A complete Southern gothic story in six chapters — a boy, a creek hollow drowned in kudzu, and a town with an arrangement it will not name.
The hollow on the creek, where the magnolias hang heavy in April.
“Some memories dry up and blow away. Others cling to the ribs like a second skeleton.”
The complete story · Six chapters · 7,301 words
Lost Fork holds its children close, sets God, family, and country on nearly equal pedestals — and keeps a few silences it does not explain. The narrator was born there in 1950. This is the record he set down anyway, glancing over his shoulder as he wrote it.
The whole story is here, free to read, beginning to end. Start at the first chapter, or pick up wherever you left off.
The story is complete. All six chapters of Whispers in the Kudzu are here, from Lost Fork to The Last Entry — the whole record, exactly as its narrator set it down.
More Writing
Memoir, essays, and poems — everything opens right here, in full.
Memoir
The Wrong Kind of Soldier
A perimeter tower, a mortar attack, and the truth about fear he learned to stop telling.
Memoir · Iraq, 2007 · 362 words · 2 min read
Essays & the South
Shadows of the Past
A South changing around the people who call it home — haunted by its past and its future alike.
Prose poem · 164 words · 1 min read
The South
Home and grief in a patchwork of faith and superstition, progress and backwards ways.
Essay · 200 words · 1 min read
Work
On men who surrender their work ethic to the false comfort of indifference.
Essay · 183 words · 1 min read
The Crape Myrtles
Two trees in the backyard — one reaching, one rooted — and the marriage they mirror.
Essay · 245 words · 1 min read
Poems & Confessions
Sacrifice
“Sacrifice is a man’s middle name.” On duty, cost, and the greatest love a man can offer.
Poem · 217 words · 1 min read
Hunger
A confession of longing — a fire with no hope of being put out.
Prose poem · 199 words · 1 min read
Desire
“A woman can catch a man like a trap catches a wild animal.”
Prose poem · 224 words · 1 min read
Hot Water Has No Mercy
A man standing in the shower, and a mind that will not quiet.
Poem · 129 words · 1 min read
Dignity
“Dignity is quieter.” On the truer strength a man only misses once it’s gone.
Prose poem · 115 words · 1 min read
Fulfillment
A man’s life is not found in purpose, but in the love of a woman.
Prose poem · 101 words · 1 min read
Pillars
On the pillars that hold a man upright — and what happens when truth tests them.
Prose poem · 381 words · 2 min read
About the Writer
“Mississippi writer on faith, culture & memory. Iraq veteran, husband, father of four.”
That is the whole bio, and it is also a fair table of contents. The faith runs through the poems and the essays. The culture is the South itself — its pine woods and clay roads, its church suppers and silences. The memory is Iraq in 2007, a childhood in a town like Lost Fork, and everything both places left behind.
He writes from South Mississippi, where the ground is red clay and the woods are longleaf pine — the ground this site is named for, and the grace his work keeps reaching toward.
