“When is ‘am’?” The persistence of identity and Witness Tree

The Ship of Theseus looms large as a metaphor for ideas about identity and change in my novel-in-progress, Witness Tree, a suspense-thriller about a leadership battle for (white) supremacy in a rural Oregon county that erupts into the open when newly sober, ex-con David Paterson is the sole witness to a brutal execution meant to tie off the last loose thread.

David is trying to make a fresh start in sobriety, but he carries the weight of the past with him, along with questions about how much he may (or may not) have changed during his eight years in prison. When he reports the murder to the police, as a now-solid citizen should, it’s the deputy who put him away eight years earlier who takes his testimony. The deputy makes it clear that if a body is ever found, David will be the prime suspect. “People don’t just change overnight, Paterson,” he says.

[from Wikipedia]: “In its original formulation, the ‘Ship of Theseus’ paradox concerns a debate over whether or not a ship that has had all of its components replaced one by one would remain the same ship.” For David, the notion that you can never step into the same river twice; that “Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow,” looms large.

So, as to identity–which is it? Which you is “who”? The person you are today? Five years ago? Who will you be in fifty years? And when is “am”? This week? Today? And which facet of you is “I”? I’m writing a suspense-thriller, so I don’t belabor the point or get in the way of the story, but David can’t be sure who he is, or what he wants, and he can’t know how others perceive him.

The story becomes David’s race to find out who was killed, why, and by whom, before the police can hang it all on him. As he investigates, with the help of two high school friends who still stand by him, he finds that what the murder was meant to cover up runs deeper and wider than David could have imagined. Worse, the murder and officials’ seeming complicity in it, feels eerily like the murder of his friend in prison, to which he was also a witness. In prison, the Aryan Brotherhood left him alive–and damaged–as a warning to others.

The photo of the pine tree on the hillside that you see is the Witness Tree that inspired the book. It’s near my parents’ farm, a Yamhill County, Oregon, survey marker, delineating plots of land. It’s probably 80 years old. Or more. And it is illegal to cut it down. “Witness to corner,” the badge on the tree reads. My mother, now passed on, had always liked the tree. The term witness tree had been pregnant with meaning for us, and I decided to start a short story that involved it.

I began thinking about a short story titled Witness Tree, with the premise, “someone sees something they shouldn’t.”

I thought, “okay, good.” But then looked at the bare hillside and there seemed no way to see something without also being seen…seeing it. Which kind of threw a wrench in the gears. Until the following day, when I noticed that someone had dropped one of those green porta-potties near it for the grape harvesters to use.

And so the opening scene was born. David shelters from a deluge–common at that time of year–inside a porta-potty near a witness tree late one night. There is (fictionally) a large warehouse-like structure nearby, and the murder takes place in its gravel parking lot. The assassins are backlit by the lights on the building, but David, some forty yards away, is in total darkness. They are shadows in the murky, watery night. They can’t see him, and he can’t identify them. And yet, there’s something familiar about the dead man…

Try as I might, I could not get the story to stay a short story. I wrote the first ten pages or so and thought that it read like like an opening chapter. So I kept going. It’s been an exciting, satisfying and frustrating process. Dealing as it does with addiction, it is my most personal story to date, too.

And I have written it in first-person, which is new for me. Many of the plot points and reveals, however, could not happen as I originally conceived them. I couldn’t shift POV to the bad guys as I would do in the Faithless Elector series books, and I ended up writing (and then deleting) multiple scenes.

So, the notion of whether this is anything like the book I (sort of) conceived of two years ago also embraces Theseus’s ship. What began as a short story called “Witness Tree” became a novel of the same name, in the writing of which, I ran off the rails in a number of key ways, but have worked hard to bring it back into trim focus. Not only is it my most personal work, the number of holes I’ve plugged, scenes I have had to rewrite, is breathtaking.

But it floats, and I’m hopeful it will be seaworthy soon.

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James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. His novel-in-progress is called Witness Tree, a (pinot) noir tale of murder and corruption set in Oregon’s wine country.

All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon.

eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

James is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, and he’s the current president of the Delaware Valley chapter of Sisters in Crime. He lives in Philadelphia. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And follow this blog!

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