The Cave That Held My Grandfather’s Faith

I pulled the photograph out of my bag anyway, held it out with a hand that would not quite stop shaking. It was me at nine years old, squinting into the sun, standing next to a walnut sapling no taller than my grandfather’s hip. “He planted that tree the day I was born,” I said. “My grandfather. Joab Fickett.”

The man looked at the picture for a long moment, and something in his face softened, just a little, the recognition of a story bigger than the one he had walked into. “That’s a fine tree,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what to tell you. We bought this place fair and clean from a title company. I don’t have any way of reaching your mother.”

I nodded, because there was nothing else to do with the nod, and I turned around before he could watch a grown man’s face come apart on his front lawn.

Walking back down Persimmon Road, I felt eyes on me from porches I used to wave at without thinking twice. A curtain moved in a front window two houses down. An old man rocking on his porch stopped rocking long enough to watch me pass, and I understood, the way you understand weather changing in your knees, that I was still exactly what I had been nine years ago in the minds of half this town. Not a man who had served his time and come home to try again. Just the Fickett boy who went to Jefferson City.

At the Harlow Springs Grocery, where I used to bag feed and sweep floors for my grandfather’s friend who owned the place, a teenage girl was stocking a shelf of canned beans. I asked if she knew where my mother had gone.