Troubling News Of Constantine

Taken from the novel, Killing Of An Old Man, by John Wilson Bach

My Dear Grandson,

How are you, my boy? I call you a boy, though I don’t remember rightly when a toddler becomes a boy. I guess you ain’t even a toddler yet. Still a baby, maybe.

I try to picture you. Roose, your great uncle Roose, will be visiting me soon, and he will surely give me a full description. I wish I could hold you. As any grandfather wishes he could hold his grandchild, I wish I could hold you. It ain’t right I’m stuck up here in this hospital, and it ain’t right your Mama don’t send me no pictures of you.

Like I said, I don’t know when you become a boy, but I do know when a boy becomes a man. Least I think I do. I think it’s when you notice a girl for the first time.

This takes me back to the subject of the last letter, the lovely singer who so enthralled our tiny church.

My infatuation with the young croonette, Miss Constantine Fellows, only grew in her absence. I heard a rumor a few weeks after her song that she would be performing in the Lost Falls Baptist Church, and I pleaded with my mother to take me there for the performance. I was refused. Perhaps her performance was just a rumor, and I hoped that it was, for I couldn’t bear the thought of her being so close and me not being able to see or hear her.

There was a young man in school by the name of Balfour Hipps who regularly attended Lost Falls. He attested nothing of hearing her. I eventually reckoned the performance to be only a rumor, else he would’ve surely been smitten as I had been.

I remember not wanting to come right out and ask Balfour if Constantine had visited his church. First of all, I didn’t know him that well. He was one of those kids you can go all the way through grade school with, and though he’s always around, and you’re always in the school pictures with him and your friends, you never really know him. He could be some bank robber now for all I know.  Second of all, I didn’t want to mention her name to anyone who hadn’t heard her sing.

It seems a funny thing, but her name took on a strange and wonderful reverence to me. To say it to Balfour, to ask about “Constantine” as if the name could be for just any girl, and to ask so randomly of a boy who may never have heard her, all seemed to cheapen her name. I found myself resenting Bud a little for having written his last name behind hers on the day we heard her in our church. That was about the only thing I ever had against Bud.

One day lightning hit my life, hit me directly. In church one Sunday, after quite awhile, the service was getting on, kinda lazy like. It was one of those instances where you hear the voices of people talking around you, but you don’t really hear what is being said.

So the service was getting on, and it came to prayer request time. Usually, when he was feeling up to it, Parker Thimson would do the praying. He would amble up to the podium with his little notebook, faithfully record the outspoken requests of the congregation, and then lead the group in corporate prayer, naming each specific request. I usually didn’t listen too hard, ’cause mostly it was old folks stuff. Say, Joe

Kinsley had knee replacement last week and would appreciate your prayers, especially considering his wife has come down with the gout. Things like that. A couple of old spinster sisters seemed to make it onto the list ’bout every Sunday. One of ’em would be home for some ailment, another week the other one would home fighting the shingles, or vertigo, or some such. Seemed like it was a team effort of troubles for them two.

One week it was a boil one of ’em needed draining. Now if I had a boil that was so important I needed prayer over it… I don’t know. Just seems like some things can work themselves out without troublin’ everybody else.

I remember the requests that drove me crazy was when someone would say, “Please pray for so-and-so… it’s an unspoken request.” That just drove me batty, and I imagine a few others too. It might as well have been, “Hey everybody, I have a secret about so-and-so, but I ain’t saying what it is.”

Back to that Sunday. Mr. Thimson gets up there and opens his book and starts to record various items needed for prayer. I wasn’t listening too good, as I mentioned before, until the lightning hit. Boom! Seems like one of the choir ladies, I can picture her, but I don’t recall her name rightly… yes, I do. Her name was Mrs. Dinkins, though everybody called her Lady Dinkins for some reason. Bud said she was kin to the Queen, but I don’t know. Anyway, she says something or another, and then she said the name Constantine! Constantiine Fellows! Oh my, how my ears perked up then!

Fortunately, it was the habit of Mr. Thimson to repeat each particular request from the pulpit for those who didn’t hear the first time. We had a lot of them kind with all the old folks in attendance. So I scooted up on my seat and turned my good ear toward him to hear better.

“So it seems young Constantine Fellows, guest singer a few months back, I think we all remember, has gotten herself into a bit of sin. Let’s do remember her in prayer, Thank you Mrs. Dinkins for bringing her to our attention.”

I couldn’t cipher any more than that. It’s all I thought about that afternoon. Bud wanted to go up in the woods and hunt squirrels that afternoon, but it held little interest for me. I went though, as the thought of sitting around the house held no appeal either. We went to our usual spot, up in the hills to the west of town and a little north. I wonder if that area is still woods even? Back then, we could get lost in them woods. Not really lost, but it felt like we was a million miles from town when we got up in the heart of ‘em. And squirrels everywhere. We’d usually get a few and then get home and skin ‘em over at Bud’s.

So we was up there and I just didn’t have no fight in me. I’d take a shot or two, but I was so down. Bud finally sits down by this big old tree and asks me what’s wrong. I can lay it out for you even now, same as it was.

“You sick, BoDean?”

“No. Why?”

“’Cause you ain’t yourself.”

“I ain’t no one else.”

“Well, what’s wrong?”

I remember looking at him. I was still standing at the time, so I sat down too. But I looked at him the whole time. I wanted to know I could trust him. I knew if I couldn’t trust Bud, there weren’t no one I could trust, so I had to let it out.

“Bud…”

“Huh?”

“I can’t stop thinking about that girl that sang in our church.”

I remember at that point Bud looked down at the ground and got a little bit fidgety. I knew then that it was eating him up too. I realized that people had different ways to be bothered. I wore it all out on my sleeve, so to speak, but Bud, he kept it all in.

“Me too,” he says.

Now we was best friends, you know, but I can’t say it didn’t bother me a bit that he was tore up same as I was. I wanted the thought of her all to myself. Knowing he was thinking of her too felt like she wasn’t mine alone.

“What you reckon she did?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Must have been bad.”

“How we gonna find out?”

“I don’t know if I wanna know.”

When he said that, that he might not want to know, I didn’t understand at first. How could he not want to know, when for me it was all I wanted to know?

“How come?”

“I don’t know.’

“I wanna know.”

“I don’t think I wanna know ‘cause I wanna think of her like she was in our church that day.”

I remember tossing a couple of sticks I’d been holding onto at a little tree by the way. My hand was all clammy, I remember that.

“She cure could sing,” I said.

“Yeah…”

And that was it. That was all we said that day. We didn’t talk about her for a long time after that. Even when I found out a couple of days later what she done, I didn’t tell Bud. One thing, I wanted it all to myself, even though we was best friends. Another thing, and maybe I was rationing this out in my mind, but he said he didn’t want to know anyway.

Here’s how I found out. You remember my Uncle Jimmy from over in Haynor that come by from time to time on his selling trips.? Well, one evening he was at our house for a night over, and my mama had made him his favorite as I recall, chicken fried steak. That served to lighten him up a bit, which had him talking pretty good, which was  a rarity with him.

So he’s eating and talking about stuff over in Haynor, and then after awhile he gets to talking about happenings in other little towns in the surrounding counties. After awhile he all of a sudden says, “Oh! I almost forgot! I heard your pastor was over candidating in Higgins, for Pastor Fellows’ old job. Did you know that?”

Of course, my ears picked up when I heard the name, Fellows. I wanted to know everything. Not so much about our pastor trying for another job, but Pastor Fellows leaving his. My mama, she takes it slow and easy. I think she just says, “Oh? When was that?” I can still see her standing there in the kitchen holding her apron in her two hands, drying them and saying, “Oh?” like Uncle Jimmy had just

been talking about the weather or something.

I just couldn’t hold it in. I says, “Mama, that’s Constantine’s daddy!” She nods her head and says, “So it is.” I turned to Uncle Jimmy, who I probably hadn’t said ten words to in my whole life, and I ask, “What happened to Pastor Fellows? Did they move?”

My uncle just sits there and looks at me and chews his bite, like a cow standing in a field chewing his cud might look at you. He shakes his head a little, finally, and says, “I’ll say. To the state pen.”

That’s when I heard my mama draw in her breath and say, “My word, Jimmy, whatever did he do?” Uncle Jimmy, he finishes one more little bite, wipes his mouth with his napkin and proceeds to push his chair back and lean back in it. Finally he gets to talking. My, the things he did say.

I’ll make it brief. I don’t even know why I’m recounting this, tell the truth, ‘cause by the time you read this, everybody in it might be long gone.  It seems a bit of a catharsis for me in the telling. I hope it don’t weigh you down none though. Just know it was important in the life of your old granddaddy.

What happened was, Pastor Fellows got into trouble for going out after a young man who was trying to court young Constantine. It about broke my heart right there at the kitchen table to hear there was a young man in Constantine’s life.

Seem like sometime after she visited our church, she sang over at a church in Cobb County. Some church I never heard of. When my uncle said the name of it, I remember my mama rolling her eyes and saying, “If you call that a church.” I didn’t know rightly what that meant, but whatever those folks held onto, didn’t seem much count in my mama’s way of thinking.

So Uncle Jimmy then tells how this young man wooed young Miss Constantine after the service, which he said was kinda scandalous the way he done it. He didn’t take after her to her daddy’s liking, and evidently he was a little older than she was, so Pastor Fellows ended up forbidding her to court with him. That right there should have taken care of it, if she had just listened to her daddy, but she didn’t. She ended up sneaking around with that boy somehow. I don’t know rightly how because they didn’t live that close to each other.

Anyway, Uncle Jimmy gets real quiet after a bit and leans in to the table. By this time my mama had sat down beside him, across from me. He leans in toward her while looking at me with a quick glance, and he says, “Her daddy done caught them one evening. Out in the back seat of a car parked in the alley behind Taylor Drug, right there in downtown Higgins! Least that’s what I heard.”

Well, that just completed the rending of my poor heart right there. I had pictured her many a time cuddling up to me out on our front porch, or strolling with me out by my mama’s garden, me filling her in on all the plantings and which parts I had helped with. Her holding my arm and looking up at me like I was some kind of something.

All of that came to naught in the back seat of an old car behind Taylor Drug. I would never stroll with Miss Constantine or swing with her on our porch. I would never have her for my own.

“So when he caught them,” Uncle Jimmy goes on, “he proceeded to beat the tar out of that young man. Evidently put him in the hospital for a spell. The police are getting to the bottom of it.”

My mama just sits there. Just sits there. Don’t neither one of us know what to say.

Uncle Jimmy grabs a toothpick and leans back in his chair. “That ain’t all. Come to find out he was an abusive daddy to Constantine, or so she claimed when they was questioning her. That’s a tough one for me to fathom. But they also found out he was skimming money out of the collections at his church. Had been for some time.”

I just couldn’t believe it. The stealing’s what put him in jail, and rightfully so. I didn’t think that much of him beating on the young man, ‘cause in my mind the young man deserved it, taking her from me and all.

It’s funny. I was mad at her for being in that car with him, but somehow I didn’t blame her for it. Seems like blaming a woman for impropriety comes harder than blaming a man. I figured he had deceived her. I figured she didn’t really want to be in that car with him at all.

Now, it took awhile to come around to that figuring, but I think it provided me some measure of comfort to figure it. After all of it, I just wanted her to never have done it.

Nothing ever came of our pastor trying for Pastor Fellows’ job. He stayed around a good many years after that. I don’t know if anyone besides us even knew he tried out for it. I never heard no more about the whereabouts of Constantine, or her daddy, or the young man he put in the hospital.

It got me thinking, though, who had more culpability? I think that’s the word I want. It’s a fancy word for guilt. Can’t hardly find a dictionary here in this hospital. I asked the nurse for one once, but she said we couldn’t have none because we didn’t take care of them. I told her I didn’t know exactly who “we” were, but I could certainly take care of one. Come to nothing, though. I never got the dictionary, so I’ll just stick with culpability as the word I want.

