by Owen Thomas
Praise for The Lion Trees
“[A] cerebral page turner… a powerful and promising debut.” – Kirkus Reviews
“Owen Thomas’ Lion Trees… can be anointed any number of superlatives to showcase its brilliance; highly addictive, spectacular, and mind blowing will have to suffice. Thomas is a wizard of fiction, and his novel a captivating gem that engulfs the reader from the beginning.” – US Review of Books
“A sweeping literary saga in the tradition of ‘Dr. Zhivago’, ‘Gone with the Wind’, and ‘The Thorn Birds’, this book has it all …original and stirring… By turns exhilarating and exhausting, Thomas creates compelling, rich characters. The ending is just as satisfying as the beginning.” – The Eric Hoffer Book Award
“Every now and then, seemingly out of nowhere, a new voice comes along and knocks your socks off. Owen Thomas owns that voice.” – The Anchorage Press
“In its structure and nature, [The Lion Trees] reminds me above all of John Updike’s wonderful Harry Rabbit novels and their ability to summarize the essence of change in American society across a decade at a time.” – Book Ideas
“[A] powerful, gripping and realistic story. Once, a few decades ago, many authors would set out to write “The Great American Novel,” hoping to tap into whatever it is which makes the US and its people so unique and hopeful, particularly at a set point in time.… These days it doesn’t seem like anyone tries to write those kind of seminal novels anymore... until now. This is a wonderful, well thought out, well written tale, worth every minute, every hour, and every day that you spend in it. … The Lion Trees does what so very few great novels can: it will take a lot out of you, but leave you with much more than you had when you began.” – Pacific Book Review
“[The Lion Trees] reminds me of the reason I fell in love with reading in the first place and what a magical world the art of storytelling is…. [A]n astounding read… I truly believe this is the best story that I’ve read this year, actually in a long time. This is what fiction and novels were initially created to be. It’s not only beautifully crafted, but it becomes a part of you.” – Literary Litter
“If there is only one book that you are going to read this year, make it The Lion Trees.” – Moterwriter.com
The Lion Trees
By Owen Thomas
Copyright
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2014 Owen Thomas
Author Website: http://www.owenthomasfiction.com
Cover Design by Endeavor Creative (http://endeavorcreative.com)
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
For my parents, who have made everything possible.
For Penny, who makes everything imaginable.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in it’s own way.
– Leo Tolstoy
The past is never dead; it’s not even past.
– William Faulkner
An unexamined life is not worth living.
– Socrates
I was raised against my will to follow the fabulist tradition. It’s a part of me now. The truth lies in fiction.
– Matilda Johns
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
– William Blake
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART I: UNRAVELING
PROLOGUE - Matilda
CHAPTER 1 - Hollis
CHAPTER 2 - Susan
CHAPTER 3 - David
CHAPTER 4 – Angus
CHAPTER 5 – Tilly
CHAPTER 6 – David
CHAPTER 7 - Susan
CHAPTER 8 – Hollis
CHAPTER 9 – David
CHAPTER 10 – Tilly
CHAPTER 11 – Susan
CHAPTER 12 – Hollis
CHAPTER 13 – David
CHAPTER 14 – Tilly
CHAPTER 15 – Susan
CHAPTER 16 – David
CHAPTER 17 – Hollis
CHAPTER 18 – David
CHAPTER 19 – Susan
CHAPTER 20 – Hollis
CHAPTER 21 – David
CHAPTER 22 – Susan
CHAPTER 23 – Angus
CHAPTER 24 – Tilly
CHAPTER 25 – David
CHAPTER 26 – Hollis
CHAPTER 27 – Susan
CHAPTER 28 – Tilly
CHAPTER 29 – David
CHAPTER 30 – Hollis
CHAPTER 31 – Susan
CHAPTER 32 – Tilly
CHAPTER 33 – David
CHAPTER 34 – Hollis
CHAPTER 35 – Susan
