by Dot Jackson
Of course there was money enough in Charleston. That amounted to a carrot on a stick. No way could I imagine my daughter sending the wherewith for me to stay here. Something else was going on too—and here is something I guess I have just chosen to forget—one day my blessed courier drove up in the yard and hollered, “I see the power company is atter you agin!”
“I don’t want anything they’ve got,” I said.
“No, but I b’lieve they want somethin’ YOU’VE got,” he said. Fact was, several letters had come that had gone unopened. I finally confessed to the man that I couldn’t really read, so he read this latest epistle to me.
“Mrs. Lamb,” it said. “Since we have had no response from you about our need to acquire your property on Big Caney River we must remind you that we have applied for a permit to dam the river at a point one-fourth mile above the falls of Big Caney. When that permit is secured we will hold eminent domain. If you wish this acquisition to occur other than through the courts, please respond at once. We are sending a copy of this notice to your daughter, Mrs. A.P. Templeton, Jr., in Charleston, in case you have not received our communications.”
As the road signs say, The End is Near. Something is about to happen. I know the children are coming now. Maybe it is time. Maybe it is time. Fly south, beloved Bird. Raise a family.
Here! I see your eyes. I have waked you with all this talking. It’s not day yet; that light is just the moon come out from the clouds. What’s the matter? You want to go? Well, hold on, I will let you out. Oh, my, I don’t blame you. How beautiful it is. How other-worldly that smell of moss and woods. You hear the narrows?
And what is that? Bird, do you hear it? I’ll swan.
Good God, Ben Aaron! Play on, joy of my life. I’m coming!
Don’t you leave me.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for this opportunity, at long last, to thank a few of the dear people who have helped with this book over so many years, in so many ways.
I thank, first, the sainted relative whose adventure of the heart was such a family disgrace that her story would not pass the lips of a solitary soul, until only a couple of old ladies, then still among the living, knew of it—and one of them told—in a whisper, with far fewer details than I would have liked.
I would like to thank an unknown young woman who, back in the early 1960s, rode the Park Road bus I caught each day to work. She always sat behind the driver and talked to him about nothing I remember, in a voice as light and haunting as the smell of moonflowers. For over a decade after the job was history and the bus ride no more, that voice lingered, as Sen’s, to narrate this story.
I thank and will ever love the encouraging, supporting people, and the people whose knowledge, from the tides along the Battery, to how to rob a grave in plain sight, to making a computer work and other arts of publishing, combined to save me (somewhat!) from my own ignorance. Among them, but by no means all: Eleanor Parker; Mary Beth Gibson; Jerry and Linda Bledsoe; Pat Borden Gubbins; Bea and Ed Broadrick; Mary Liles Gravely; Suzanne Kirk; Angelica Cranford Hastings; Jim Scancarelli; Dannye Romine Powell; Barbara Webster; Tom and Mary Layton; Frank Guldner; Sharyn McCrumb; H.J. “Doggy” Hatcher; Charlotte Ross; Anna Simon; John Ware; Frances Marvin Mauldin; Pat Edmunds; Olivia Fowler; Karen Swann; Sandra Woodward; Hazel Ritch; Greg Brock; Gayle Edwards; Starkey Flythe Jr.; Tom Johnson; Louis Henry; Perry Morgan; Novello editors Frye Gaillard, Amy Rogers, Ann Wicker and Carol Adams; book designer Bonnie Campbell; my agent Michael Congdon—and my children Tom, Katharine, and Fred and his beloved Mary.
To those, listed and otherwise, who have passed beyond my expressions of gratitude, I hope with all my heart that you somehow know it, anyway.
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