Dale Tucker, Novelist

I’d like to give you some flavor of the novel which I’m in the final stages of preparing for publication through Smashwords in ebook form. Whew! That was a mouthful. The title of the novel is Wanderer Come Home.

Our main character is 70-year-old Axel Browne. The story takes place in 2018 and early 2019. Axel is a veteran of the Vietnam War and served in 1967-1968 and was wounded the day before the famous Tet Offensive by the North Vietnamese Army. But this is not a war story. So there you have the broad strokes which define our Axel Browne. Oh, but I forgot one important thing: Upon returning home from the war, Axel could not reenter society in the traditional sense which means he had no desire to live the way most Americans live—with careers, bills, mortgages, and the rest. Instead, he decided to become a wanderer—a homeless person who travels wherever his boots take him.

This type of life suited Axel well, however, because he was in search of something—or, I should say, someone—but even his friends did not know this about him. He did not tell them about his search because, first of all, it was a very personal thing and, second, if he discussed it with anyone, they would probably think him touched, or something. Now, at the beginning of our story, Axel realizes he’s probably already lost whatever opportunity he might have had, over his lifetime, of finding the girl for whom he has searched so long. Oh, did I say “girl”? Well, okay then, that’s right. He has looked for a girl who, of course, now, would be a mature woman in her late fifties.

But there’s a second character who enters our story early on. His name is Hunter Carr. He’s in his late forties, happily married, and has been speedily climbing the ladder-to-success. As the story opens, Hunter has reached the pinnacle of his career, to date, when, in a freak accident, he drowns in his own swimming pool. With the drowning, he experiences what people call: “a near death experience” or NDE. He revives from the drowning but the NDE messes up his perceptions of reality, success, and life in general. Everyone who matters to Hunter, of course, wants him to “recover” which means they want him to return to the same person he was before the pool accident. The problem is he can’t.

Axel and Hunter do meet eventually under unusual circumstances. But both men change the other’s life, unknowingly and profoundly, even before they meet in person for the first time.

It’s a story about how some of our mundane, everyday decisions accumulate to have life changing consequences. But we never know which decisions change our fate or if they are somehow predestined. And when our lives are changed profoundly, what do we do then?

See you around the block.

I thought I should give you a bit of something to read until I can get this blog-site fully up and operational. So I give you Chapter 43 – “Geese In October” of my soon-to-be-published novel: Wanderer Come Home. Hope you enjoy.

43 – geese in october

As of yet, Annabel Stiles had no idea what had triggered Axel’s breakdown. Because of certain anomalies which were part of her youth, Annabel had made a decision a long time ago not to live in the past. In fact, it was unusual for her to even think about the past, and why on earth she had brought it up to an almost complete stranger like Axel, she had no idea. That will teach me, she thought, bring up the past and see what happens? A perfectly calm man falls apart!

She had made it her motto that whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, except, in this case, “Vegas” equaled The Past. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of it, necessarily. It was just that it presented such a huge tangled mystery which she knew she could never unravel. So why crack your brain over a riddle that defies reality? she thought; it’s unproductive.

From Annabel’s point of view, her own life could be divided into three distinct segments: life before Tom Stiles; life during Tom Stiles; and life after Tom Stiles. Tom Stiles had been “the biggest mistake of my life” according to Annabel, and their brief courtship and marriage marked the transition period between Annabel’s former life and present life.

Her former life was full of acrimony and that’s why she chose to put it away and avoid it. The acrimony happened because Annabel had experiences, beliefs, and strongly held opinions that rubbed other people’s religious assumptions and social mores the wrong way. Such was the case with her Aunt Connie—her mother’s sister—who disowned Annabel and denounced her as a heretic against the Christian faith because Annabel claimed to believe in reincarnation. But Annabel was not a heretic, of course, she was not even a non-conformist. She was merely a young person who had always had dreams, actual dreams, at night. And they weren’t even surrealistic dreams or nightmares. They were just dreams about living life as a different person which convinced Annabel that somehow they must be true dreams and the people who populated those dreams must have existed in the physical world at some point in time.

As a teen she learned about reincarnation and it was a watershed for her. All of the puzzle pieces finally fell into place. Suddenly the dreams were no longer the byproduct of an overactive imagination, as her mother always saw them, but reincarnation gave them substance, a plausible explanation, accepted by even scholarly individuals. This is it, she thought, I’ve been reincarnated and the dreams are my memories of a past life. Other people know about this stuff and it’s real, she was convinced.

But long before the epiphany of reincarnation, Annabel kept journals. She started at about age eight. She wrote down the stories of her dreams, as well as she could, in notebooks and in so doing, over the years, collected a great deal of information about the who? what? when? and where? of her other life. She collected dates, addresses, and the names of people and places. In the dreams, she even experienced her own death as the little girl named Dixie Larsen. That, of course, was tremendously upsetting to her the first time it happened.

After reaching puberty the frequency of Annabel’s dreams began to slowly diminish but her interest in them did not. She began her own surreptitious research and investigation to find out if, indeed, Dixie and the Larsen family existed or had ever existed and, if so, where.

One day in 1980, at the Lincoln County Library in Libby, she found that a Mackinaw Ferry did exist—in Indiana. So she wrote the city to ask if they had a city map she might purchase. The city wrote her a nice letter in return and sent her a free map of Mackinaw Ferry.

Almost shaking with excitement, she opened the map and began studying the city, street-by-street, to see if the places she knew in her dreams existed there. She almost jumped out of her skin when her eyes fell upon the street labeled “Meridian Avenue”. That was the street where Dixie lived!

From that day forward Annabel began planning every detail of the trip she would one day make to Mackinaw Ferry. And she did, finally, make that trip on the weekend of May 24th and 25th, 1986. But the trip turned out to be a disappointment. The Larsen family—Dottie and Millie, mother and daughter—had moved away to no-one-knew-where after the father, Sam, died in early 1970. Brownie, the boy next door with whom Dixie spent so much time, had gotten drafted during the war, sent to Vietnam, and never returned. And other extended family had either died or scattered without keeping in touch with the local relatives. So it seemed like there was nothing left of her past life except dead ends.

When Annabel returned home, she didn’t throw away her notebooks, full of those dreams, but she stuffed them in a box and put them in the attic and, more or less, forgot about them. A few years later she met Tom Stiles and, well, soon enough she had two children to raise and a ranch to try to keep on its feet and had only her mother as support because her marriage to Tom, by then, had failed.

After that, Life took over and childish dreams of Mackinaw Ferry and the Larsen family, like geese in October, flew away.