Moon Over Manifest

We’ve been on a two-day hike and have had the good fortune to come across trenches already dug. You can tell a lot about a man by the trench he digs for himself. Some are shallow and clumpy. Others are well dug and roomy enough for two. Kind of feels like sleeping in someone else’s bed for a spell, but I always feel a debt of gratitude to whoever dug it. Funny thing, it also makes me take a little extra care when I dig one so it might be a place of respite for the next guy to come along.

I’m reminded of a line in a book I read in high school. “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” I can guaran-darn-tee you, these foxholes won’t be found on any map after the war is over. But for now, my home is wherever me and my buddies lay our heads at night. And where we pray to God we’ll wake up in the morning.

There’s been some talk of peace. Armistice, they call it. Hope is something most of us have been none too familiar with lately. Some men try to fight it off like a bad cold. Others let it wrap around them like a blanket. Me? It creeps quietly into my dreams and it looks like Pop, and you, and home.

Vive la nuit (Long live the night),

Ned

The Shadow of Death

AUGUST 23, 1936

Miss Sadie stared ahead. This time she lingered in the story after she told it, as if she was looking for a different ending.

Even though she had not told me to go, I stood and started out the door. Then, turning back, I took the compass from the hook on which it had hung all summer. My work here was finished. It felt like we’d all done enough.

I can’t say I knew where I was heading when I stepped off her porch and walked down the Path to Perdition. I knew when I got to the end of the path that there was no place else for me to go. I wandered around a little but eventually found the tombstone I’d come across the day Lettie, Ruthanne, and I had been frog hunting. The one all by itself in the clearing, near an old craggy sycamore tree.

I studied the letters on the tombstone, letting them tell me their story. Letting them help me make sense of something that made no sense. The letters spelled out my father’s name. Gideon Tucker. That was my father. The boy, Jinx. They were one and the same, as I’d wondered about and hoped for all along.

Sitting down with my back against the stone, I took the compass from my pocket and opened the latch. Inside were the words I’d mistaken for the compass maker’s name. Now I knew them for what they were. ST. DIZIER. OCTOBER 8, 1918. This was Ned’s compass, on which Gideon had engraved Ned’s date of death and place of burial. Because for my father, that was the day he began his wanderings in the valley of the shadow of death.

I sat mourning the loss of Ned, a young soldier at arms. Grieving the death of a town. Wishing for my father, who was still wandering.

My tears had been falling for some time when Shady came for me. He stood beside me, stroking my hair.

“He thought it was his fault, didn’t he, Shady? Because he helped Ned raise the twenty-five dollars to join the army underage and then Ned was killed. Because he thought he was a jinx.”

“I suppose.”

“So what happened that night? After the telegram came about Ned?”

Shady sat down beside me. “He left and never came back. With Ned gone, I suppose he felt he’d done the one thing the town couldn’t forgive him for. We didn’t blame him. No, sir. There was nothing to forgive him for. The problem was we couldn’t forgive ourselves.”

“For what?”

“For not being able to live up to what we’d convinced ourselves of. That there was something special about Manifest. That we could overcome our past and start over.”

“What about the springwater, the metal ore in the ground?”

“Some of us started believing our own tale. That it might be healing water, hallowed ground. But it was just water and dirt, plain and simple.”