CHAPTER 36 – Tilly
CHAPTER 37 – David
CHAPTER 38 – Susan
CHAPTER 39 – Hollis
CHAPTER 40 – Tilly
PART II: AWAKENING
CHAPTER 41 – Benjamin
CHAPTER 42 – David
CHAPTER 43 – Susan
CHAPTER 44 – Hollis
CHAPTER 45 – Angus
CHAPTER 46 – Tilly
CHAPTER 47 – Susan
CHAPTER 48 – Hollis
CHAPTER 49 – David
CHAPTER 50 – Tilly
CHAPTER 51 – Hollis
CHAPTER 52 – David
CHAPTER 53 – Susan
CHAPTER 54 – David
CHAPTER 55 – Tilly
CHAPTER 56 – Susan
CHAPTER 57 – David
CHAPTER 58 – Hollis
CHAPTER 59 – Tilly
CHAPTER 60 – Susan
CHAPTER 61 – Hollis
CHAPTER 62 – Susan
CHAPTER 63 – Hollis
CHAPTER 64 – David
CHAPTER 65 – Susan
CHAPTER 66 – Tilly
CHAPTER 67 – Hollis
CHAPTER 68 – David
CHAPTER 69 – Susan
CHAPTER 70 – Tilly
CHAPTER 71 – Susan
CHAPTER 72 – Hollis
CHAPTER 73 – David
CHAPTER 74 – Angus
CHAPTER 75 – Tilly
CHAPTER 76 – David
CHAPTER 77 – Susan
CHAPTER 78 – Hollis
CHAPTER 79 – David
CHAPTER 80 – Matilda
EPILOGUE – Angus
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
An Invitation from the Author
The Lion Trees
PART I: UNRAVELING
PROLOGUE - Matilda
Bitches and sirens. Don’t they just always get the attention? Damnable storm. Everyone recognizes her now. Katrina’s mother. That’s some real star power for you.
And there’s really no doubting where she’s headed. She’ll be there soon enough and not the least bit tired for the journey. Two more days at most. Everyone has been waiting for so long – sixty years! Imagine that. And soon she’ll be there, at last, with her arms flung wide and her capes in the wind, gliding in through the front door as if she walked on water. She’ll set down her wet bags and sing of her arrival. And when they hear her voice, all will weep at the sound.
She is coming to kill them, of course. All of them if she can. She will bludgeon and drown and choke them with mud until they are all dead or gone or so stricken by her diluvial terror that they are left hollowed out and floating like empty gourds. She will submerge the entire body of the place, snapping the arteries of oil like twigs and popping the eyes of commerce and gouging her wet thumb into
the brass and reedy windpipes of Louisiana. She will make her daughter, little Katrina, seem merciful by comparison. They have all been waiting for her.
That, anyway, is the news about the weather. It plays over and over and over from the Magnavox Holostand in the corner of my room. I have not always been unconscious in this bed. I know what that contraption looks like over there by the windows. But if I have to be here with that thing blaring its hysteria, then I am much happier to be unconscious.
Technology has managed to bring affordability to the broadcast of a third dimension. Television personalities can now almost come out of their box and breathe some of your oxygen and walk around and see how you live. Progress of a sort, I suppose. But the eggheads have done precious little to improve the programming content. Content! We could do with a little third-dimension intelligence. The older I get, the more I sound like my father. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Take, for example, the twenty-four hour news that they never seem to turn off around here. Never have so many different people said so little so continuously. Never mind meteorological science. Never mind the already daunting challenges of orderly evacuation. One would think from even a small sample of viewing that the net-work’s effort was not to inform or to educate, but rather to whip up such a gale force of panicked madness as to create a second hurricane, one that might go out and greet and guide in the first hurricane. The one that they have taken to calling Katrina’s Mother. Hurricane Katrina should be delighted to learn that after sixty years, she is not forgotten. We should all be so lucky.