Pastor Fellows should have never taken that money.  That boy should have never talked Constantine into that car. I don’t see nothing wrong with our pastor looking around at other pastoring jobs. And Constantine should have never allowed herself to be deceived. So I guess three out of the four have culpability.

So it all got me to wondering. You might wonder these types of things by the time you’re my age, and by then I suppose I’ll have the answers. I’ll be in the hereafter by then, and I won’t have no way of telling you what I find out. Just like my own Grandaddy can’t tell me now that he knows. We find out, each one of us, on our own.

When God goes to evaluating our lives, which part of it does He look at the hardest? What if I’m a good boy my whole life till I get to be a grown man, and then I do something awful, and then I never do good to make up for it? Is it all the same? Is all the good I done at first to no count because of the bad I followed up with?

What about Constantine? When she sang in our church that day, it was a gift from heaven. I believe that. But God knew right then when she was so enrapturing us, what she would do just a little while later with that boy. He knew it right then! Does that mean her song come to nothing? Was God pleased at all with that beautiful song from the heart of an innocent?

What about the young man? Say he straightened up and flew right from then on out. Does he still have to pay for what he done, or is it just wiped clean from his slate? And Pastor Fellows… does all the preaching he done prior to that come to no count?

Which part of my life counts against me and which part goes for me? Does Constanting get to go to heaven? I sure hope so. Deep down in my heart, I find myself still holding out for some strolling with her, even if it’s somewhere in the beyond.  As for me, if I was to die right here in this hospital, I feel my chances to be pretty good. But I’m staying on the narrow way now just in case. I suggest you do the same. Once you fall off, it’s hard to get back on.

I am going to close for now. It troubles me to ponder on the ways of people sometimes. The older I get, the more I realize how slippery life can be. I don’t mean to end on a depressing note. I am tempted to tear this letter up and not tell you about these things, but it took me awhile to write it, so I’ll just include it.

Maybe later I will take it out, but then you won’t know it was ever there in the first place.

Maybe that is better. Never to know things in the first place.

I hope to see you soon, or rather to hear tell of you at any rate. I love you little one.

Grandaddy

Names Can Hurt Me…

I would like to take a moment or two and agree with some people I usually disagree with. Not that many folks care what I think about this, and not that it’s even in the news lately… but something about it being the pro football playoffs, combined with the fact that I have no radio to listen to in my car during my morning commute (I have too much time to think)…  these things lead me to think that The Washington Redskins should change their nickname.

They should. Even in light of faux white guilt and the current collective pseudo-sensitivity to all things racial – even with all of this – the Redkskins should be called something other than the Redskins. It is a derogatory and offensive term for a group of people, and it shouldn’t be used.

We would never call a sports team the Washington Honkys or Washington N– or Washington Yellowman. We wouldn’t. There would be a hue and cry amonsgt us. However, with the Redskins its seems that the only ones offended are certain Native Americans (don’t like the term but utilizing it here for clarity) and certain gamma males and hip, young, naive white people. Problem is, there aren’t enough of them to make a big enough stink to change it.

Point is, I wouldn’t care if there was a Washington Honkys or Washington Crackers or Washington Pasty-Faced, Can’t Jump, Don’t Have Rhythm White Boys. I really wouldn’t, even though I fit all of those descriptors.

Well, I do have a little bit of rhythm. Mama Bach likes it when a soul song comes on and Big Daddy Bach turns up the volume and then sends that sultry look at her and opens his arms and starts dipping his shoulders and swinging his hips and… well, anyway. Ahem. Where was I?

Oh yes, I really wouldn’t mind those nicknames for a sports team.

However, I can understand why people of Native American heritage DO take offense at the name, Redskins. Not Braves, not Indians, or Chiefs. Just something about Redskins doesn’t seem very nice.

Soooo… I have one issue here about which I agree with many liberals and progressives.

We soon part ways, though. Very soon. You see, while I find the name offensive, and I think it should be discontinued, I think the government has no place in MAKING anyone change it. It’s free speech. If enough people are offended, market forces will force the issue.

Imagine this…. a sports team owner starts up a pro football franchise in, say, Memphis. He owns the team, so he gets to name it. Let’s say he comes up with the name, Memphis Cotton Pickers. I imagine that is offensive enough for many, but he insists on it. Enough people raise their voices in protest, refuse to buy tickets, or watch on TV, etc. Soon, he’ll change the name all right to something more palatable to all.

Because he learned the error of his ways? No. Because he wants to sell tickets and make money.

So do the Redskins. If enough people complain, refuse to purchase tickets, buy merchandise, or otherwise spend money on the product, then the name will change.

But they won’t do that. Or at least they haven’t yet. Bottom line, not enough people care.

Yet here’s my complaint in this tiny forum. It’s offensive to me.

Some Republicans Make Me Want To Vomit.

As I sit here in the early evening on a cold winter’s night, it is comforting to take pleasure in some good economic news. Gas prices are down, significantly. $4.00 a gallon gas is a distant memory. Today, I paid $1.95 at the pump. A minimum wage job can now support buying over 4 gallons of gas for every hour worked. Woo hoo, good news. Of course, if the local, state, and feds would tax less, it could pay for even more.

Surely, things are looking up in America. Who gets the credit…

“Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has a message for Americans reveling in a spate of encouraging news on jobs, gas prices, economic growth, and insurance coverage: You’re welcome.”

This is when I head to the bathroom to visit Uncle Ralph in his Buick.

Are you serious, Senator McConnell? You took office in January of 1985. 30 years ago. The national debt at that time was 1.82 trillion. It is currently 17.82 trillion. That’s in excess of $500 billion added, per year, for every year you have been in office. Now, I wasn’t paying real close attention in Civics class, but I do remember something about Congress having some sort of authority regarding spending. I don’t really know. I’m just a regular schmoe out here in flyover country, but 17 trillion dollars seems like a whole lot to me.

So why would I thank you, Republicans, for the items you listed?

1. Job growth? Too busy working to decide whether you did that or not. Cut taxes on wages.
2. Gas prices? Seems like I read that OPEC didn’t cut production and that the oil price drop, while enjoyable (except for those frackers out in North Dakota losing their jobs… see number 1 above), will be temporary. Gas will go up. Cut the fuel taxes.
3. Economic growth? Did GDP go up recently? Is the quantitative easing really equivalent to growth? Cut taxes.
4. Insurance coverage? You are taking credit for, I assume, the passage of Obamacare? Do you really want to claim that? Cut taxes.

Cut taxes, Senator. You and your ilk, cut taxes.

Cut taxes.

Next time you’re feeling good about your work in Washington, Republicans, take a look at this…

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

Pretty to look at, in a quixotic way, but sobering.

The Democratic response is typically humorous, of course.

“Democratic National Committee spokesman Mo Elleithee told reporters in a statement, ‘The fact is, under President Obama we’ve had 57 straight months of private sector job growth leading to nearly 11 million jobs added. All Republicans have given us is a government shutdown that cost the economy $24 billion. I get why he (McConnell) wants to take credit for the economic recovery. But maybe he should first do something to help contribute to it.’”

Here’s the deal. Democrats are children. Those Kentuckians who sent you to Washington, Senator McConnell, need you and the other Republicans to be adults. Not to be RINO’s or to cater to special interests, but to cater to your Constitutionally-limited role as a federal government.

Cut taxes. Quit spending money. Then take credit.

S*itting Bull

As further evidence of the continued decline of our great republic, it is noted that a certain Native American, whose Indian name is Elizabeth Warren, is being considered by some as a POTUS candidate.

Now, Ms. Warren elicits none of the physical characteristics of a First Nations person, save her high and exotic cheekbones (note sarcasm). She looks to me to be a public school elementary principal (pity the children), or perhaps a bank teller, or DMV employee. No, this fine woman actually wields influence in the vaunted halls of our Congress.

Mostly, Senator Warren complains… about Wall Street, big business, successful people, those kind of folks. She decries individualism and capitalism. She complains about successful people, and has ironically used her shrill voice to become successful herself. Kind of like a Michael Moore of the political class, without the flabby paunch, or goofy hat. But with, as noted, those fabulous cheekbones.

Of course, no one in the media holds her responsible for her claim to be part Indian. Said claim helped secure her seat at Harvard, some say.

According to the Washington Post, “Warren first listed herself as a minority in the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Faculty in 1986, the year before she joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She continued to list herself as a minority until 1995, the year she accepted a tenured position at Harvard Law School.” Furthermore, “The New England genealogical society clarified in a statement that it has found no proof of Warren’s self-proclaimed Native American lineage. The group also told The Globe that the candidate’s family is not listed in an early-20th century census of major tribes, known as the Dawes Rolls.”  Interestingly, when she applied to the University of Texas in 1981, she listed her ethnicity as “white.”

Elizabeth Warren, Senator from Massachusetts, will be running for POTUS in 2016. She says that she currently is not a candidate, and currently she isn’t. But power corrupts, and the clamor of the masses can be heady. I believe it is telling that she is being considered at all, proving further that the mass media-fed stupor of the liberal electorate is unfettered by sanity.

As noted elsewhere, “Sitting Bull (Tatanka Iyotake) was a fierce enemy of Anglo-Americans from a young age.” So it is with Ms. Warren. It is a worthy comparison of these two First Nations people. He, a fierce warrior and respected tribal elder. She, a shrieking squaw falsely grasping at greatness, while the liberal lemmings cheer her on.

To A Dying Outlaw

“It seems to me,” the old man said,

As he looked away out west.

“To die out here beside my horse…

It seems that would be best.”

 

“For many years I’ve spent upon

My faithful stallion true,

And I can swear upon his grave

It’s better me than you.”

 

“For sins I’ve done, I’ll pay the price,

The desert high it calls…

Right now the sunset beckons me,

And soon the curtain falls.”

 

I saw the old man slump a bit.

The blood was pooling fast.

“So, mark my words here, stranger, please,

For these will be my last.”

 

“The desert high will kill a man,

And take his years away.

So slowly do the sands collect.

That’s all I have to say.”

 

“But did you rob the bank down there

Down in the valley yon?”

He gazed at me and curled his lip,

“I’ve said my peace, be gone.”

Letter Number Eleven, From… the Hospital

My Dear Grandson,

It seems as if my most recent missives to you are so heavy and dark. I apologize for that. It reminds me of one of my mother’s favorite sayings, “A life is not all roses or thorns.” I’ve been poking you with thorns now for awhile so let me show you some roses. Another saying she had was, “Fish and company both stink after three days.” Now that one might take you a little living to truly understand, but suffice it to say it relates to my stay here in this hospital.

You see, I ain’t in the part where people are who are hurt or sick temporarily, or who need surgery and that type of thing. No, I’m up here in the part for the long term patients. That’s what I am, a long term patient. I even got to wear the clothes they give me. Say one day you was to go on a trip down to the Gulf, and when you’re there you see a shirt you might want to buy for me. That’s all fine and good. But you could bring it to me, assuming I ain’t out by then and you even want to come visit me… and if you was to give me that shirt you bought as a present I couldn’t even wear it. Nurses would tan my hide if I even put it on. They’d rather me have no shirt at all than to have one a loved one give me.

Lots of folks up in here ain’t got no loved ones. I’m so happy I got you, and Roose. Without the two of you I might go crazy. Roose is coming to visit with me next week and he’ll give me all the lowdown on what’s going on with you, so it will be like I had two visitors and not just the one.

The thing about the fish statement is that some of the fellows up in here get on each other’s nerves, so they got to keep us separated. We just get tired of being around each other, every day, in such cramped quarters. Aint’ no one of us can ever just get up and go nowhere. Sometimes there’s even fights that break out. Now you wouldn’t think a bunch of hospital patients could work up much of a fight more than a bunch of Girl Scouts, but you’d be surprised. The staff can’t be all places at all times and sometimes the tempers they flare. Aint nobody wanting to be here, so sometimes some one might say something to make another someone mad, or even just look at him wrong. Before you know it they’ll be down on the floor, one atop the other with fists flailing. Takes more than a nurse when that happens.

