Salvage

Curt Craighead

Description

Back on his motorcycle for the first time since his wife's passing, Dr. Tom Welton finally feels he is beginning to heal from the grief. His early morning ride is restoring his sense of self. But when he loses traction on the wet asphalt and slides off the road's curve into the dense woods of the east Texas Big Thicket, he comes face to face with his life-long spiritual deception. Trapped under the wreckage of his motorcycle, he believes his salvation lies in being found before it's too late. But too late for what?
As his family mounts a search for their missing elderly father, Tom takes a journey through his life while lying on the forest floor. In his fever-seared state, he is visited by loved ones and a few strangers, each who have a message to impart. He comes to understand "too late" has an altogether different meaning as his true spiritual state becomes apparent. Will he be found in time?

Sujets

• Love
• Love (disambiguation)
• Fiction
• Salvage
• Theology
• Christian novel
• Adventure fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Wipf and Stock Publishers
• Date de parution: 31 mars 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781725263062
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Salvage
Curt Craighead


Salvage
Copyright © 2020 Curt Craighead. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8 th Ave., Suite 3 , Eugene, OR 97401 .
Resource Publications
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8 th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback isbn: 978-1-7252-6304-8
hardcover isbn: 978-1-7252-6305-5
ebook isbn: 978-1-7252-6306-2
Manufactured in the U.S.A. 05/01/20
To Teresa,
without whom this book would be forever on my desktop.
Table of Contents Title Page Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7


