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about it. You just call him up and ask him what it is he’s got in mind for you.”
    â€œJust call him up,” she’d say, like he had a phone number and a direct line.
    She thought I had a natural inclination for words and theorizing, suggested I considered journalism or science research. When I came home and told my parents what she had said, my mother smiled and nodded, her way of showing me she was proud. My father mulled it over much like a theological proposition and said, “Words and writing is a dangerous way to make a living; I’d pick the science option.”
    I laughed at the irony of this statement coming from a blind man trying to farm on the side of a hill. But thenhe continued. “I never want to see no record of the stupid things I ever said. Be like a snake you only hit and stunned, he’ll be back to bite.” Then he reached out his hand, a sign to my mother, who came over to his side, bringing him a cup of coffee.
    Even though I understood my daddy’s wisdom and had seen only one newspaper in my whole life, I still liked the idea of writing. I thought that with my teacher’s guidance and support I could leave the mountains and the farming and make a life for myself with words.
    But Dr. Lovella Hughes, the only person in my life who made me think I could do something other than dig up bloodroot or ginseng, milk cows, and grow a productive garden, left the mountain just as I was finishing seventh grade. She developed tuberculosis after caring for the Crainshaw baby when the mother died and the father just ran off. Everybody knew the baby was sick, that it had taken in its mother’s bad milk; but Dr. Hughes was not about to let the child die just because he had a bad start. She cared for him as long as she could then turned him over to the state.
    We heard that she lived a long time in one of those sanitariums near her hometown of Wilson and that she was never sorry for doing what she did. The baby grew up to become a famous lawyer, a senator or judge or something. To this day I don’t think he has any idea howshaky his beginnings were and how one black woman, who rode a train, two buses, and a farm truck up the mountain to teach the children, gave him back his life.
    When Dr. Hughes left I lost the motivation to keep learning, the drive to write reports or stories. So I quit school and helped on the farm and took care of my parents. There was always something that needed to be done, cows to be milked, weeds to be pulled, floors to be swept. And with just the three of us trying to make a go at harvesting crops and managing a farm, there was no extra time for studying or planning for the future.
    Sometimes I think about how my life might have been different if I had finished high school and made it to college. I think I could have been smart and ambitious. I could have put the words together describing a life or researched the patterns of animal behavior. I could have been more interesting. But just like Dr. Hughes made a choice to put herself at risk to nurture the life of an orphan boy, I sacrificed the thoughts of being educated and clever and lived my life at home.
    We stayed up there together, the three of us, working, figuring, managing, until I turned fifteen and Mama died from a heart attack. It was her third, the first two having come over a period of four years, leaving her weak-spirited and unable to walk a row of beans or stand at the stove and cook. After her passing, Daddy lasted just afew months. His trouble, though diagnosed by doctors as the same reason for death as Mama’s, cardiac arrest, was of another sort. He simply quit living. Bleeding heart, the old folks called it. My daddy died from having been forsaken. He always thought he should go first.
    After my daddy’s death, I was briefly cared for by my father’s family, his sister and her husband. But every day I would walk the three miles to our old house and stay longer and