I just realized I’m getting into the thorns again. Seems like sometimes they start to overcrowd the roses. They sure do stick out and it’s hard not to run up against them. But let me balance all this out a little with some lighthearted fare. Then next week I’ll visit with your great uncle Roose and then you and I can talk about that in the next letter. 

There’s this one patient up in here by the name of Clyde. Clyde ain’t too bright, and some of the other fellows like to go and make fun of him. Sometimes it gets out of hand, but most the time it’s just them being mean. One day there was a bunch of us down in this room watching a TV show about outer space. It was one of them documentaries about the stars and how far away they are and what they’re made of and such as that.

Well, some of us was getting a little restless and wanting to turn the channel to something else. That’s when Clyde pipes up and says, “We aint’ never been to the moon.” Now he didn’t mean that we, our particular group hadn’t never been to the moon. He meant that no one, not one person, had ever been there. So some of the fellows get to laughing at him and he starts out on this trail saying why there ain’t no real proof about it that can’t be proved otherwise.

It went on a little till this nurse comes over and just turns the TV off. Don’t let us watch it no more that whole day. That just simmers some of them right down, and they go out to find something else to do, not that there’s that much. Clyde, he just sits there kinda smug like he done proved his point. I don’t believe it sometimes neither, tell the truth, but then when I get to thinking on it, I do believe it.

Anyway, the whole affair got me to thinking on outer space and man’s place in it. Didn’t have much else to do, so I might as well sit there and think. They say the universe is really big, BoDean, and I believe it is really big. Not too sure it’s quite as big as they say, but I know it stretches out quite a ways. Wonder what’s on the other side of it? If there is something else out there, then what is it and why ain’t it considered part of the universe? If nothing, then… well, what’s nothing? I can feel the limits of my thinking knocking right up against the inside of my head when I get to going on about this subject.

My friend J. Dean used to say there weren’t really no stars out there. That the black night was just a blanket that had some holes in it, thrown over the whole thing. Just some pinpricks the angels put in it. Course he couldn’t say with his little theory how the moon moved around. He’d just say cause it did. Course he said thunder was the angels bowling and lightning was them looking for stuff with flashlights. Sure seemed like them angels was awful busy sometimes.

Makes me wonder where heaven is. Everyone seems to think it’s up and the other place is down. I got to thinking ‘bout that, too. Guess there ain’t no way to know till we get there. There was this preacher used to come around Hooker County every spring when I was a kid, went by the name Tibbs. Pastor Tibbs. I remember one time he said he didn’t rightly know, but there was evidence that the bad place might be way down below us in the middle of the earth. If the earth is a big ball, and I got no reason to expect it ain’t, then the bad place being down don’t make much sense anyway, cause what’s down when the whole world’s just a ball floatin’ around out yonder in space? So maybe down could mean in the middle of the earth.

He said if you was to dig a hole clear down, eventually you might hear the very groanings of the departed wicked. That thought scared me to no end. There used to be this real deep pit over by the Champs Mansion. They said they had used the dirt from that pit to build up some dam somewhere way back when. It was set up in this hill so it would drain all right when it rained, but it was real deep. Course our folks all told us to not go near it. Well, after that sermon, us kids went over there and climbed down in it, and we laid ourselves down on the ground with our ears planted in the dirt to find out if we could hear anybody groaning. After a few minutes, all of us trying not to squirm around too much, Tom he lets out a yell that he thought he could hear someone way down below. Sounded like a whimper, he said. We all tried laying where he was, one after the other, but I didn’t hear nothing. J. Dean said he wasn’t sure but he might have heard something. But he was the agreeing kind, it seems.

So I wonder, on my way out, stepping through the veil as they call it, will the last thing I see with these old eyes be the attic or the basement? Sure hope I’m going up.

I can’t wait to see my own Granddaddy again. Mom and Dad, too, of course, and my brother Jim I told you about, the one that went and got killed in the war. I guess I’ll see my wife again. Now don’t get me wrong. I know she was headed up. It’s just if I get there, up that is, she might still steer clear of me like she done down here. Your mama says I’m going down, but please don’t you believe that. I want you to believe what your mama says on other things, all right, but not that. She takes no count of me, but I think if we meet up there – and I’m sure she’ll be there – all will be fixed up again. Leastways I hope so.

I want to tell you about your mama, things she won’t tell you, but I don’t want to just come right out and spill all the details all over the place. Makes it seem messy. She’s a good woman, an excellent woman, and she would have made an excellent wife, just like the Proverb says. Her truck drivin’ “friend,” your daddy, didn’t know who he had found. Now I don’t want to make you think you’re made up half-bad and half-good, so I’ll just leave it at this… your daddy didn’t recognize what was right in front of him. He had himself a real prize. She loved him, she did. But he couldn’t stay still, I guess. Couldn’t focus, maybe.

So you got his part in you and your mama’s, and the way I see it, if you can just stay focused on the good things, you’ll turn out all right. Don’t never run off on a good woman. But, anyway, I wanna tell you all about her different somehow. Maybe it’ll all come out while I’m talking about other things and people. If you got questions, you can write me back when you get old enough.

In the last letter he sent me, Uncle Roose told me you sleep a lot, just like a baby should. I can’t wait to see him next week. Ill get to asking him if you are still sleeping a lot. It’s been so long since I even seen a baby. Can’t remember the last time I held one. It would probably do my condition good to hold a baby. I’d sure like to hold you.

Roose tells me your mama calls you an active baby, that is, when you are awake. I never seen any other kind of baby but an active baby. You come from a long line of active babies, I know that. I asked Roose to try and sneak a picture of you in the mail up to me, but he said your mama saw right through that. Said he took his camera with him to visit you and told her he wanted to get a picture. She kinda looked at him and said, “No.” Just like that. Just, “No.” He asked well could he take a picture of you with him that had already been taken. Said she just sighed and then stayed quiet for a few minutes and finally said, “Uncle Roose, I done told you I don’t want him having nothing to do with my baby or with me. I ain’t never gonna change that.” Of course, the “him” she was talking about was me. Sure wish I could see you.

I also sleep a lot, up here in this hospital room. More than I should, I guess, but I don’t have that much to do, really. The staff, the nurses, they hardly ever come in here. They feed me all right, but not like I’m used to eating. Everybody gets the same thing. What I want don’t never matter.

They do let me get outside up here, get some fresh air. I see a lot of other patients out when I do that. I ain’t friends with none of them, though some of them I guess can be cordial enough if I tried to approach them. I guess I don’t see the point, since I’m getting out of here sometime. Some of them have what I have, and some have other things. It’s a terrible thing to just sit up here waiting.

The other day I was outside in my favorite spot. I didn’t have that long to be out there. After I walked around a bit to stretch my legs. I leaned up against this wall where it’s all warm. The sun hits it and just warms it right up and it feels good to lean against it and soak in some of that warmth. Seems like I get cold a lot easier than I used to. Must be from getting old.

So I was standing there and looking out at the blue sky over the trees out yonder. Can’t see too far, but there’s some wispy little clouds hanging up there out to the south, little whispers of white breath hanging there like they ain’t got nowhere to go, and I realized there wasn’t nothing between you and me, that is if your mama had you outside right then. Yeah, there was buildings and such, but if I could aim my words just right, and not take account of no breeze cause words ain’t moved by the wind I reckoned, if I could send them up toward them clouds they might just shoot out and spread out and land right on you. So I did. I looked out and I said, “I love you, BoDean’” and something else I can’t say right now.

I breathed in that sweet fresh air after sending you those words, and I hoped you would breathe the same air someday, that something good from me might make it to you, that I might just then be breathing some of the air, just a little portion of it, that my own daddy and granddaddy breathed years before. Maybe someday we will all be together and there won’t be no throwing words to the wind but saying them right to you. Right now, throwing them will have to suffice. That, and this letter. Which, I hate to say, it seems I must end.

Know that I love you,

Grandaddy

My Argument For Gun Control

I have come to believe in gun control. That’s right. Me, stolid conservative that I am, strict constitutionalist with a thin glaze of libertarianism. I believe in gun control.

I believe it is vitally important that one learns and practices how to safely control a gun.

It happened a few years ago, by my recollection of years… probably close to 25 years. Of course, the days, the week, the years, they go slowly as they are happening to you. But looking back they went by in a wink. Wouldn’t you say?

Flora Hendricks was alone in her home that night. It was the same home she had shared with her husband for many years. Alfred. Al, she called him. “What a wonderful man, “ she recollected to me when I met her. He had been dead at that time for close to 30 years. Hard to pinpoint times for me. I bet it wouldn’t be hard for Flora to pinpoint the time. Probably the exact time.

It was late when it happened. The middle of the night. As I said, she lived alone in her home. There had been no children born to the union of Alfred and Flora; I never asked why. Suffice it to say that at her advanced age that night, there were no close family members to call upon in her hour of need. Only the cold law enforcement officers. Police. Doctors. Ambulance. None of whom knew her. Alfred certainly wasn’t around. No children, as I mentioned.

Sometime in the night, while Flora slept, a young man kicked her back door in. He entered the house directly into the kitchen. In that neighborhood the houses were all old enough to have their kitchens in the back. No large and spacious open kitchens back then. No, just a small room with a door to the outside – now kicked in- and a second door into the remainder of the house. He headed straight through it.

Flora awoke at the sound of the door. Was it a dream? she wondered. She listened. The footsteps were heavy in the hall, and coming toward her. She heard them clearly. This was no dream. She whispered, “Oh, Jesus.”

Now Jesus could have come in personally and stopped the man, or sent an angel to do the job, or thousands upon thousands of angels. There is no counsel against the Lord. In the Garden of Gethsemane, when the betrayers came with Judas to fetch Him as a criminal, He responded with, “I am He.” That simple statement was enough to make them draw back and fall to the ground. (It is never a question of the power of the Lord to accomplish His purposes. No one there in person with Him during His ministry ever questioned the miracles). No, it was their response that was telling. The same guards who fell to the ground got back up and arrested Him. The same folks who watched as He hung on the cross, later exclaimed after His physical death and the subsequent shaking of the ground, “Surely He was the Son of God.”

Back to that night in Mississippi. Jesus never left the side of Flora. In His sovereign wisdom, He let her go through it. She sat up in bed. The man entered her room. He stood for a few moments in the doorway, looking around, looking at her, a helpless old bent over woman in her eighties, now utterly awakened by the beast that he was. His outline was dark against the night. She could not make out his face. She called out shakily, “Please…”

Somehow she had the strength to make it to her feet beside her bed. Perhaps it is instinctual to stand against a physical attack.

Flora was – thankfully – (only) shoved to the ground and her purse snatched from the dresser beside her. The man went back out as quickly and noisily as he had come in.

Had Alfred been there with her, and had he been a younger man, I am sure he would have stood between this intruder and his Flora. It is indeed natural for a man to protect a woman, even a Gloria Steinem. I have read that in the theater shooting in Colorado, the dead victims were found atop their women. It is not something thought of or strategized. Men are wired to protect. But Alfred was not there and would have proposed little obstacle to the criminal had he been. He had been somewhat older than Flora, and she was 86 years old. Perhaps he could have been the one pushed to the floor.

To my point of controlling guns. There is only one useful equalizer in the matters of violent men. The mere sight of a high caliber pistol could have stopped the man. A steadily held shotgun pointed at his chest could have also done the job. Had these plans not worked, a simple squeezing of even an 86 year old forefinger against the trigger would have. No one would have cared about the purse.

When I met Flora, she had divided the home into two sides. A kind of modified duplex. We rented the one half and she stayed on her side. She was a wonderful lady. She would sit out on her front porch in the evenings and watch our young son play. She would talk to us of her years growing up in the country 20 miles south of there. She would ask me sometimes, “John Wilson, do you think you might want to reduce?” Her term for losing weight.

