Chapter 53
Fifty-Three
Woodsmoke drifted from the chimney of the Carter homestead, where I first drew breath fifty years earlier.
Under the ol’ hickory out in the yard, October had dropped her golden skirt at its trunk. Leaves eddied and slapped against the furrowed bark.
Jackson left his cane and limped out the cabin door, then folded himself into the swing, pulling me close to him.
Moss-stitched woods and the whispering waters of Troublesome Creek greeted us from our candlelit porch. I rested my head in the hollow under his chin, the night choirs of warblers and brook-song awakening a hymnal across the coal-dusted hills, shielding us under a star-smattered Kentucky sky.
A breeze lifted across weathered boards, and a bright-yellow leaf landed on my shawl. I pressed it to my chest and know’d she was here.
She’d been gone now for years, but I could still feel the ol’ girl’s watchful eyes.
I stepped down and crossed to the hickory that Pa planted long ago.
Inhaling, I took a breath of mountain-raspered winds, the pine and earthen rot pleated, its perfumes tangling.
Sometimes, if I cocked my head just so, I could still hear her gentle whimpers, shivery whinny-haws, and quarrelsome snorts whistle through pine boughs, scraping down the ol’ Kaintuck mountains.
I bent over Junia’s small marker and brushed off her engraved stone, and laid the gold-jeweled leaf across it.