Follow Along
New pieces go up on the writer page first. Find him here:
Some memories dry up and blow away. Others cling to the ribs like a second skeleton. The worst of them stay sharp long after the names have gone dull, and the kind ones thin to smoke whenever I reach for them. Age has been no help in sorting one from the other. Still, there are days I remember all too well, and I have lived long enough to stop pretending I would rather not. I was born in Lost Fork in 1950, to loving parents and a town that held its children close. My early childhood was easy in the way childhood ought to be. Doors went unlocked. There was not a traffic light for miles. Everyone was more family than friend, or so it seemed to me then. But a place is always more than what a child can see of it, and I did not learn how far Lost Fork's story ran until I had fallen a long way into it. There are people who would not approve of my setting this down. I find myself glancing over my shoulder as I write. Some things have a way of watching. Still, someone ought to leave a record, in case a stranger someday needs one. I cannot say how it might help, and I have no answers to offer. I can only tell what happened and how it looked to me. Lost Fork is like any small Southern town: quiet, comfortable, slow. It sets God, family, and country on nearly equal pedestals. The old people said the town was founded on a gravel pit and a salt mine, though the timber has always been the real wealth. The population hovered around seven hundred when I was a boy. Now there may be four hundred left, every one of them descended from families that have been here for generations. Newcomers do not settle in Lost Fork, and they would not be welcome if they tried. The rare outsider who did arrive seldom stayed. Billy Morgan was one of them. He was the first to teach me that some of our ways did not want explaining. But I am getting ahead of myself, and I should begin with him. Summer, to a small boy, is something close to enchantment. It runs on without end, gold and slow, and everything in it seems possible. The Morgans moved into the house across the street during the last week of school, a family of four, friendly and warm, the kind of neighbors a mother hopes for. Billy's older sister, Susan, if memory serves, had dark hair and freckles. She was a couple of years ahead of me, and she was my first love, though she never knew it. Billy was a good boy, a little loud and brash but never unkind. He liked to bend rules rather than break them and had nearly mastered the art. I took to him at once, and from the first day we were partners in every sort of trouble. We explored the abandoned buildings in and around town. We rode our bikes down WPA Road to pick blackberries and honeysuckle. We set off firecrackers during choir practice and bore the consequences together. It was the best summer a boy could have asked for, and as it began to wind down, I never suspected what it was winding toward.
It was a Monday. Billy had heard from some older boys at church about a stand of trees in the pasture behind the building. They had called it creepy, which was all the invitation we needed. Nothing in Lost Fork had ever been truly creepy, only old and bad-smelling. We had already explored the mansion across the railroad tracks and even camped in it. A clump of trees seemed a poor rival. We rode to the church and set out across the pasture. The grove could not be seen from the building, but walking straight back would bring us to the creek, and the trees had to be somewhere along it. Billy fairly hummed with excitement. To me it was only trees and another field. To him, everything was an adventure, and the world looked enchanted through his eyes. We crossed like boys who had not yet learned to count hours. Halfway over, the ground rose into a gentle swell before sloping toward the water. We climbed it and stopped. It lay off to the left and below us, and at first it looked like nothing at all. A hollow where the creek cut through, with trees on both banks drowned in kudzu. The vines hung in a thick, green blanket that seemed to swallow light and sound. I remember that the afternoon had been full of noise, locusts and wind and our own breathing, and that standing there, I could no longer hear any of it. Then a breeze stirred the leaves, and I thought I heard a whisper. I told myself the heat was playing tricks, that it was only wind in the foliage. I looked at Billy, and he was already looking at me. Neither of us said a word. Neither of us needed to. The wind turned and began to blow from behind us toward the trees, and the whole hollow seemed to draw a breath, the way a person gulps air after too long underwater. The hair stood up along my neck. It was the feeling of being noticed for the first time by something that had been waiting very patiently to be. I took a step back, and that was when the smell reached me. Honeysuckle first, thick and sweet, and beneath it blackberries and blueberries, a whole collage of sweetness, too much of it, too ripe. It was so strong that I realized I had stepped forward again without deciding to. Behind us, a man's voice asked what we boys thought we were doing out there. We spun around. It was Pastor Jones, who must have seen us from the church and followed us out. He looked from one of us to the other and asked again. Billy answered for us, saying we had only come to see the hollow of kudzu. The pastor's eyes stayed on us a few seconds