The Cave That Held My Grandfather’s Faith

The half acre turned out to sit close enough to town that the men from the chapel showed up on a Saturday three weeks later with lumber, a rented generator, and more casseroles than one small cabin build had any business needing. Word travels fast in a town that size once the right people decide a story is worth telling differently than they had been telling it. By the time the walls were up, half of Harlow Springs had heard some version of what happened in that hollow, and most of them had quietly revised their opinion of the Fickett boy who went to Jefferson City into something closer to the truth: a man who had made a hard mistake young, paid for it in full, and come home to find that grace had been waiting on a hillside the whole time, patient as limestone.

I planted a cutting from my grandfather’s walnut tree at the corner of that new cabin the same week we raised the roof. It will not shade anything worth mentioning for another twenty years. I did not plant it for me. I planted it the way he planted the first one, for whoever comes after and needs a place to stand.

These days I keep a small garden going on that half acre, help the pastor with the church’s re entry ministry on Wednesday evenings, sitting across from men who are wearing the exact expression I was wearing the day I walked back into Harlow Springs with nothing but a duffel bag and a photograph gone soft at the corners. I tell them what I learned in that hollow, because it is the only thing I know for certain is true. The world can take your house. It can take nine years, and your name in a town’s mouth, and every plan you ever made for yourself. It cannot touch what somebody who loves you decided to bury deep enough, and long enough before you needed it, that even the worst years could not dig it back up before you did.