skin, succumbing to the therapeutic dullness his nurse, Mary Jane, provided.

Today, he settled into the familiar end of the bench and pulled out his packet of Zig-Zag papers.

Mason's hair stood on his neck again.

Peering through military-black binoculars from the ridge of a dune to the north of Mason’s bench, the shadow from the dark sedan whispered, Well, I'll be damned.

CHAPTER 3

Babe Ruth and Louisville Sluggers

He's looking at you. Elizabeth stared straight as she nodded toward the infield.

Who? Margaret asked, scanning the visiting-team bench just in front of their third baseline bleacher seats.

The second baseman.

The smell of the St. Joseph River drifted over the ball diamond built on the flatland below Benton Harbor’s Colfax Hill. Just north of the ballfield, the Flats housed most of the area's Coloreds in dilapidated shacks. They worked manual labor jobs in Benton Harbor's factories or did housekeeping in St. Joe's resort hotels.

The Twin Cities – Benton Harbor and St. Joseph – were separated geographically only by the river, 200 yards wide.

In 1917, though, the cities’ ethnic differences made them anything but identical. Benton Harbor’s Negro population was growing while St. Joe’s citizens were as white as the linens the Negro housekeepers put on the Whitcomb Hotel’s beds.

Although Benton Harbor was the larger of the Twin Cities, St. Joseph folks often gave the impression their city was superior.

Finishing their final warm-ups in the late-spring drizzle, the rival ball teams sported new flannel uniforms with blousy, grey-and-pin-striped knickers and navy blue leggings. Only different emblems embroidered into the jerseys set them apart.

Margaret – Margo to her friends – spotted the second baseman of her St. Joseph Catholic team thirty feet away, sitting in the center of the team's bench surrounded by a gaggle of pimple-faced ballplayers. Garrett, the Ponies' second baseman, focused on the team's coach as he announced the batting order. Margo's heart sank. Sitting on green-painted wooden bleachers along the third baseline in chilly dampness, Margo hoped Garrett had finally noticed her. He hadn't.

No, he's not. she nodded in the coach’s direction, He's listening to Coach.

Not that second baseman. Liz – Elizabeth to her parents – pointed past the pitcher's mound where the infield turned muddy, That one. Margo followed Liz's finger aiming just to the right of second base.

The one with the red hair? Margo replied dully.

It's not that red. Liz protested, It's, well, it's sort of reddish-brown red.

I see.

Yes, you see? Liz smiled, It's not that red.

No, Margo retorted, I meant I see. As in, I can see how red it is. It seemed fitting he played for the Benton Harbor Fighting Irish.

Today, St. Joe was the visiting team. Benton Harbor St. John Catholic – the Irish – were the Ponies' perennial nemesis across the river. They were taking their last warm-ups before the first St. Joe player would be motioned by the umpire toward the batter's box. The Benton Harbor coach was at the plate, smacking hard ground balls to his infield.

At the next crack of the coach's bat, the red-haired second basemen darted left and scooped a grounder into his glove, pulled it out with his right hand and softly flicked it underhand to the first baseman. As he turned back toward second, he reached up and tipped his ball cap to the two St. Joe girls watching from the third baseline bleachers.

Margo adverted her gaze, turning her attention back to Garrett. He was batting third in the lineup and was chattering with his teammates as he picked through the Louisville Sluggers, finding his 36-incher he special-ordered from Hillerich & Bradsby in St. Louis.

Just like the one Babe Ruth uses, he often boasted, comparing himself with the young Boston Red Sox pitcher. What he lacked in talent, he made up for in ego.

He's quite brash.

Who?

The second baseman, Margo answered.

Garrett?

No, that one, Margo nodded toward second. Liz watched the reddish-brown red-haired teenager scoop up another grounder, this time pivoting back toward second base and firing it to shortstop with his foot on the bag. As he walked back to his position between first and second, he flashed a smile toward the third-base bleachers.

Liz smiled, I suppose he is. Liz rested her hand on Margo's. Someday she'd figure it out, Liz hoped silently. Liz and Margo had been friends since fifth grade when they were both competing for the same boy’s attention. The boy moved away but Liz and Margo became friends.

The game stayed close until the eighth inning when St. Joe's leadoff hitter sent a fly ball over the left field fence, breaking a four-inning tie.

Benton Harbor had two more chances to catch up. Despite a two-bagger by the seemingly brash, reddish-brown red-haired second baseman, they didn't.

Margo watched as the rival second baseman smiled and congratulated each member of the victorious visiting team. He didn't miss any of them, not even the ballplayers who sat the bench the whole game. Margo watched as the young man then hurried back to his team's bench and encouraged his teammates, Good game, he slapped their backs, good game. We'll get the next one.

Garrett was too busy to notice Margo standing in the drizzling rain atop the third baseline bleachers hoping to catch his eye if even for a moment.

Liz silently gathered up their woolen stadium blanket and umbrellas. She said nothing as they climbed inelegantly down the hard wooden bleachers. Despite her feet being numb with cold, Margo turned back once more toward the muddy field. A red-haired, Irish second basemen stood there, smiling back, smiling and smacking his fist into his glove. Margo turned away and followed Liz to the trolley which would take them back across the river.

As the trolley rattled over the

Reviews for The Beech Tree

[Fred · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Beautiful narrative. The characters draw you in because you can relate to them. The book is a delicate dance of gritty life challenges faced with love and hope. You'll want to stand up and cheer. Keep your tissues handy.