Late at night, every night, I would see under the connecting door that her lights would remain on. She would stay up through the night, until the new day came. Fear does not remove easily. I would have gladly pointed a gun at any intruder for her. No one, including myself, knows how he will react in a true situation, of course. Having said that, in my mind if a man is willing to break into another person’s home, he is willing to risk his life.

That night with the intruder could have ended far worse. A couple of years ago, here in Omaha, a similarly aged woman left her door unlocked one night. A young illegal alien, drunk, broke in and raped her, beating her to death in the process. They found him passed out atop of her. Things surely could have gone worse for Flora so many years ago.

I’m sure she felt some measure of relief that we lived right through that connecting door. I wish she hadn’t felt the need to stay up every night in fear. I think she knew I would have come running had she needed me. I hope she knew.

So ask the politicians calling for “sensible gun laws” – we already have them – to have their bodyguards lay down their arms. They won’t. For they know better. The depravity of man sometimes calls for cold steel.

A Short Treatise On Hair, And Such

One thing I have never understood is why cosmetologists have to be licensed. It should not be necessary to hold a license to cut hair. It’s that plain and simple for me.

I am of the school of thought that says if you don’t like how your hair looks after a haircut, just wait a few weeks and it will grow back out. Why is a license needed? Why must the state regulate everything? I mean, house painters needn’t be licensed. If I want to open up a business for housepainting, I hang out my shingle and away I go. Sure, I must incorporate probably, or whatever, but I don’t have some state board regulating a specific house painting license.

Let’s take a worst case scenario. Let’s take an incredibly vain person who thinks the universe revolves around her, and let’s say she schedules a trip to a cosmetologist, or hair stylist, or beautician, or barber, or whatever the title is nowadays. Let’s say she takes incredible care each morning, Saturdays included, to ensure that her hair looks just perfect. Brushes and combs and clips and hairspray and mousse and gel, etc. – ad nauseum –  are all major items on her shopping list each week.

So she goes to the hairstylist and her hair gets butchered. She asks for this and gets that. It’s nothing like what she wanted. It’s ruined. Okay, so she wears a hat and waits a few weeks and never goes back to that stylist. Problem solved. If enough people get the same treatment from that stylist , then that stylist will have to find a different line of work. Case solved. Open and free market. Go America.

So why the need for a license? I know somewhere underneath all the talkspeak is money. Someone somewhere knows enough lawmakers to get regulatory procedures in place so that licensing fees must be paid. It’s usually about the fees, isn’t it? That’s my only plausible theory. Someone tell me something better.

By the way, what is a cosmetologist? The suffix –ology means the study of, and the prefix cosmo, I’m sure has something to do with the universe, as in cosmos. So why isn’t cosmetology the study of the stars instead of a profession for young ladies and misguided young men?

When I was a kid, I used to get dragged along on a regular basis by my mom to the beauty parlor. She would go and get her hair done, and I had to wait for her because I was too young to stay home by myself. Now, “beauty parlor” is a great name. Beauty parlor. Something about the word parlor maybe. Old ladies (probably middle aged at that time, but hey, I was a little chap) would sit around reading magazines about hairstyles while sitting under massive Lost in Space-looking hair dryers. Because of the noise, their conversations would be very loud. I learned more about carpet fabrics and curtain fabrics than a young boy should.

All that unhealthy exposure to le monde aux femmes had to be counteracted by my trips to the barber shop with my dad to get my own hair cut. Ah yes, sitting up in the big old chair and hearing all the man talk. Sports. Cars. Real life stuff. The stuff of men. Getting a free sucker and piece of bubble gum when it was all done and smelling great the rest of the day to boot.

The smells at the beauty parlor were not so great. The men at the barber shop used talcum powder and shaving cream. The women at the beauty parlor used dyes and chemicals. I bet it wouldn’t even be legal today what they used. Women would emerge from there like queen bees with their big old queen bee hairstyles piled up on their heads like cotton candy. They’d have to duck to get into their cars to drive home.

Like many things in this country, things have changed. The beauty parlor concept has seemingly melded with the barber shop concept into one unisex type thing. You go in and sit in the waiting area with sports news on the big screen while really hip music is blared out at you.

Then some Gen X or Y or Z, I forget them all, comes out and gets you and asks you how you want it cut and then charges you way too much. You don’t get a free sucker or bubble gum and you don’t hear any talk at all, not even about carpets or curtain fabrics. They stylist, if she talks at all, talks about herself.

You go your way after emptying out your wallet and you feel like another notch in the corporate hair company’s belt for that day. Another customer.  Another cog in the financial wheel of the highly regulated and fully licensed world of cosmetology. And you don’t even smell that great when it’s all done.

How They Drag The River

The rocking chair sat heavy on the front porch of the little worn-down shack, which itself sat heavy in the midst of a large expanse of cotton fields. The afternoon was quickly leaving, only to give way to another hot, muggy, windless night in the Delta.

Many people would be out tonight, lanterns and flashlights and headlights of old beat-up pickups searching the road ditches and rows of half-grown cotton, and also down by the Yazoo River, probably for a mile or two both directions, at least on this night. Sheriff Posley had said to keep the search within a mile or two in any direction from the shack, that a young boy of five wouldn’t get any further than that in a few hours, even if he walked straight in one direction the whole time, which is unlike any five year old around.

In the rocking chair sat the missing little boy’s grandmother and mother de facto, Elsie. She was no use in searching for him, as she couldn’t walk much further than the end of the gravel drive anyway. She would if she could. She certainly would. She would walk to the ends of the county and the state line, indeed as far as the river flowed, on to the ocean and to the ends of the earth if she had to in order to find the little lost boy, her only grandson. Her best bet was to sit in the chair and wait, she thought, and pray for the little boy and all the folks looking for him. Sitting was harder to do, and her prayers came fast and strong as the day grew darker.

“Please, Jesus, let him be found. Oh Lord, let him be found,” was her refrain.

Had he left, or had he been taken? A long list of thoughts and scenarios had run through her mind since that afternoon when he vanished. Perhaps he had ambled out to the fields and gotten into one of the endless rows of leafy plants and fallen asleep. They would surely find him, even if it took him waking up and crying and hollering. Or maybe he had followed the old dog, Tillie, down the road and gotten caught up in the ditch somewhere.

Other thoughts assaulted her. She tried to think through each good option and ignore the bad ones, but the bad ones preyed stronger upon her mind. What if he had been out on the road and someone picked him up? Or what if some wild dog had dragged him off? She didn’t think there were any wild dogs around.

Beside her in another chair sat Julia, faithful cousin and close friend. Julia was roughly the same age as Elsie, though she had never married and had no children. Elsie had married, and had stayed married, for 37 years, to Salem. He would know what to do, but he had been gone for six years. He had never even met little Thomas. Elsie pictured Salem’s grave out in the quiet churchyard three miles away. She closed her eyes and studied in her mind its stone marker near the giant magnolia tree along the back row of graves. The space next to it was empty, where she would be someday. How could she bury a grandson? Too painful. Another picture jumped in of a smaller grave, but she quickly pushed that aside.

“Where are you, Thomas?” she half-sighed and half-whispered, as if the little boy, wherever he was, could hear her. She dared not go inside and perhaps miss the little boy peek around the corner, as if he had never left. Julia could go inside, but not her. She heard herself groan, quietly, but there was not much competing noise this time of day. The bugs were silent yet, and there was no traffic on the road nearby.

“There, there, Elsie,” Julia had a gentle voice. She reached over and rubbed Elsie’s shoulder. “He be all right. I know it. I believe it in my heart.”

Julia rubbed a little longer, and patted softly, then pulled her arm back and looked up and out into the fields ahead of her. “I’m gon’ go look around in the yard again, sweetie.”

Elsie managed a muted, “Okay.”

“Just holler. I’m right here.”

“Okay.”

So Julia got up from her post and went down the steps to explore the little yard. There were only so many places to look, only so many hiding places for a little boy to find and play in, or to crawl up into and fall asleep, and she had already looked into all of them once, and some of them twice or more. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to look yet again, before it grew too dark to see.

Back up on the porch, Elsie sat still in her chair.

“How can a bright, sunny day go so horribly wrong?” she wondered. “Please, Jesus, let him be found. Oh Lord, let him be found.”

The worst thought she could imagine was that he had ended up in the hands of Bob Kilmerson, clear on the other side of the fields. Bob Kilmerson had done time down at the Parchman Penitentiary near Jackson for hurting a kid, though no one seemed to know exactly what he had done. The truth had been twisted and had grown into all kinds of fabrications, told over and over between the locals, each version perhaps a bit different from another. He had done time for it, whatever it was, but not enough time in the opinions of most folks. Elsie had not been happy when Kilmerson had been released. She had wondered how a man could be so evil.

Kilmerson was sometimes seen walking along the river road, getting as close as a quarter mile to Elsie’s place, but Tillie would go off barking at him when he did. Tillie had a nose for Bob Kilmerson, it seemed, and Elsie had taken comfort in that. The law hadn’t kept him in jail forever, but at least Tillie would keep him away from Elsie’s property, and from Thomas.

There would be people searching all over Kilmerson’s place and if Thomas were there… she quickly pushed the thought aside.

Tillie hadn’t barked that afternoon, though, leastways not that Elsie had heard, and that’s what she had reported to the sheriff, sitting right on that porch. He had arrived quickly, just a few minutes after she had called 911 after Thomas had disappeared.

Elsie had hung the phone up and waited on the front edge of the porch, looking out down the driveway to the road, willing the sheriff to get there even quicker than he had, and then out of his car and up onto the porch. Then she had sat down in her chair, the sheriff standing near her, his notepad in hand. He had listened, mostly, written down a few notes, and nodded his head a few times. He had asked what any good lawman would have asked.

He had then asked general questions about Elsie’s boy, Davis, Thomas’s daddy. Davis had been locked up in Parchman, too, since right after Thomas had been born, for some drug related charge. Sheriff Posley had been in on the arrest. Elsie had taken Thomas to see Davis once, over four years before, but he hadn’t seemed to care about the baby.

The little boy’s mama had run off two weeks after Thomas had come into the world, and hadn’t been seen around there since. Rumors had spread that someone had seen her in Mobile one weekend a year or so later, drunk and yelling at some young man. Another rumor had come about that she was pregnant again.

“The boy’s mother… you seen her ever?” the sheriff had then asked.

“Sheriff Posely,” she had said, gently, but starting to cry. “You can ask all these questions ‘bout Thomas’ mama and daddy, but they ain’t had a thing to do with him yet, and they ain’t got nothing to do with him now.”

She had related how she and Thomas had gone into their shared bedroom for a nap, just like they did most days about that time, right after lunch. She and Thomas would both be getting sleepy, so she would lay him down in his little bed and she would slip off her shoes and rest on her bed. She sometimes dozed and sometimes just rested her eyes. Oh, why hadn’t she just rested her eyes on this day? She would’ve seen Thomas climbing up off his bed, which he was not supposed to do, and she could’ve said, “Now, Thomas, back to bed, honey. Just a few more minutes and we’ll get up and read us a book.” And he would have complied, ‘cause he was a good boy, unlike his daddy, whom Elsie had put out of her mind right then.

But on this day she had fallen asleep, like night time sleep, out of this world sleep. When she had awakened, the first thing she had done was turn her head over and look to Thomas’s bed and seen he wasn’t in it. Blankets all rumpled up, pillow dented in, but no Thomas. And she had moved up off her bed, calling his name. Figured he had gotten up to go to the bathroom or into the kitchen. She didn’t hear the television on the counter, though. She had slipped her shoes on and called his name a little louder, “Thomas?” Looking round the house, only four rooms, calling again, “Thomas?” Her voice growing louder.

