The Cave That Held My Grandfather’s Faith

I was on my knees in the dirt floor of a hollow the old folks in Harlow Springs used to call Preacher’s Cave, digging with my bare hands until my nails tore, when I hit something solid under six inches of clay. Wood. A box. And carved into the lid, so faint I had to run my thumb over the letters twice to be sure I wasn’t imagining them in the dark, were two initials.

J.F.

Joab Fickett. My grandfather. Three years in the ground, and somehow he was still leaving things behind for me to find.

Four days before that, I had walked out through the gates of the correctional center in Jefferson City with everything I owned in a clear plastic bag: a Bible with a cracked spine, a photograph gone soft at the corners, and a bus ticket to a town I had not seen in nine years. I told myself the whole ride home that Harlow Springs would still be Harlow Springs. The Case IH dealership on the highway. The Baptist church with the crooked steeple that never got fixed after the ice storm. The old Fickett place at the end of Persimmon Road, with the black walnut tree my grandfather planted the year I was born.

I was wrong about exactly one of those things, and it happened to be the only one that mattered.

The house looked the same from the road. Same porch, same tin roof, same tree grown taller and wider than I remembered, its branches heavy with September leaves. What was different was the swing set in the side yard, and the two kids chasing a dog around it, and the man who came out onto the porch wiping his hands on a rag when he saw a stranger standing at the end of his driveway with a duffel bag.