Rayne's Forest

About the Book

In the latter days of the Vietnam war, two soldiers are sent on a mission. They step on a land mine and one is blown to pieces. The other has a multitude of wounds including the loss of his memory. A pair of dog tags is picked up and put on the live one who is taken to a hospital. The other is buried and an empty coffin is sent home to his family.The soldier who lived was given the name Bill Rayne although he doubts that is who he really is. His mother and sister back in Pensacola are uncoomfortable around him and this adds to his doubts about himself. After a name keeps coming into his mind, (twenty years later) he decides to go to Washington to see the VietNam Memorial. On the bus that stopped in Meridian to pick up passengers, Diana Clayton Warren and her first husband´s mother come aboard. Thus Bill and Diana come face to face. Both seem familiar to the other. Diana sees the stranger has her first husband´s eyes. She shies away from him. That part of her life was over a long time ago. But Bill falls instantly in love with her and when he finds out that her first husband was killed in Nam and his name was Dex, things start falling into place. He wants to be Dex? Dex´s mother wants him to be Dex but Diana doesn´t want this. She is comfortable in her marriage to Dex´s friend who came home from Vietnam to court and marry her. Although their marriage is not one of grand passions, she is afraid of Bill and what he can do to her well ordered life. Other things conspire to tear up her comfort zone, leaving her free to explore her feelings for Bill. She fights this feeling for a long time. The title comes from one of Diana´s children asking, "what is it like not to know who you are?" He tries to explain his loss of memory as “being lost in a forest and not even knowing what a tree is.” He stumbles over obstacles and keeps going, searching, reaching and refusing to accept his life of emptiness. His trials, tribulations, and successes as well as those of the woman he loves are what makes this story.

About the Author

Murphy has spent all her life in Mississippi except for a few years in army camps in South Carolina, Georgia and Germany. While working at Peavey Electronics she began attending Meridian Community College for an Electronics Degree. She soon decided writing was what she wanted to do and spent several years in night classes learning her craft. She says, “I thought when I retired I would have all the time in the world to write. It is still like the filling in a sandwich, the bread being housework, church work, taking care of a husband, a grandson and two dogs. None of these are things I can ever put down.” She is the author of a poetry book and has thirty different published credits in different small magazines.