She had gone outside and had been surprised how the day had gotten on. The sun had moved over quite a ways, the shadows slanting at different, late afternoon angles. She had walked out onto the porch and yelled, “Thomas!” and listened. Nothing. She had seen a little bird swelling up its wing feathers in a tree in the yard. She had walked down off the porch and around the house, yelling in every direction, “Thomas!”

“Thomas!!” Quiet. Then back into the house, hollering some more. The house so still and silent. He was gone.

The sheriff had asked, “Elsie, did you hear Tillie barking at anything, or anybody?” No, she hadn’t. She hadn’t heard anything. Not a peep.

“Well, where is Tillie?” he had asked next, leaning against the porch post, his hat in his hand, looking hard out into the surrounding fields. She didn’t know.

He had looked around a few minutes for himself, in the shack, around the yard. He had yelled, “Thomas…!!” a few times out into the expanse of fields and sky. He could see quite far into the fields in every direction since the plants were still low. No Thomas.

He had whistled for Tillie. Maybe Tillie would come bounding out of the rows with Thomas

right on her heels, laughing at the trick he had played on his grandma.

Nothing.

He had walked back up to the porch, talking into his radio as he walked. He had then asked to go into the house and look. He had come back out, his mouth drawn into a thin line and his forehead squeezed down into a frown of thought.

He had walked the length of the porch then, thinking to himself, and then asked again for a description of what the boy had been wearing, his height, his weight. Did he have shoes on? Did he have a hiding place or a fort or had he said anything that might give a hint? Had he ever run off before, maybe with Tillie? He had surmised out loud again that that might be it. Maybe Tillie had run off and Thomas had just chased after her. He might be out in the cotton exploring. He looked again out into the surrounding fields.

“I’m gon’ send a deputy over here. He’ll be here directly. And I’ll go out on the road and look around. “

“Please go to the river, Sheriff.”

“Elsie, I’ll get everyone available out on this,” he had continued, not hearing her request. “Don’t go nowhere. Stay off the phone. I’ll call. He can’t be too far away.”

“What about the river?” she had asked, a little louder.

“Yes, ma’am,” he had answered. “We’ll get someone there right away.”

Putting his hat back on, he had jogged over to his car, yelling back to her, “We’ll find him! ‘He

can’t have gone too far. Don’t you worry.”

The sheriff was good on his word. He called in for help to find a lost or missing child out at Elsie Wells’ house on Poynter Road, five miles north of town. He specifically directed that someone needed to head immediately to the river and start there. He drove straight to the river and then, not seeing Thomas, headed to the Kilmerson place.

Bob Kilmerson lived about two and a half miles away, straight to the south toward town. However, with the patchwork of cotton fields between the two places, it required a bit of going around the long way to get there. Within a few minutes, the sheriff pulled into the Kilmerson driveway and stopped his car.

The Kilmerson house had, at one time, been a fine house. Bob’s father and mother, both long dead, had been the beneficiaries of two wealthy cotton farming families. Their marriage joined up not only two loving and hardworking souls, but thousands of acres of profitable cropland. From that, they had constructed a fine house with large windows looking out on wide, expansive porches. A front porch welcomed one and all, with each end of it turning the front corners of the house and running back along the sides… one to a side door into the kitchen, the other to a small stair leading toward the back yard. There was a back porch as well, more utilitarian than the front, and long filled with so many trinkets, newspapers and old things in general, that passage through it had become impractical.

The house presented a lovely façade to all who viewed it. However, the planned filling of it with noisy, healthy children had gone awry. A daughter had been born but had contracted polio and died as a youngster. She had been followed by a strapping boy, named after his father, Frank. The boy had died in his crib one morning as an infant. Details had grown sketchy over the years. Had this tragedy occurred more recently, it would have been diagnosed as a SIDS death.

Frank, Sr. and his wife, Bonnie, had become so disheartened at the loss of their two children, they had given up on further attempts. The two losses had devastated all of the hopes of that particular Kilmerson line. Years later, to the surprise of both, Robert Kilmerson was conceived, and delivered nine months later at the county hospital, a healthy boy. By that time, the two parents were in their late forties. The joy and energy of their lives had so subsided, that young Bob was delivered into a melancholy estate.

By the time Sheriff Posley pulled into the driveway all these years later, the house had devolved into a mean shadow of its former self. What had been straight and true was now crooked. What had been planted and maintained had been choked out long before by weeds. The cropland had been leased out rather than worked, and the income from the leases mismanaged to the point that all of it had eventually been sold, piece by piece. Indeed, by this time, Bob’s life was but a remnant of past possibility. The only thing to which he proudly clung was the fact that he was related to another Kilmerson, a brother of Frank, Sr., by the name of Cale Kilmerson. Cale had built up a successful regional chain of hardware stores in a three state area.

The industry of this uncle, Bob’s one source of familial pride, exhibited itself in a few articles of clothing he had acquired over the years, each piece displaying the company moniker, Kilmerson Hardware. The crown jewel of his pride rested in the blue denim ball cap he wore whenever he left the house. It had started to fade, though he hadn’t realized it, the proud Kilmerson Hardware stitching across the front of it remaining yet intact.

Sheriff Posely pulled his car into the driveway, noting that Bob’s pickup truck was parked in the driveway. He parked behind it, got out, and walked up to it. He looked in the back of the truck, and then walked to the front and held his hands to each side of his face while peering into the cab. Nothing unusual. He felt the hood, which wasn’t hot to the touch. There was no sign the truck had been moved recently.

He walked across the yard, his eyes alert to anything suspicious. He hadn’t been on the property in the past few years, so he hadn’t seen things up close for a while and was surprised by the general disrepair of the place. A Bible verse out of Proverbs he had memorized as a child came to him suddenly, “I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard of the man void of understanding; And, lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was broken down.” He said it to himself, halfway audibly, as he looked around and approached the front door.

He called out, “Bob Kilmerson?” No answer.

He climbed the wide steps of the once fine porch. He noticed the paint on the house, long peeled away in so many places, exposing the weathering wood beneath. The windows all looked intact, but seemed smoked over heavily with a general film from neglect.

“Bob Kilmerson!” he yelled, louder. “Sheriff Posley here! Need to talk to you!” The only response was the gentle tinkling of a half missing wind chime hanging from the corner of the porch ceiling.

The sheriff rested his right hand lightly out of habit on the handle of his service revolver holstered at his side. The doorbell was missing, only a loose wire wrapped in black tape giving away its former place. He walked up to the door and knocked, loudly. BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM. He waited a few moments, trying to see through the window in the door.

He knocked again. BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM, in quick succession, this time leaning in with his good ear toward the door, listening for a response.

“Mr. Kilmerson!! Sheriff Posley!” BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM.

He walked along the length of the porch and looked into every window. He couldn’t see much, and he saw no sign of activity within. He knocked on a few windows, gently, careful not to break the old floating glass. After making his way around the left corner of the house, he noticed the side door was cracked open. A rickety screen door hung crooked in the opening, its bottom board having carved a gentle arc into the porch floor.

He peered into the kitchen, cupping his hands and yelling for a response, receiving none. Becoming exasperated, and frustrated by the passage of time, he walked quickly back up to the front, giving two more loud knocks on the front door.

He walked along the porch, staring out into the yard as he went, turning the corner and down the other side porch and down the steps into the back yard. He walked around back, now on ground level and having to reach up to knock on the back porch windows as he went. He didn’t bother yelling out anymore. He had made his presence known. There was no noise of any kind, no drone of an air conditioner which should have been running at this time of day with the windows all closed up.

Not wanting to waste any more time, he walked around the house, calling out Bob Kilmerson’s name a few times. He then walked quickly back to his car, calling in for the Kilmerson phone number as he walked. A moment later the response came back and he punched the number into his cell phone. He reached into his car and grabbed his gloves and walked back through the yard and up the steps and up to the front door.

He knocked, BAM-BAM-BAM and yelled, “Bob Kilmerson, open the door! It’s Sheriff Posley! Come to the door!!” BAM-BAM-BAM. He stood perfectly still and listened, hearing nothing from inside. He pushed the SEND button on his phone and waited a moment. The phone inside the house rang in response, and rang again, and again. He disconnected the call.

Looking around into the yard and out onto the road, the sheriff pulled on his gloves. He grabbed the doorknob gently and tried to turn it. It was locked and wouldn’t give. He leaned over, concentrating, and tried with a little more force to turn it, pushing gently as he did so. The door was secured shut.

Straightening up, he let out a loud breath. He stared at the doorknob, biting gently on the inside of his lip and turning things over in his mind. He called in on his radio to make sure a deputy had been sent out to Elsie’s. He then requested for more help to be sent to form a wide perimeter and scour the area for the boy. The response came back that volunteers were already on their way, having heard through various channels that Elsie’s little boy was missing.

He nodded his head, thinking. He turned his glance toward the yard again and back to the

house, reaching up to rub his chin. He turned and walked again to the side of the house with the open door. As he approached it for the second time, he yelled out again, “It’s Sheriff Posley, Bob! Just here to check in with you! Are you home?”

He walked up to the screen door and listened again. No sound. He grabbed the handle and slowly pulled the door open, leaning in to look around.

He yelled yet again, “Bob!! Sheriff Posley! I’m coming in!” Looking back once more toward the road, he disappeared into the house.

A few minutes later, the sheriff exited from inside the house back out onto the porch through the same door, closing it back the way it had been. He had worked as quickly as possible, looking into every room, every closet, under every bed. The house was large but sparsely furnished and unkempt.

He had peeked into the attic by standing on a chair. He had gone quickly down into the basement. It was clear that Bob Kilmerson was not at home. It was also clear that Bob’s only way to get anywhere of reasonable distance was still parked in the driveway. Unless someone had come by and picked him up. Or unless he was out in the detached garage.

Sheriff Posley moved quickly to the garage. It was hardly of much use anymore, with its one overhead door having fallen off its track years before. One cursory look through the opening told the sheriff that Bob wasn’t in there.

The sheriff took one last walk around the house, circling around the outside edge of the yard and looking as far as he could out into the cotton fields. He wondered if Bob had seen the sheriff’s car coming up the road and had run out into the fields. He quickly dismissed that idea and returned to his car, got in, closed the door and sat there, thinking.

He figured that if Bob wasn’t off with someone, and he couldn’t think of who that would be with the man being such a recluse, then he must have gone on one of his walks. It was getting late in the day, though. He had seen Bob on his walks before, and it always seemed to be earlier than this. He called in to see if anyone had found Thomas. Any sign at all? With the expected negative response, he decided to drive down the road along the river himself. Maybe Bob was walking, or maybe Sheriff Posley would see for himself some sign of the boy.

Elsie didn’t realize how many searchers had been out. Within an hour of Sheriff Posely first calling it in, even more had gone out, leaving their jobs and their errands undone. People had heard that a deputy had been called out to Elsie’s place, and that her little Thomas was missing, and that her cousin Julia was on her way out there. The day was getting on. Some folks had dropped their activities and had driven out and parked along the road nearby and gone out into the fields. Some had just stayed to the roads and ditches. Salem Wells had been a well-liked man, a much respected man, and Elsie was in trouble. They would surely try and help her.

Searchers would also be out to the river. Elsie hated that the river was able to take her little boy under and kill him. Thomas couldn’t swim, and the water was muddy. Couldn’t see more than a couple of inches down into it. Thomas could have been playing along the bank and slid right in and…

“Oh Lord, have mercy,” she cried quietly. “Have mercy on little Thomas. Let him be found, Jesus. Have mercy on me, oh Lord.” A few giant sobs escaped out from her suddenly-heaving chest and spilled more tears down her face and neck and onto her collar.

By early evening, the light was dimming and the bugs had come out in full force. Not just the ones making themselves seen, flying around and landing on things and gathering near outdoor light bulbs, but also the ones out in the fields and tree lines, singing or scratching their leg songs, or whatever they do. Elsie had lived here all of her life, right here in this shack, and she loved the sounds of the bugs in summer. Except tonight she wanted to hear Thomas, and the bugs were so loud. If he were out there crying, they would outdo him.