Chapter 1
Part I
I’m turnt, turnt ‘round, And I can’t find my road back home. Lord, I’m turnt, turnt ‘round, And I can’t find my road back home.
— Memphis Joe McRay
D awn breathes life into the day. A restorative puff filling the lungs of that diurnal course, that daily resuscitation, once again opening the locked eyes of the world’s quiet, daily death. For Tom, the notion of the day beginning in darkness never made sense, and while his clock and the world both told him midnight was the hallmark of the new day, the feeling of wrongness in that could never be overcome. Every morning he felt the world must be surprised by the gasp of renewed life, as one struck by lightning or pulled lifeless from a river is surprised to find they live again, determined to make this portion matter. This day would matter, he knew, as the first time on the road in a very long time.
And that road, that glistening black stretch-and-bend, stretch-and-bend, stretch-and-bend—undulating and cool, like the warped 78 records he listened to in his youth, the needle rising and falling in an endless left-hand sweep, writhing almost, as did the shimmering black rat snakes in the hay barns and canebrakes of his boyhood. On pebbled asphalt, the surface almost imperceptibly bowed and endless, he made out the first mile before it twisted north, lost behind the damp loblolly pine, bald cypress, redbud, white oak, and magnolia. The dank earth steamed to give the forest back to the sky, releasing the sweet aroma of pine needles, pungent undergrowth, and turning leaves. The soaked bark and fallen needles deadened the sound of the old motorcycle, hushing the staccato rumble like an embrace. He thought of it that way—an embrace—one he’d given or gotten with intent as he hurtled through the magic of the east Texas Big Thicket on the edge of the Davy Crockett National Forest.
Easing into the throttle he took advantage of the light and the straight away, the pipes humming an aubade while he hoped his afterlife held this for him. At seventy-seven and one-half, most people would have thought Tom had figured it out. Still, he didn’t know whether he had no business whatsoever on a motorcycle, or if that was his only business. It had always been this way for him—all or nothing—and while he often considered what he had given up and what he had gained, he liked to believe he had given more than he’d taken.
While the balance was in his moral favor, giving up this motorcycle, in his mind, should not yet be penance. At his age, he made few apologies and even fewer excuses, but not because he was too proud or set in his ways. He had just gotten very good at resisting anything needing apology. This too had always been the way for him: be a good man, a better man, do the right thing. Indeed, do the right thing.
Blobs of fresh orange sunshine squeezed between east Texas pine trunks, the sun’s crescent silhouette stretching to clear the horizon. Sun up but unseen as it rose behind the trees; orange, amber, gold, silver, and white shafts slicing through first the ground cover, then the vines, then the forest proper to dapple Tom as he rolled on. That glowing orb, welcomed by the good of heart, cursed by the philistine, took away all hiding, took away all fear, took away all unknown in the brindled early morning light of east Texas. The northbound tarmac wouldn’t feel the sun directly for another two hours when it would rise above the treetops, but Tom had felt it even in the dark. Tom had felt the coming sunlight always, in fact, even while he slept and for seventy-seven and one-half years.
Overhead the morning shone blue; a cloudless, powdered azure specked with cowbirds, grackle, coots, and cormorants, phoebes and flickers, and far more sparrows than the rest. None of which reap, none of which sow, none of which store for the winter. This was his path, his duct, his endless channel cut from the trees and covered in tired asphalt. This road was built for him, he thought, as was the morning, as was the hour, as was the sun.
He’d spent so many years—seventy-seven and one-half it felt—swimming upstream that days like this were rare and glorious. In the groove, so to speak, Tom reveled in the sound, the vibration, the movement. Silenced were the hecklers of his psyche, those faraway voices shouting doubt from the caverns in his mind. Absent were their echoes, bouncing between memories of a lifetime as reminders of what had been, could have been, would have been, and how little there was left.
He’d ridden motorcycles more than sixty-five years, on and off, and had owned more than four dozen all told. While he had three in his garage that very day, his ride of choice was clear: a 1969 Triumph Bonneville he’d modified as a younger man. It was a custom-built machine meant to gain speed very quickly, handling the power nimbly and assuredly. He came to build the bike in the summer of 1971 , with his then twelve-year-old son, Jonathan, a smart and curious boy grown into a smart and curious man.
This machine was an exotic beast in its time, a holdover by a British company who’d never seen Japan coming. While Harley Davidson, Triumph, BSA, and Norton had been competing with one another, Japan snuck in and took them by surprise, effectively ending all talk about which western manufacturer would dominate. The answer was none of them. Japan won, would win, still wins.
His machine, Tom’s machine, his time machine, was all his. Created from the factory as a multi-purpose commuter in England, he’d disassembled and recreated it as an individual, stripped-to-essentials, personal rolling cannonball. Tom, enamored with the innovation and the very notion of creating something whereby the sum was greater than the total of its parts, had begun piecing the motorcycle together almost fifty years earlier, rode it until he couldn’t, and parked it just three years before this day. Now, with time on his hands and Roseanne gone, he set about disassembling the motorcycle bolt by bolt and restoring it to its former glory, finishing just days before this morning ride. Some fifty years later, it was an old exotic beast, out of its time, out of its element, and far away from home, much like Tom himself.
Even when he’d finished it the first time, the motorcycle was out of place in Houston’s oil heyday, when pickup trucks and station wagons gave way to Mercedes Benz and Cadillac. Even then and always still, Tom had no interest in fitting in. It wasn’t that he made an effort to be a dissenter, he was just different. Just was, pure and simple. Part of being different meant interest in everything from science to medicine to art to history to animals to machines. But mostly machines. And part of being different compelled in him a deep and abiding love of blues music, Cajun food, old people, firearms, philosophy, theology, literature, engineering, architecture, humanity, and motorcycles.
When he brought his first motorcycle home in 1944 —a 1939 Whizzer motor mounted on a 1940 Schwinn Superior bicycle—the matriarch of the Sunday school class had chastised his mother for allowing it.
“Tom goes his own way,” was what his mother had said. And indeed, she was right. Until he had met Roseanne, his mother was the only one to know what that meant, and since Roseanne’s passing, there was no one. This motorcycle, this Triumph, was strange and strong and precise and authentic. It was stout and powerful and nimble and honest. The bike was odd and built to perform. The same could be said of Tom.
He hadn’t ridden any motorcycle in three years; eighteen months to hold the hand of his withering bride and eighteen more to restore the Triumph. For the first time in three years, Tom felt Tom-ish, again in his groove, in the world but not of it. Whole and alone, not lonely but solo. The black-and-white diamond-quilted seat was right, the pegs were right, the soft white Biltwell grip rolling under his hand and wrist was right.
His jacket, worn white leather with a black Triumph breast and back patch, was chaffed at the cuffs and waist after years of wind, dirt, and rain. The collar was tinged ecru from the sun and sweat, and the red satin lining was beginning to separate at the seams. The zippers, heavy brass Talon brand, were solid still, even better than new, tinged and worn with the joy of going on and coming off, while the rest of the jacket held every mile, but couldn’t keep them a secret. His helmet came new with the bike, and even after replacing the lining and padding many times he knew it was long past its life but couldn’t bear to separate the three. And with him being part of the ensemble, he couldn’t separate the four.
That morning he would have said he was as giddy as a schoolgirl had