I can hear the nurse eating her snacks in the chair next to the respirator, filling my lungs with its calm, mechanical breath. She sits there like that, all crammed in, so that she can quickly strike the pose of tireless invigilator and take sudden, careful note of my vitals. Just in case her supervisor comes looking. But there is little danger of that happening. It is slightly more likely that Katrina’s Mother will extend an arm past New Orleans and swat us up here in Columbus, Ohio just for the malicious fun of it.
It is a daily routine of hers. Hiding out in my room, eating from a cellophane bag and watching the holographic news.
Of course, she thinks it is no inconvenience to me. The comatose are always such an agreeable lot. Science still has not illuminated much of this dark, still world. We are liminal, to be sure, but only like dead, not actually dead. We have stopped our physical functioning, but not our perceiving. Perception is greatly dampened, but not gone entirely. I can feel your touch. I can smell your breath. I can hear your crunching. I have simply, tragically, lost the wherewithal to object.
It is not all so bad. Soon Sadie will be here. My grandniece, a lovely rascal of a girl who is as kind as she is stubborn and waggish. She is newly sixteen and believes that the world is a place with room left yet for optimists. She is so like her grandfather in that way. Not the sort of panglossian optimism that marks the fool, but more of a point on the compass by which to navigate. For North is not always so magnetic.
Sadie will come with her homework and her stories of school and boys and she will confide in me believing in the slimmest of chance that there is some sentient cognition left in my still form to hear her. Here’s to incurable optimists.
For I do hear her. And while I cannot see her, I can imagine those intense little eyes looking at me as she talks, those nimble fingers twirling her brown hair or absently fondling the necklace I gave her on her ninth birthday and that she has never removed. It is a simple thing, that necklace. A leather thong threaded through a hole drilled in a chunk of aquamarine. It was a gift to me from a friend, a very long time ago.
My, how the world does turn. Rolling on its arc like a chipped marble.
To think of those years is scarcely different than dreaming up one of my own books. To look at me here, like this, all glaucous and withered, depredated by time, you would certainly think it fiction. Or dementia.
But I am not so far gone as to have misplaced the facts of my own life. I am the sum of all of my experience. It is all still down here in the well with me.
When Sadie comes, she will continue reading. She will pick up where she left off, with Colonel Ivanova and Lieutenant Miller leaving Earth for a far away planet as poor Jules dies in her bed from poison. She is a good reader, my Sadie. She doesn’t race through the words. She takes her time. She knows that this is a slow, careful story. She knows it is my favorite. Of all of them, and there have been so many in my life, she knows The Lion Tree is my favorite.
And she knows that it is true.
CHAPTER 1 - Hollis
Hollis Johns contemplated the tree, raking the line of his jaw with his fingers. He raised his blade to the base of the lower-most, ancient and gnarled branch, positioning it carefully between the trunk and the scalloped oval knot. His muscles tensed and he was, at last, ready to sever the old limb from fifty-eight years of growth.
Then he thought better of it, again, and returned the shears to the desk.
Another slug of wine and some more contemplation. Deeper this time. Much deeper. The Tao of the bonsai was patience. Discipline. And wisdom. Great wisdom.
“Hollis?!” His wife’s voice was thick and muffled and distant, bur-rowing its way down two floors into his leather-appointed basement study. His sanctuary. His retreat. His bunker. “Hollis?!” She tried again.
Sighing, Hollis swung his left arm over the back of his chair and reached for the volume knob of the stereo with two fingers. The room swelled like an orchestral lung.
It was Schubert tonight, but anyone would do, really. Susan would eventually get tired of calling out his name and would come down to fetch him. She would be wearing that look of labored marital deco-rum – a thin, elastic politeness stretched over her face like over-taxed sandwich wrap, her muscles straining to contain exasperation and anger and decades of complaint. A supremely unconvincing façade that, Hollis knew, she meant to be unconvincing.