Elsie wanted to fight off the approaching shadows. She wanted the fields to be suddenly stripped of their crops, and the river dried up, and the buildings lifted up from their foundations, exposing all of their contents. She wanted a full view in every direction for as far as needed to find her little Thomas.

Down by the river, one of the searchers saw something in the mud. He waved the beam of light back over it. It was a shoe. A small tennis shoe, it looked like. He walked over and picked it up. Yes, it was. He wiped some of the dried up mud off of it. He saw white with blue stripes all over, just like the sheriff said Thomas was wearing that morning when he disappeared.

“Clyde, come ‘ere!” he yelled to his buddy. “It’s a shoe! Hurry!”

Clyde, the other searcher, ran down the bank. He waved his light around frantically, first on the shoe and then all around the surrounding ground.

“Oh good Lord, Russ, it is. It’s got to be his.”

Clyde scanned out over the slow moving water with his flashlight. He then moved it back over

the surface, more slowly and methodically. It was a smooth, lazily roiling solid surface of brown. He looked straight down at the very edge of the river closest to him. The bank was rather steep, not much grass, mostly muck. There was nothing below him in the water that he could see. He knelt down as carefully as he could, for his footing was unsure. Russ did the same. They reached down into the water, almost up to their shoulders, waving around blindly in the dark muddy water, hoping to feel something. The river was slow but strong. It sought to pull them in the more they reached into it.

“Feel anything, Clyde?” Russ asked.

“No, nothing. Nothing but mud and water. God, help us.”

Russ sighed deeply, the sound almost complementing the slow sigh of the river. “I’d go in, Clyde, but I ain’t that good a swimmer.”

“We’ll get the sheriff on the radio right quick,” Clyde responded, still waving one arm in the water. “They’ll get divers in here, maybe drag it. You go on up to the car and call in, and I’ll keep looking.”

“All right.”

Russ rose up off his haunches and started back up the bank toward the car. Both men felt quiet pangs of guilt for not going in, though it was the sensible decision. It was dark, and neither man could swim very well. Had the lost boy been one of their own, however, they would have gone in, and they knew it.

Clyde waved around in the water some more, as deeply as he dared. Thomas could have easily

slipped down the steep bank into the water and disappeared. Clyde sat back up and scanned the river some more, then down at his feet. He could make out where he and Russ had positioned themselves in the muck when reaching into the water, but he wasn’t trained in any kind of tracking or investigating, being just a volunteer searcher. He decided to back away and let the experts come and do any further exploring. He and Russ had stepped around enough, making holes here and there in haphazard patterns, their boots caked with the heavy wet mud.

He could hear Russ back up at the car talking somberly into the phone, giving location, describing the shoe. He looked downriver with his light, sending the beam out into the middle and over to the other shore, not that far away. Back to the near side. Up and down the bank. Back out into the river. A few branches reached out from the bank downriver, but nothing appeared caught on them. He turned and looked upriver. He stuck the flashlight straight out from him and peered into the light, straight across and into the field beyond, the beam growing wide and dissipating into a useless opaque glow not much distance past the far bank.

He backed up the hill toward the car, making more prints in the mud as he went. The holes he made grew shallower as the soil beneath grew firmer away from the river. About halfway back up he stepped on something. He stopped and reached down to pick it up. Something made of cloth. He thought it might be another shoe, though it seemed too pliable. Holding it in the light, he saw that it was a hat. A baseball cap. He turned it around in the light. It read, “Kilmerson Hardware.”

The night seemed especially dark to Elsie, the blackness out beyond the reach of her porch light like a wall. She sat in her chair, on her porch, her largeness a mere dot on the wide earth, her house a dimly lighted island in a great expanse of nothing.

As the night moved along, Elsie felt her life leave her. What remained was just a shell, a covering, and would remain so. Her eyes, staring ahead, were those of a stranger. She had worked her way through so many Kleenexes, and then napkins, that Julia had finally gotten her a sturdy dish towel. Her thick arms and hands, grasping the now mangled dish towel on her lap, were not her own.

As for Julia, she had pulled a chair up beside her dear cousin, and sat leaning against her, her arms alternately around her and at her own side. She loved Thomas, too. Not as a mama or grandmama, but all the same she loved him. Her voice sometimes prayed in the early morning darkness, and sometimes she sobbed gently, trying to restrain herself. Her thin shoulders would bob up and down when she did so.

The sheriff called on the telephone. Julia went inside to answer.

“Tell Elsie we don’t have anything yet, but please know everyone is out looking. We’ve got some dogs we’re gonna take out. They’re world class.”

A soft “Thank you,” was all Julia could muster. She set the phone down and sought for her chair back on the porch and sat down beside Elsie again. Both of them were tired. The night had brought little relief from the heat the day had brought. Elsie’s neck glistened. Julia had found a fan at some point and would wave it intermittently at herself and at her cousin. A glass of water she had poured earlier for Elsie remained full, resting on the porch railing.

Within 15 minutes, the sheriff had driven back out and was standing on the porch beside them. “Thought maybe I could do better than a phone call.”

Elsie sat, silent. Julia managed a soft, “Thank you, Sheriff.”

Sheriff Posley took off his hat and fidgeted with it. He looked out at the yard, and then at the woman before him, and was utterly unable to tell her about the shoe or hat. He had planned to, but he couldn’t.

“Miss Elsie, I believe we will find him. I do.”

Elsie didn’t respond.

“It’s likely he just wandered off this morning when you were inside and somehow got turned around…”

“They’d a found him by now, Sheriff…”

“Well now, not necessarily. I’ve known of cases where…”

“You check Bob Kilmerson’s place? What’d he say?” Elsie looked up at the sheriff, her voice strong for once.

“Yes. We’ve got men over there right now looking around. Have been all day.”

“Looking around? You ought a turn that place upside down! That man grab my Thomas, I swear, I’m gonna…”

“Elsie, we are looking everywhere, including Bob Kilmerson’s. First place I went after I checked along the river.”

“What he say?! You ought a put that gun there to his head’s what you ought a do! Then he’d

tell you ever’thing.”

“Elsie, I can’t do that.” He didn’t want to tell Elsie that Bob hadn’t been at home, that no one knew where he was.

“We’re looking everywhere. You know, just so you know, Mr. Kilmerson didn’t do time for child molesting… I know people say he did, but that’s just a rumor.”

“What he do then? That’s what I heard.”

“It was an assault charge, and it was against a minor, but it was an older teenager, and it wasn’t a sexual assault. By the law, technically, he did it. That’s why he went to Parchman.”

“Why you go over there so fast then, if you don’t think he did nothin’?”

“’Because everyone else automatically thinks he did. Most people’d want me to just go over there and take him to jail and throw away the key. Maybe I should, just for his own good.”

“Sheriff, don’t come around here havin’ no pity for Bob Kilmerson.”

“I’m not, Elsie.”

“What’d he say when you went over there? He go walking today? He seen my little Thomas?” Elsie looked up at the sheriff.

The sheriff looked back. “He didn’t say nothing, Elsie. He don’t know nothing.” The second sentence seemed necessary in order to explain the first sentence.

“Well, I don’t know then. He don’t seem to care what people think about what he did.”

A picture of Thomas face down in the river suddenly took over Elsie’s thinking. She dropped her head into her hands, “Oh, Jesus. Oh Lord.”

Finding the shoe and the hat so near each other changed the strategy of those who searched. Sheriff Posley left again, leaving only Julia and a deputy behind with Elsie. Elsie wrestled to keep away the picture of her little boy in the water.

At times, it seemed as if she had no thoughts at all. To rest, her harried mind detached itself completely. No reason escaped from it, no details, only an all-consuming, hated grief.

Those working out in the dark branched into camps working two possible scenarios, drowning or kidnapping. One group kept on the hunt for the little boy, at the same time searching for the local ex-felon who had suddenly disappeared as well. The other group consisted of those who had the needed expertise and equipment to begin the task of dragging the river.

Elsie sat still in her chair and looked out into the yard. Just then something moved in her peripheral vision. She turned her head to look, as a man appeared out of the cotton and stole across her yard. She had seen him somewhere before. Out on the road. He wasn’t a searcher.

She watched in growing horror and silence as he came to the porch and walked up the steps. It was Bob Kilmerson. Elsie couldn’t move. She noticed that she was alone with him, the deputy and Julia having left the porch.

The bugs grew suddenly quiet. Kilmerson stopped before her, looking out into the fields before them, and then down at her in her chair. He looked hard at her, taking off his hat and tilting his head a little.

Elsie surprised herself by saying, “Why, Bob? Why you so bad?”

Kilmerson didn’t answer, but just looked at her and held his hat in his hands, running a finger or two over the stitching. He finally sighed and looked straight down at his hat. He shifted his weight and looked back up at her.

“Miss Elsie, I didn’t hurt your boy. I didn’t do it.” He moved his head back and forth gently as he spoke.

Elsie closed her eyes and thought to call out for Julia.

His voice continued, “That time way back yonder with that teenage boy – he was an animal. I was just plain defending myself, but no one believes it. Could a been anyone he went after, ‘cept it was me. No one believes it!”

“I don’t neither! Get on off this porch!” Elsie wanted to move but couldn’t.

Kilmerson didn’t move. “You gotta know,” he spoke again, “just for your own good. I ain’t done nothing.”

Elsie reached up to hit him, but instead of hitting him she asked for his hat.

“Gimme your hat so I can prove you done come around here bothering me. Them dogs’ll find you! Gimme that hat, I say!”

“This hat won’t help nothin’.” He looked down at the porch floor.

Just then a light appeared way out on the gravel drive and silhouetted Bob Kilmerson against it.

Seeing it, he put his hat back on and backed away slowly, whispering back at her, “I ain’t done it.” He then turned and descended the steps and walked quickly into the yard, growing smaller in the coming light.

The light grew stronger and Kilmerson disappeared into it. Elsie opened her eyes to see a car coming toward her into the yard. She had drifted off. Julia sat beside her still, her head sagged to one side, her own attempt to stay alert having flagged as well. Elsie felt lost, beyond anxiety, just lost. She looked to see who was getting out of the car in front of her.

It was only the deputy who had been on watch. He had decided to drive out into the adjacent roads, searching with his headlights and flashlight, but to no avail. He walked slowly up to the porch and climbed the steps, seating himself in a chair. He had only the will to murmur, “Elsie,” as he took his seat.

Elsie straightened herself a bit and looked around. The thought occurred that at least it wasn’t cold. She heard the deputy’s phone go off, and heard him answer it dutifully with a resigned, “Yeah.” A loud sounding voice came over the other end, so loud that Elsie could hear the voice, though not make out the words. It was a brief, staccato burst of language, the termination of which caused the deputy to shoot his legs out and sit bolt upright, instantly and in one snap, quite alert.

“They what?!!” His voice was sharp, and he didn’t wait for the answer to finish before turning to Elsie and loudly and clearly proclaiming, “They found him! They found him! He’s okay! Elsie, he’s okay!!”

The words seemed to bounce right off of Elsie at first. She looked down, breathing quickly to ensure she hadn’t dozed again. She turned her head back to the deputy and burst out instinctively, her voice a barky croak from lack of recent use, “Thomas?” Perhaps it was Kilmerson, and not Thomas, whom they had found.

The deputy stared at her and frowned, that possibility hitting him too. He stood up and said into the phone, “Repeat that, Sheriff. They found Thomas?”

He was still for a moment as the chatter resumed on the other end of the phone, followed by a quick fist pump and a swiveled turn to Elsie with a thumbs up and a smile that engulfed him from the neck up. His head nodded rapidly. He loudly whispered “Yes!” as he received the confirmation.

Elsie sagged. She wanted to jump off the porch and run through the yard, to wherever they had found him, but she sagged. She wondered where and how they found him. Who found him.

