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Writer McColley engagingly chronicles his life’s events with a focus on his determination to solve a harrowing family mystery. As a veteran, devoted family member, and experienced farmer and builder, the author has chosen to examine in detail the tenor of the times in which he was raised. That history is overlaid with the bizarre and heartbreaking events of January 1997, a snowy Sunday, when his daughter Tammy died in a baffling house fire. Tammy’s two young daughters were safe and unhurt, as was her husband, Garry. As the incidents surrounding this tragedy were explored, it became clear that the fire was not accidental or caused by the children as Garry claimed and that Tammy’s relationship with her husband had been fraught with near-constant abuse. The discrepancies between Garry’s version of the conflagration and reports from Tammy’s friends and coworkers about her evident fear of her husband prompted the author’s determination to uncover the truth.
The mystery is interwoven with McColley’s memories from childhood, during which he learned valuable moral lessons from his grandparents and absorbed the many physical and economic factors entailed in farming as he rode in a horse-pulled wagon and shelled corn with his grandfather. This opened a lifelong pathway to agricultural endeavors. After high school and local jobs, he entered the US Navy and served on the famed warship USS Enterprise during the Vietnam War. Having met his future wife, Ruth, while on home leave, he married her. The two acquired a farm, and after many fraught changes, settled contentedly in Minnesota. Despite many hardships as he aged and the wear of his unrelenting focus on his oldest daughter’s death, he was finally able at last to ensure that justice had been done surrounding Tammy’s tragic loss and feel comforted that his granddaughters would have a safe, kindly upbringing.
McColley, who has served on and led farming committees as well as church and township boards, began writing at an early age and felt called, through spiritual channels, to compose this comprehensive memoir. The principal impulse was Tammy’s death, with his struggles to reveal and establish the facts borne out by the inclusion of many legal documents, underpinning his personal zeal to protect his young granddaughters from harm and assure them of the privileges, including complex inheritances, to which they were deserving recipients. Many recollections are vividly drawn from his reflections regarding the particular details and broad philosophy of agriculture. An admirable and interesting aspect of McColley’s home-based occupation sprang from the recommendation of a friend to participate in the recruitment of foreign exchange students through Minnesota’s MAST program. This spawned relationships that provided a learning experience for him and his family and would result in their several overseas visits, expertly detailed in this chronicle, to places where their student helpers originated and beyond. Later, he and Ruth attended various empathic religious workshops, which stimulated him to begin keeping a journal. This dedication to that discipline is evidenced in the many lively, day-to-day episodes offered. McColley’s panoramic, historical, legal, and personal view of life’s traumas and triumphs should serve as rich material for group discussion and individual study.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review