And he would be equally unconvincing. Oh, sorry, I didn’t hear you, was all he needed. Schubert would do fine.
It was a shame, he thought, that these pretensions, his and hers, were necessary at all. This was not the way he wanted to relate. He hated that word, relate. Communicate. No, he hated that word too. Interact. Yes, this was not the way he wanted to interact with his wife. Why? Because directness and honesty in all things were greatly preferred.
Another swallow of wine and a one-quarter turn of the potted tree before him. The sides of the octagonal planter were a slick, dark green, like wet evening grass. Through his fingertips, he felt the roughened porcelain bottom of the planter scrape against the wooden desk. The lower-most branch of the old tree rotated into the pool of buttery light beneath the desk lamp. Hollis narrowed his eyes and lay the branch across his outstretched palm. Then he sighed.
The Japanese understand.
They understand what it means to live an honest life. That is the benefit of such an ancient culture. Wisdom is a crop that grows very, very slowly. It thrives only in old, mature soil. Americans are such an infantile culture. We cultivate infantile crops. Not small. Infantile. Big and loud and brash and self-satisfied and unruly like hyper-fertilized weeds growing in an undisciplined crawl out of the gardens and across the floors and up the very walls of the republic. We are so slavishly obsessed with youth. We eschew anything and everything that is around long enough to have any value. Why keep a veteran of the loan department when you can have the slick kid with a flashy smile and a head full of hair and an MBA for a diaper? The older you are, the less value you have. That’s all there was to it. Wisdom cannot flourish in our culture. Our soil is too alkaline.
“Hollis?!”
And without wisdom, there is no honesty. The wise man knows that pretensions deceive the self as well as others... No, that’s not quite right.
With the flesh of his thumb, Hollis stroked the branch, twisted and bent with age at an angle irregular to the rest of the tree.
The wise man knows that
pretensions deceive the self and that what others believe about us does not matter. That was really the key, he thought. Why do we care so much about what others think of us? Why was that so important? That conceit – that the opinions of others matter – was at the root of all pretension. The honest man, the wise man, just does not give a damn about how he is perceived by others. He is who he is. He is a scoundrel. He is a knave. He is a hero. He is a bastard. He is a regular old chap. But he is not a fool who, for the sake of another’s impression, ultimately deceives himself into believing he is somebody he is not. He is honest and forthright in the world only because he has freed himself from the burden of giving a damn.
“Hooooollllliiiiis!” Susan had now crossed the threshold between beseeching summons and domestic yodel and this prompted in her husband a heavy sigh and another swallow of wine, two acts which experience had honed into a single almost elegant process: exhaling through the nose directly into the glass and a simultaneous draining of wine over the tongue.
Akahito Takada was such a man, he thought, refilling his glass.
Old enough to be wise. Wise enough to be honest. Honest enough to not give a damn about what anybody else thought of him. Even his family.
Hollis had only known Akahito Takada a week. Six days, really, living as a guest in his magnificent Tokyo home. But the intensity of that exposure had been ample.
Akahito Takada was a real Japanese man. Very modern, yet strong with tradition and imbued with the wisdom of old. President of a huge international bank – Hyakugo Bank could have swallowed Ohio First Securities and Credit like a little sushi roll – and yet, a man who meditates every morning and evening; a man who cultivates his own garden; a man who speaks very little and even then only in a soft, whisper of a voice; a man with a beautiful and intelligent wife and daughters who respect his authority – not in a dictatorial sense, not out of fear – out of respect for his undeniable sagacity. Akahito Takada did not have to endure daily tests and petty challenges to his place in the family. Izume Takada clearly loved him and he her. They had been married what? Forty-five years? And she was no dullard. God, no. Izume was a doctor for Chrissakes. And yet she respected Akahito’s place in the family. It wasn’t about dominance or subjugation. Or sexism. It just wasn’t. It was about respect. Respect.