longer, then moved to the hollow. His expression was not angry or disappointed. It was discerning, as though he were weighing something I could not see. After a long silence, he told us gently that we ought to go on home. He said it with the quiet patience of a man who knew something we did not. I asked, not understanding any of it, whether we might take a little of that fruit with us. It smelled so good. He looked down at me then, and I shuddered in the heat. I have shuddered at the memory many times in the decades since. Then his face softened, and he told me the fruit was not good for me. He smiled when he said it. Even as a child I could tell the smile was a thing he had put on. When we hesitated, he laid a hand on each of our shoulders and turned us back the way we had come. I looked behind me only once. The sweetness was gone from the air, and so was the strangeness, as though someone had closed a door. I do not remember whether Billy looked back. I have since come to believe he did. We rode home in silence. We said our goodbyes, or perhaps we did not. I cannot remember. I spent the afternoon at chores and helping Mama with supper: sweet cornbread, fried chicken, lima beans, and cream corn. I had all but forgotten the hollow by the time Daddy came home. He came in more serious than usual, kissed my mother, and sent me out to take out the trash and check the mail. I had already done both. In those days a boy did not say so, and my father knew I had, which meant he wanted a word with my mother alone. I went out and played with our German Shepherd, Max, until Mama called me in. We said grace as always and began to eat, and it was some time before I understood that I was the only one eating. My parents were watching me. I have never been able to describe the look on their faces. There was love in it, and concern, and something that might have been fear. After a while my father said, very calmly, that I was never to go near that hollow again, and he asked if I understood. I did not answer at once. I was thinking of the whisper, the smell, the pastor's hands on my shoulders. He asked again, and this time there was something close to desperation underneath the calm. I said yes, sir, and heard my voice stumble. I looked to my mother, but she was studying her plate as though she meant to hide behind it. I would have sworn she was holding back tears. I asked him why. I had not meant to. The word was out before I could stop it. My father was a loving man, but in our house a child did not ask why. Yet that evening, for the first and only time in my childhood, he neither corrected me nor grew angry. He only looked at me and drew a long breath. He said I was too young to understand, that all I needed to know was that it was not safe for me there, that I could get hurt. It was the pause before that last word that raised the skin on my arms. He said there would be no more talk of it. Then his voice lightened, and he said I should finish my supper and take my bath, because he meant to take the next day off work and carry me into the city. A smile crossed his face. It seemed genuine, but something moved behind it, and I could not tell what. I ate. I bathed. I went to bed far too early, excited, because we almost never went to the city, and when we did it meant ice cream or baseball cards. I fell asleep thinking that in the morning I might ask if Billy could come along. I never got the chance.
The years between boy and man are tumultuous ones. They bring a flood of change to the mind and body and spirit, and a confidence worn proudly and warily at once. Lost Fork seemed to sense this in its young and, at times, used it against them. The town had a way of drawing a person inward rather than outward, and by fifteen I had learned to accept most of its silences without question, though I had begun to keep a few of my own. What I had yet to learn was that Lost Fork kept traditions, and that they were best left to themselves. In early April, I stumbled into one. I was out past dark, against my better judgment and my mother's wishes. A girl named Darlene Pruitt had taken to smiling at me in a particular way, and I had taken to walking past her house at hours when I had no business passing anyone's house. That night I was headed home along Creek Road, cutting across the old Tatum property, when I heard something. I thought at first it was singing. It was low and unhurried, the kind of sound felt in the chest before the ears make sense of it. I stopped walking. The night was warm and the frogs were loud along the water, but threaded beneath them was something else. Voices. Women's voices. They say curiosity killed the cat. It did not kill me, but it did something. I moved closer, almost against my will, with that same prickle rising along my neck, as though my body had understood something my mind had not caught up to. Upstream from the hollow, the creek ran wider and shallower, and in spring the water was clear enough to count the stones on the bottom. Magnolias crowded both banks, enormous old trees with roots that reached into the current like fingers. In April they hung heavy with white bloom, so low over the water that the place felt roofed over, sealed off from the ordinary world. There were nine of them, maybe ten. It took me a moment to know them in the dark and the strange pale light. Mrs. Aldridge, who taught Sunday school. Darlene's mother. Hattie Broom, who had to be eighty and made the finest peach cobbler in the county. Clara