Tom Mathews > Recent Status Updates

Walla Walla was all-in on autos. “Every where is heard the warning honk! honk! of these machines of pleasure and gasoline,” The Evening Statesman declared, describing a place swept up “by the merry sport of ‘chuffing.’”

To Henry Ford, it was obvious. The virtues he prized in a car were the same he favored in people. Strength coupled with lightness; leanness, efficiency , coiled power, fighting trim. The very qualities he prized in himself.

Perhaps we are only ever truly home when we stand on the land on which our ancestors roamed. As a genealogist, I had spent hours tracing my family roots all the way back to these ancestral lands, to the ancient hills and mountains and moors and deserts from which we all have sprung.

When you are deep into a genealogical search, it can be a completely immersive experience. Time disappears, appointments are forgotten. Even those genealogists just starting out fall into this trap and sit glued to their computers for hour after hour, skipping dinners and other social events, secure in the knowledge that building trees and finding new relatives will prove more exciting than any dinner or party could.

In 1985, seven years after her family last saw Marlyse, the remains of a woman and three children were found in two metal barrels in Bear Brook Park—victims who, more than thirty years later, I identified.This marked the first time in the history of U.S. law enforcement that autosomal DNA from rootless hair samples helped solve a crime–the first time genetic genealogy had to obtain the true identity of a criminal.

"In 2015 fewer than one million people in the United States had submitted samples for genetic testing to AncestryDNA. Today, that number is well over thirty million across all the U.S. genealogical sites."

There’d been range riders since the first six cows arrived in the Americas on a Spanish galleon. Riders who stayed with the herds, lived alongside them, guarding them from rustlers and wolves . But they’d begun disappearing along with the big predators, replaced with cowboys who tended to sick and injured stock, drove them from pasture to pasture, and herded cows to market, but bunked back on the ranches.

“You didn’t ask me.”
“Ask you what?”
“How it feels.”
“How what feels, Alice?”
“When dead people start talking to me. You didn’t ask me what it feels like.”
My mouth floods with the taste of hot metal. Fear, polluting me.
“What does it feel like?” I ask her quietly and she looks right at me.
“Like biting into ice,” she says.

The government and the cattlemen of the previous century had been trying to kill a whole nation of wolves, ridding the West of a menace not unlike the Apache or Comanche in their eyes. A force of depredation, barbarity. Wildness. A primeval force, which kept the frontier uncivilized. The West was a new addition to their realm, and they wanted it clean, free of predators.

"We love our parents not because they are perfect but because they persevere despite their imperfections. We all fall short of grace, but the beauty lives in the attempt."

Tyranthus Slaughter is, without question, one of the most evil characters that I have ever encountered on page or screen.

Upcountry on the Nurse farm, beyond the house and barn, down across the fields, Rebecca’s grave has had time to green over, the earth no longer as raw as grief. While her family continue their lives, keeping apart from the rest of the Village, falling snow blankets her grave, concealing the disturbed earth and obscuring the evidence of what the family will never forget.

Hands and feet tied, one by one they were turned off the ladder, and one by one they died with the usual painful messy contortions. Then there was nothing left but to let the workmen bury the dead, with the corpses hanging there long enough to warn and deter other evildoers.

That’s the way it is with me. I don’t just see things as they are today. I see them as they were. I see them all around in time. And this is bad. Because it makes you think you know a place. Because it makes you think you know the people in it.

I wonder now how I lost it, the mysteriousness, the wonder. It faded steadily until one day it was entirely gone, and night became just dark.

They taught me my Bible lessons the exact same way. And to this day I am very good at spotting signs of Negro blood and at reciting the endless lists of genealogies in the Bible. It’s a southern talent, you might say.

I prefer teaching the post- 2015 period, when social media were beginning to be drawn into the currency of private lives, when waves of fantastical or malevolent or silly rumours began to shape the nature not only of politics but of human understanding. In the stampede, grisly government secrets were spilled, childhoods despoiled , honourable reputations trampled down and loud- mouthed fools elevated.

Two American naval officers, Captain Stanford E. Moses of the USS Von Steuben, which had taken minor damage when the steamship Northwind drifted into it, and Captain Howard Symington of the USS Tacoma, which had felt the concussion 52 miles off Halifax and returned to port, asked, “Is there anything we can do?”

Rescuers, whether professionals or amateurs, appeared by the thousands all over town, an instant army of mercy reporting for duty—unofficial and unorganized but utterly committed to providing aid to anyone who needed it. It was these spontaneous acts of generosity, courage, and selflessness that did more to reassure victims than any formal communication could have achieved.

When the cloud released its contents, it created what witnesses described as “dark rain.” But anyone caught underneath the fallout could tell you it wasn’t water coming down but a thick, black precipitation of hot oil and soot, like liquid tar, mixed with heavy, scalding shrapnel that cut, burned, and blackened everything in its path.

Mont-Blanc disintegrated, leaving only two recognizable parts: the anchor shank, which weighed half a ton and was found 4 miles away in the woods of the Northwest Arm; and an iron deck cannon, intended to protect the ship from U-boats, which landed 3 miles away in Little Albro Lake behind Dartmouth, with its barrel drooping like a warm candle.

The great-grandson of Canada’s greatest privateer, Joseph Barss Jr., who had captured, burned, or sunk dozens of American ships in the War of 1812, Ernest had inherited more than a little anti-American sentiment. But in 1917 that was true of most Canadians, who resented the Americans’ persistent threats to annex their land from the time the United States was born to as recently as 1911.

The reason these men made deals with the Devil was because they could not otherwise harness the power for the acts they wished to undertake, and so they bargained with the only immortal thing they might ever possess: their souls.
They were lazy.

She had no eyes.
Dark holes gaped in her face like a corpse’s, like a skeleton’s, black and deep and endless and growing and gorging themselves on darkness.

"The fainting bride had died yesterday afternoon. Coffins began to appear soon thereafter, carried on slumped shoulders through the winding streets of the city."

*The Matlazahuatl epidemic was a series of hemorrhagic fever outbreaks that plagued Mexico, particularly during the 18th and 19th centuries, also known as cocoliztli in the 16th century. The disease caused high fevers, bleeding, and a high mortality rate.

She flipped her fan open and batted it gently before her face, as if she were warm. A coquettish gesture, another piece of a game they played.

This was the way it was: warm words , the practiced dance of flirtation. Enough to make any onlooker in Zacatecas believe that they were such lucky young things , to be marrying for love instead of money.

If Carlos was a candle, Alba was the shadow it cast. Always a half step behind, flickering with unease at his every move.

Greed was less a deadly sin than family creed, as inescapable as the name he bore

She Went by Gently, by Paul Vincent Carroll ☆☆☆☆☆
The Islandman, by Desmond Clarke ☆☆☆☆
The Lady on the Gray, by John Collier ☆☆☆☆☆
The Awakening, by Daniel Corkery ☆☆☆☆
The Return, by Daniel Corkery ☆☆☆
Saint Bakeoven, by Eric Cross ☆☆☆☆

Irish words were slipping into American slang. “‘So long’ is from ‘slán,’” he’d said. “And when a fellow’s told to say ‘uncle’ it’s ‘anacal’—mercy—he’s asking for.”