She felt herself standing up and raising her arms, her palms up at angles, her mouth dropping open as it smiled. She looked at Julia and then she looked up through the porch ceiling, as if staring right into the heart of heaven. She wished that she could. She wished that she could reach up and throw her arms around the Lord Jesus Himself.

A slowly building siren of emotion came out, “Aaaaaaaaahhhhh….” building into a crescendo, and falling again as more breath was needed. Again, “Aaaaaaaaahhhhh….” as the full brunt of the news hit her. She sobbed, her large, full frame in motion. Her hands retreated to her face and she yelled, “Thank you, oh Lord!”

She heard Julia, also now standing, “Thank you, Jesus!! Thank you, Jesus!! Oh, thank you, Lord!!” as her own hands had gone automatically to her mouth in prayerful salute. The deputy was still getting details over the phone, a finger over his ear as he strained to listen over the two women. They turned and hugged each other and wept loudly.

At the conclusion of the call, he hung up and filled them in on the details that he knew. A search dog had lit on a scent where the shoe had been found. There had been some running up and down the road for a bit, and then some failed forays into the opposite cotton field at several locations. Then, along a tree line, edging a field, they had found him. Huddled up next to a fallen tree. Elsie started crying again, muffled at first and then loudly, not caring how loudly, her heart exultant and her mind at ease.

She knew she would want to hear these details again, at another time, but all she could grasp at this moment was that her baby was alive and that she wanted to hold him. She grabbed onto Julia again with one arm and waved the other in the air. She nodded her head up and down. She loved Julia. She loved the deputy, and the sheriff, and she loved the searchers.

By early light of the new day, a gathering of adults sat happily together on the front porch, surrounding a chatty Elsie and equally verbose Julia. There were giggles and cackles and even a few guffaws. Thomas stood before them, his clothes messy, trying to stifle a yawn, but unsuccessfully. Tillie rested on her belly at Thomas’s feet, her front paws out straight before her, her head up, looking nowhere in particular, but seeming to pay attention. As much as he could, the boy felt deep within that this must be an important moment. He tried not to fidget.

“Now Thomas, you just tell me and your Aunt Julia and Sheriff Posley and these nice deputies exactly what happened, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am, I will.” He looked up and down the line and then settled his eyes on Elsie.

“Well, to start with, where did you go… before you ended up in that field for the night?”

“I went to the river to try and catch me a fish. Am I in trouble, Mama?”

“To the river? Young man, that is the last place you better ever be going without your…,” she caught herself as Thomas’s bottom lip swelled out and water filled his eyes. His hand moved to wipe away tears before they fell.

Elsie redirected, “Honey, you’re not in trouble but you could a been! That river is dangerous! Come here, sweetie!” She pulled Thomas to her and held him as he sobbed a bit. Julia reached over and patted his back gently with one hand, pinching the tears from her own eyes with the other. “Oh, my baby boy,” Elsie cooed. “You be a big boy, honey.” His head nodded up and down against her belly, and then he stood back in position.

“Okay, so you wanted to catch a fish?”

“Yes, ma’am, I did.”

“Well first, honey, back up and start in the bedroom while Mama was resting her eyes and you were napping. What got you to the river to even think about catching a fish?”

“I saw a commercial, Mama, where this boy was fishing with his daddy, so I decided since I didn’t have no daddy I could go by myself.” Thomas glanced at the sheriff and deputies, wondering suddenly what a man might think of him.

The words “Didn’t have no daddy” pierced Elsie. It was a deep cistern that needed cleaning, but not today.

“Honey, you still need an adult to go to the river, baby… so you were layin’ in the bed and you started thinking about that commercial?”

“Yes, ma’am, I did. And I wasn’t sleepy so I got up and clicked on the TV to see if I could watch it again, but it didn’t come on.”

“Okay, so…”

“So I sat on the couch a little and tried to look at books. I got my pictures out and tried to color, but I just kept thinking about that boy fishing.”

“Didn’t none of us see any colorin’ pictures, Thomas, when we were lookin’ for you.”

“I put ‘em back up in the drawer, Mama, like you always told me to.”

“Okay.”

“You were snoring, Mama, so I knew you was tired. I didn’t want to wake you up.”

“You could a woke me up, honey.”

“I didn’t want to, but I wanted to go fishing real bad.”

Elsie sat back in her chair, somewhat impressed at this newfound determination on the part of her grandson. She smiled a little and said, “Go on, baby.”

He then recounted how he had gone out on the porch and had started petting Tillie. Hearing her

name, the dog looked up at him from her watch at his feet. She closed her eyes in approval and readjusted her paws as he reached down and rubbed her head.

Thomas continued. He had known that he was not to leave the porch, ever, if Elsie was

sleeping, but when Tillie had run off after something in the yard, and he had run after her. He had caught a glimpse of the road, the road that he knew led to the river, the river that he knew had fish in it. He had come back up onto the porch and come inside to check again that Elsie was still asleep, and then he had gone to the river, Tillie with him.

The boy’s resolve turned suddenly against Elsie as she realized just what that determination could lead to. She wished suddenly for Salem to be present, or that the boy’s daddy had been a good man like Salem and that he was here. Here with her and Thomas instead of absent, a 45 minute drive away, sitting behind bars until long after Thomas would be a man himself. She closed her eyes and sighed, remembering Thomas’s daddy, himself as a boy, playing on this very porch and in this very yard surrounding her.

Then the sheriff said, “So, did you see any fish in the river? I’m glad you didn’t fall in!”

“Well, I didn’t see no fish. The man grabbed me.”

The adults sat up in unison.

“What man, Thomas?” Elsie asked urgently.

“That man you don’t like. The one who walks down the road sometimes. He grabbed me and started yelling at me.”

“Slow down now, honey…”

“Yes,” the sheriff interrupted, “we got to hear this part slow, Thomas.”

The boy was silent. He bit his lip but didn’t talk. No one spoke.

“Okay,” Thomas eventually answered, looking out over the yard with a little shrug.

The sheriff looked at his deputies and continued, “So you were standing there by the river, trying to see some fish…”

“Yes, sir, but I didn’t see none ‘cause the water was all dirty.”

“And Bob… I mean… the man, he grabbed you?”

“Yes, sir. Well no, he started yelling at me first.”

“Yelling what at you, honey?” Elsie asked.

I was standing there wondering where all the fish was and how do they see in all that dirty water to know where they should be going. Do they look like they do on TV, Mama?”

“I don’t rightly know, Thomas. What did the man do?”

“I heard him yelling at me to get away from the water.”

“Where was he?” the sheriff asked.

“He was up on the road behind me when he was yelling, but when I turned around he was

running down the hill at me.”

Thomas looked down at his feet and started playing with his hands.

“Runnin’ at you?” Julia asked.

“Yes, ma’am, right at me. I got scared. Tillie saw him, too, and started running up at him from

down the river a little. She was growling and yapping at him. I didn’t have nowhere to run to. I knew my mama didn’t like him.”

“What was he yelling?” the sheriff asked. “What were his words? Can you remember?”

“Yes, sir, I remember.” He kept yelling, ‘Get away from there! Get away from there!’ Over and over. Then he got to me, so I sat down ‘cause he started grabbing me, and I didn’t want him to be grabbing me so I balled up and kept pulling away, but he bear hugged me, and I started yelling to let me go.”

All of the adults were silent.

“He didn’t say nothing to me after that, but he carried me up the hill to the road. Tillie was biting his leg, and he was yelling at her to stop. I did hear that. I started kicking and trying to scratch him. I knocked his hat off!”

Thomas’s eyes grew wide with the retelling, his head turning just a little as he looked down at the porch floor.

“And you lost your shoe,” the sheriff said.

“No, sir. I didn’t lose it. It fell off when I was kicking.”

“Well, what happened after that?”

He set me down up by the road and said to stay there. Then he kicked Tillie till she let go of him. He said that he was gonna go back down and get my shoe and take me home. Asked me where my mama was or did she know I was down there by the river. Said I could a fallen in.”

“What did you say?” Elsie asked.

“I didn’t say nothing… I waited for him to go back down there, and then I took off running across the road into the cotton to hide.”

“Did he come looking for you?” Sheriff Posely asked.

“I never did see him after that. I ran though, and got real low down on the ground so he couldn’t see me.”

Thomas reached down and petted Tillie’s head again.

“Tillie followed him and was barking some and growling back down there, but I just hid myself. She come up and found me a little later. Maybe she run him off.”

It was silent. Elsie rocked back slightly in her chair. She looked out through the yard and saw in her mind the road that led down by the river. She knew the bank of the river from years before. She pictured the late afternoon just gone by, with her and Julia still on the porch and Thomas crouched down in the early summer cotton. A slight breeze blew in from the yard, whispering a little.

“He might have my shoe,” Thomas offered.

Elsie started in, “So that’s all he did, then, was bear hug you and carry you up to the road? Just grabbed you around like this?” Elsie made a bear hugging motion.

“Yes, ma’am, kinda like that, ‘cept I was scared. I couldn’t slip out a him grabbing me. I thought he was gonna hurt me.”

Thomas’s eyes grew a little red and swollen and started to pool with tears.

“Come here, baby, let me hug you,” Elsie reached out to him. Thomas ran to her and climbed up into her arms and onto her lap, burying his face into her shoulder. He sobbed a little.

Muffled, his voice came out, “Mama, that man gonna come ‘round here looking for me?”

“No, baby.” Elsie rocked him a little and cradled the back of his head in her hand, leaning her head against his. “No. He ain’t gonna come around here. Don’t you worry.”

Somewhere off past the fields a dog barked. Tillie’s head rose up. She sniffed the air.

Thomas perked up and looked out into the yard. “Mama, can I play now?”

Elsie looked at the sheriff, who nodded his head silently with a little shrug of his shoulders. He reached over and patted Thomas on the head.

“Thanks, Thomas. You did real good today. I’m glad you’re safe, and I don’t want you near that river no more, you hear?”

“Yes, sir,” Thomas responded.

“And another thing,” the sheriff continued, “you want to go fishing, you have Miss Elsie call me up and I’ll take you. And it’ll be better fishing than that old river.”

“Yes, sir.”

By late afternoon of that day, Bob Kilmerson’s body was found by a search team, a few hundred yards downriver from where it was presumed he had fallen in. Had the locals known that he had died trying to save a boy, they might have accepted him as their own. Of course, Tillie had seen it, but she couldn’t understand it for herself, much less add a word recounting it to the adults gathered there on her porch.

The man had redeemed his own broken life. He had been the one to happen by, and he had been the one to take notice of a little boy on the edge of the river. He had been the one to pull the boy back. No one else had done it. Then he had gone to retrieve his hat and the boy’s shoe, and just for curiosity, had gone back to that same edge and had peered into the dark water. And he had gotten too close and had fallen in.

Tillie had seen the man, unable to swim, thrashing and sinking in the muddy depths of the slow river. She had barked at him, and then she had followed her master’s scent into the cotton to hide with him.

A few days later, amidst the still joyful reunion of a grandmother and her little boy, after some meals of the boy’s favorite foods, and after some other visitors had come and gone, Sheriff Posley drove into the driveway. He pulled a chair from the trunk of his car and came up on the porch and sat by Elsie. Thomas played on the end of the porch, pushing some toy cars back and forth, making vroom noises, crashing the cars against each other and against the corner post.

“Salem sure would be proud of you, Elsie,” the sheriff crooned as he sat down. “He sure would be.”

He leaned back and patted the arms of his chair with his hands. “And he’d be proud of you too, Thomas,” he said to the little boy.

“I think he is, Sheriff,” Elsie smiled.

“You’re right, he is.” The sheriff smiled at her, a twinkle in his eyes. His lips pursed.

Elsie looked toward Thomas, “And there ain’t gon’ be no more running off by Mr. Thomas, is there?”

A return volley of more vroom noises and a muted, “No, ma’am,” came back. A loud crash of a toy car hitting the corner post followed.