Tatum, who was perhaps seventeen and whose family owned the ground I was trespassing on. They stood barefoot in the shallows, dressed in white, some in gowns and some in plain dresses, and each held a single magnolia blossom. They were full flowers, wide and pale, the kind that bruise brown at the edges if looked at too hard. One by one they set the blossoms on the current, carefully, with something like reverence. And they were speaking, though the word does not fit. It was too rhythmic for conversation and too quiet for a hymn. I could not make out any of it. Whatever they were saying had not been meant to carry. The blossoms drifted downstream. Toward the hollow. I stood there longer than I should have. I know that now. At the time I told myself I would watch a few seconds more, and then those seconds became more seconds, the way they do when a boy is looking at something sacred for the first time. I was not afraid. I felt something else, though I have never found the right name for it, a low, uneasy pressure somewhere beneath the ribs. I was lost in the sight of them when one of the white figures turned in my direction. It was Clara. I froze and tried to become part of the brush. After what felt like a very long time, she lifted a finger to her lips and shook her head, slowly. People talk about blood running cold, but that has never seemed accurate to me. It was more as if the night itself had leaned in. I believe she was smiling. Everything felt wrong at once, and the urge to run became nearly unbearable. Nearly. Then she turned her face downstream, toward the hollow, and did not look at me again. She never let the others know I was there. I have wondered for sixty years why she did not. I had overstayed my welcome, and I went straight home. My parents were waiting. I was scolded severely and confined to the house for a week. I took it all to be about curfew until my mother said, almost to herself, that it was not safe this time of year. It meant nothing to me then. Only later did I understand she had been speaking of what I had seen. The next afternoon I came in from after-school chores and heard voices in the kitchen. I rounded the corner and stopped. My mother barely acknowledged me. Her whole attention was on the girl at the table across from her. Clara looked up and smiled, and I still feel that smile in my spine. I am an old man who has seen a great deal, and there was something wrong with it. She said she had only dropped by to have a word with Mama, to let her know she ought to keep watch over me, because some of the girls around town had taken a real liking to me. I glanced at my mother. Her face had drawn tight. She said she would keep a close eye on me and thanked Clara, but there was no gratitude in it, nothing warm or welcoming. My mother was the kindest woman I have ever known, and in that moment I did not know who she was. Clara rose, thanked my mother for her time, and walked to the door. There she paused and wished us a wonderful evening, and she smiled again, the warmest smile I have ever seen on a human face. It took me years to understand that some people keep two faces, the one they have and the one they show, and that Clara Tatum wore hers better than anyone I ever met. I saw fewer troubling things in Vietnam than I did in that kitchen. My mother said nothing. I did not move for a long while. At last I told her I had seen something the night before. She drew a deep breath, as though she had been holding it all day. She told me, quietly, that I had not. It sounded less like a statement than a wish. I had not seen anything, she said, and I never would, not around here. She asked if I understood. I nodded and said yes, ma'am. We never spoke of it again. I did not understand then, and I am not sure I understand now. But for the second time, and not the last, I learned that Lost Fork had secrets, and that it is best not to go digging in the ones you are not ready for.
I left Lost Fork the summer I turned eighteen and did not intend to come back. The Army found me before I had decided what to do with myself, and by the spring of 1969 I was in Vietnam. I will not say much about it here. I came home with all my limbs and fewer illusions, and I spent the better part of a year learning to sleep in a quiet room. The war taught me that men can do terrible things in ordinary daylight and go to supper afterward. It also taught me, in a way I did not recognize until much later, that I was not easily frightened by what I could see. I settled in Mobile because it was far enough from home to feel like a decision. I took work at the shipyard, and then at a paper mill, and I met a woman named Ellen at a church supper where neither of us had meant to be. We married within the year. Three children followed, two girls and a boy, and with them came the long, loud, blessed ordinary years. I coached ball. I fixed things. I learned the names of my neighbors and kept their porches in my mind the way my father once kept the town. I went back to Lost Fork only when I could not avoid it, and never for long. Christmas, once or twice. A funeral. My parents drove down to Mobile instead, and I let them. My mother would study me across the table as though checking for something, and I never asked what. There was a stretch of those years when I did not think about the hollow at all, and a longer stretch when I thought of it constantly and told no one. I never spoke of Billy Morgan to my wife. I did not know how. My