The same toy car soon careened out into the yard, where it rolled over and over and ended up on its top in the tall grass. Thomas watched it until it lay still. 

“I ain’t never gon’ leave my mama again.”

A Time To Say Goodbye

From Final Days With Fran and Millie…

It had been many years, probably fourteen at least, maybe fifteen, since Victor had been back to the place of his birth, the place of his childhood. His sister, Millie, had never left. His other sister, Fran, had left as a young woman, married, had children, lost her children, lost her husband, moved back in with Millie, and now lay dying in the back bedroom. Victor was coming back now, of his own will, and at Millie’s specific request. He had received the letter two weeks before:

My dear brother, Victor,

Frances is dying. Will you please come see her and say your goodbyes? Stay as long as you can. I remain,

Your faithful sister,

Millie

 

Victor’s hometown was set in the middle of Tyler County, not that it mattered the name of the county, nor the name of the town. It could have been any town, as long as it was small, and it could have been any county, as long as it was rural, and in the South. Somewhere in the South. The town happened to go by the name of Cophelia.

He had been born in the very house he sought out, 78 years before, between his older sister, Frances Camilla Stevelin, and his younger sister, Elizabeth Mildred Stevelin. He lived his life right between the two of them, one a year older and one a year younger, the two sisters as different as night is from day, as some say. He was kind of twilight in nature himself, or perhaps mid morning, depending on the day.

Sometimes he wondered why there was no acceptable word in English for mid morning. Twilight worked fantastically well for its time of day. Not still daylight, yet not nighttime either. What term could be acceptable for not still morning, but not yet done with the morning ideal – the sunlight still filtered – if it shined at all? He wondered this, only due to his profession giving him the luxury and time to wonder such things. He was a professor of English Literature at a small Southern university, or he had been at one time. Now retired, he was just Victor.

How he arrived back at the house he grew up in on Larsen Lane, in Cophelia, does not really have much pertinence. Some 78 year old males are still able to negotiate time and space well enough to get from one point to another. Millie hadn’t given that much thought – did she ever give much thought? – when she wrote her urgent plea for him to come home. Victor hadn’t thought about his boyhood home road being named Larsen Road in a long time. When he had first realized as a lad that he had an interest in words, and the etymology of words, he wondered how a Swedish name like Larsen had snuck into Cophelia. He knew no Swedes there. Nothing else of Swedish influenced moniker lay within the town boundaries that he knew of.

There the house sat, on Larsen Lane, a dead end road that ended in a bean field currently. When Victor was a child it had ended in a cotton field, and he remembered hearing as a child that his own great grandfather had at one time owned that very cotton field at the end of the road. He wondered if his great grandfather, either as a boy or as a man, perhaps as an old man, had ever walked the same steps he walked, ever trod soil now covered over with pavement that was now itself even grown old.

There the house sat, but it was now encased with bars. Bars everywhere. Over each window rested black iron bars, vertical bars, such as one sees at an old fashioned jail. He noticed the houses surrounding the one he sought out were now decrepit. A general sense of neglect and disrepair lay heavily over the somber stillness, as a fog covering a field  on a cool morning.

Rooftops sunk in, cars parked in yards, grass no longer grass, but patches of collected weeds, shocks of green milkweek and crabgrass here and there. Dirt for ground cover. His father, Felix, hunched over an old contraption of a fertilizer spreader, dressed in thin cotton coveralls and a broad brimmed hat, meticulously doling out nutrients to an accepting and luxurious carpet of thatch… his father carefully doing that all of a sudden appeared in his mind, so many years before. What would his father think of this? Where had the grass his fathered nourished gone to? Were these patches the bastard descendants of that lovely sod of his father’s virile years?

Victor stopped on the cracked and buckled sidewalk for a few moments, taking it all in. This was all part of coming home to Fran, and to Millie.

The roar of a large car came to him from down at the corner where Larsen Lane intersected with Hobbs Street. Victor had always enjoyed that name, Hobbs. He had wondered if a Mr. Larsen had known a Mr. Hobbs, and had Mr. Hobbs been English, and had they ever compared notes of their respective old countries.

The car came nearer. Ancillary to the sound of the car came the sound of the music within the car. Victor had heard such music before, once. In a not very nice neighborhood in a large city. He had escaped that music before – he did not agree with it being termed music at any rate – and here it had come and found him again. He watched the car, a long white Cadillac proceeding toward him, angling this way and that, as if the pavement under the tires was full of small breakers.

The car slowed, almost imperceptibly, as it approached him there on the sidewalk and turned in front of him, right into the driveway next to his boyhood home. He remembered his uncle driving into that very driveway years before, probably soon after World War II, and in fact that uncle – it was Uncle Red – had driven a Cadillac, too. Though he looked nothing like this man driving this Cadillac.

The car engine turned off, but the music continued for a moment longer. Seemingly louder now that the engine no longer accompanied.

“Rifella!” The music continued still, a quite conspicuous rhythm going nowhere and repeating itself.

“RIFELLA!!!” Victor saw the driver lean up inside the car and turn a knob to stop the music. The front window came down halfway; a puff of smoke, gray smoke on gray air, came out of the window.

“RIFELLA!! Get yo’ ass out here! Now, bitch!!!”

Victor didn’t know what to do. The Cadillac, and the man in the Cadillac yelling for whomever Rifella was, in a most inappropriate way, sat between him and his projected path to his own boyhood home. His boyhood home where Millie sat, undoubtedly in some overstuffed living room chair, if not in a wheelchair, and where his other sister Fran lay dying, probably in the back bedroom.

He wondered if Millie had heard this man yelling, and if Fran had. What if Fran had perished just at that moment, or a moment before, and her last vision as she floated up to glory was of her little brother standing flummoxed. Solitary and still as a statue of an old man – which he felt himself to be, particularly at that moment – and the last sounds she heard with what was left of mortal ear had been that dreadful, incessant beat of the music along with the verbal outburst of this man, who obviously had no manners to care about an old lady dying in the back bedroom of her childhood home.

Not knowing what to do, Victor did nothing but stare. The curiosity that incessantly germinated within him found good soil and sprang up suddenly. He leaned over a bit, not 12 feet from the open window of the car, and peered into it, looking over his glasses. He smelled the cigarette smoke, though the gray fog had since dissipated.

The man honked the horn now. BBBBRRRRRRRRRUUUUUUPPPPPPPPP. Immediately after the honk ended, the man turned in his seat and rose to get out of the car, seeing Victor standing there looking at him.

“What you looking at, old man?” he sneered, head immediately cocked.

Victor knew himself to be an old man, indeed, and if that wasn’t enough, he was a small man physically as well. How many times in his 78 years had he wished he could take care of a young punk like this?

“Excuse me, young man, I don’t mean to stare, certainly. I just wondered what year your car was, for I once had a Cadillac about that year…”

“Yeah, man, maybe you had a horse and buggy Cadillac, huh?” The young man sneered and bobbed his head up and down, evidently pleased with his self-perceived quick wit. Victor saw that he had tattoos up and down his skinny white neck, metal plastered over his front teeth. He did not look well, and he had wispy, old man type hair.

The man turned toward the house and yelled, “Rifella!! I ain’t waitin’!”

Then he turned back to Victor and grunted, “You ain’t got no ride now, huh, old man?”

Victor shot back, “You know… pardon me, but I didn’t catch your name.”

“My name’s Chase… like I chase the ladies, ya know?” The man squinted a little and searched restlessly through his pockets, looking for cigarettes, and finding none. He leaned back and reached into the open window of the car, grabbing the pack off of the dash.. He looked back at Victor.

“Oh?” Victor extended his hand. “Do you catch them, or do they run away?”

“Yeah, that’s good! You some kinda comedian or something?”

“Yes, I am, in fact! Vaudeville! Heh heh…”

Chase stared at him, ignorant.

“Mr. Chase,” Henry went on, undaunted, extending his hand to Chase. “I’m Victor Stevelin, and it’s very nice to meet you!” He smiled broadly.

Chase didn’t know what to do. How many years had it been – indeed, had it ever happened at all – that another man had extended an open hand to him and expressed pleasure in meeting him? He wasn’t sure how to shake someone’s hand in a regular and professional way.

“It’s okay, Chase. I won’t bite, I’m not after your girl, and I’m not gay. Now shake my hand.” It’s all Victor could think to say at that awkward moment with his hand having been offered and now hanging in limbo. He had heard that line sometime in a movie. He had hated the movie, but the line seemed apropos.

Chase slowly extended his hand to reach Victor’s, staring blankly at it as he stretched it out, watching it as a spectator, bemused, as if some strange force was raising it up on an invisible pillow.

Two people were watching the odd exchange between this small old man, dressed in a pressed cotton shirt with a light jacket and creased pants, and this virile, misdirected young man, he with the injected green ink in his neck, the sweaty, stretchy cotton tank top with a hole in the side, his pants hanging amply down below the halfway point of his buttocks, purposefully showing off his colorful underwear.

One person watching was Rifella, looking out of the upstairs bedroom window of the house where the Cadillac sat quiet in the driveway, the two men shaking hands, putting the finishing touches on her overadorned face. Fifteen gold and silver colored earrings, hoops and straight pins stuck into her flesh in various places. Hair as dark as black painted charcoal, cut and teased to all manner of misshapen sizes and angles. Eyelids pasted with some weird pinkish shade and eyes outlined with dark lines, grossly overdone with sharp edges. She glanced down, wondering who the old man was, her highest aspirations that evening being the desire to get very drunk and have Chase pay for it. She hoped he had gotten paid that afternoon, as he was supposed to. New job for him. Third one since they’d met five months before.

She yelled as she hurried down the steps and dodged an old chest freezer sitting unused – for a decade – in the front foyer… the word “foyer” being far too eloquent a term for what that room had devolved to…she yelled to no one in particular, for no one who stayed there cared, “Going out!” She didn’t know why she bothered yelling anything.

The other person watching was Millie, from the front window of the boyhood home of Victor, the house she had never left. She had seen that boy before, the one in the Cadillac, and she didn’t like him. She didn’t like his clothes or his car, and she certainly didn’t like Rifella, and she didn’t like the things she just knew they were doing when they went out. Things she felt ashamed of even thinking.

She spoke back through the room at Fran in the back room, not turning her eyes off of Chase. “Fran, Victor has arrived! Victor is here! Oh, Fran!”

Fran didn’t hear her. Fran didn’t hear anything anymore, at least not that Millie could tell. The nurse who came, Dr. McGill, the cleaning lady, all of them said Fran was past the days of hearing anything. Millie wondered why the doctor wasn’t anymore sure about that than the cleaning lady. Millie thought that as long as there was breath in her dear sister, there might be the chance that Fran could hear her.

“Did you hear me, sweetie? Victor is here! He’s over talking to that dangerous boy in the big car. And here comes that awful woman… oh my, that scrap of cloth she’s wearing for a dress!…”

Chase backed away a step and sat back down in the car, closing the door. He stared at Victor.

Victor half waved and wiggled his fingers at Chase and Rifella, who was letting herself into the other side of the car, fidgeting with the back of her hair.

“You get paid, Big C?” she asked. “You get paid today, baby?” She pulled down the inside visor and looked closely at her face, turning this way and that, inspecting. She slapped the visor back up and settled back.

“Let’s go, man!” she said, backhanding Chase on the arm with a firm, quick tap. The car started, the music and rhythm of percussion started, the rattling of speakers turned up too loud started.

The car backed up. Victor continued to wave.

Rifella flipped the visor down again and looked at her face. “Who’s the old man?”

Chase didn’t answer. He thought of the handshake moments before.

Rifella asked again, louder, “Who’s the old man, C?”

Chase put the car into drive, looking for all purposes as if he had met a ghost.

“Well, hell, baby, I don’t care anyway. You get paid today?”

The Cadillac moved away up Larsen Lane toward Hobbs, and Victor continued to wave.