parents died on a wet October night in 1989, on the county road coming home from a church revival two towns over. A truck crossed the line. The deputy who called me said it would have been instant. I have turned that word over for thirty-odd years and still cannot decide whether it was a kindness. I drove up alone the next morning. Ellen would follow with the children after the funeral. I expected to feel the town close around me the way it had when I was a boy. I braced for it on the last stretch of road. But Lost Fork in 1989 was only a tired little place going quietly to seed. The church had been repainted. There was a traffic light now at the one real crossroads, blinking yellow over nothing. The old men on the bench outside the feed store nodded at me with the soft, awkward sympathy of people who had known my parents all their lives. It was a small, sad town, and I could not find in it anything to be afraid of. I remember being almost embarrassed by how ordinary it was, and wondering whether I had been a fanciful child. It took me a week to settle the arrangements. The house was the hard part. My mother had kept everything, and every drawer carried some piece of a life I had not asked about. I worked through it in the evenings after the visitors had gone, with the radio low and the windows open because the house felt too close without them. On the fifth night, I went up into the attic and found the box. It sat behind the water heater, beneath a quilt I recognized from my childhood bed, tied with a length of kitchen twine. It was an ordinary cardboard box, soft at the corners from years of damp. The knot was one my father used to tie. I carried it down to the kitchen table and cut the string. The first thing in it was a journal. It was small and bound in cracked leather, and the pages had gone the color of weak tea. The name inside the cover belonged to a preacher who had served Lost Fork in the 1880s and into the nineties, a man named Whitlock, and the hand was cramped and careful, the hand of someone who had learned to write by candle. I read the first page standing up. I read the rest sitting down. He wrote of the hollow as it had been before the vines. In his day it was a green and sheltered bottom where a spring fed the creek, ringed with old magnolias and thick with fruit that grew in no season it should have. He wrote that the cattle would not graze there and that the dogs would not follow their masters down. He wrote that the families of Lost Fork had gone there since before the church was built, and that they called it by a name he would not set down on the page. He described the people's arrangement with it. Women went, in spring, and gave it flowers. In return the town was left alone. The crops came in, the sickness passed over, and the mine and the timber paid. He did not say what the hollow took. He wrote around it with a kind of terrible delicacy, in the manner of a man who had seen the answer and wished he had not. He wrote of his own attempts to end it. He preached against it from the pulpit and was ignored. He cut down the first magnolia himself, and the ax came back to him wet, he wrote, though the wood was dry. He hauled salt from the mine and spread it over the ground in a ring. By the following spring the ring was green and the fruit hung thicker than before. The last entries were short and the writing had begun to slip. He wrote that it did not mind being opposed. It only remembered. I put the journal down and sat a long while in the quiet kitchen. Beneath it lay a photograph. I took it to be a family portrait, the sort taken on a church lawn in Sunday clothes. My father was in it, young and stiff in his collar. My mother stood beside him holding an infant I understood, with a start, to be me. And between them, at their knees, stood a little boy of perhaps three, dark-haired and squinting into the sun, one hand wrapped in the hem of my mother's skirt. I had never seen him before. I knew his face anyway. It was my own, only older, a face I had met in mirrors and in my son. Under the photograph was a paper folded in thirds, and I knew what it was before I opened it. It was a birth certificate, the county seal pressed faintly into the corner. It gave my parents' names, and a date in 1947, three years before mine, and a boy's name I had never once heard spoken in that house. There was nothing else with it. No death certificate, no funeral card. In all my years of walking through the churchyard, I had never once seen a grave with his name on it. As far as any paper could tell me, he had simply stopped existing. I thought of my father at the supper table, his voice stretched thin around the word hurt. I thought of my mother staring into her plate. I understood, in a way that arrived all at once and entirely without surprise, that they had not been afraid of something that might happen to me. They had been afraid of something that had already happened to them. At the bottom of the box, wrapped in a square of wax paper, there was one last thing. I lifted the paper away with two fingers, because I did not trust my hands. It was a magnolia blossom, pressed flat and gone the brown of old tobacco. Age had stripped the petals nearly to lace. It was a full flower once, wide and pale, the kind that bruise at the edges if looked at too hard. I knew then what I had really seen at the creek that April night when I was fifteen, and what Clara Tatum had understood when she looked at me from the water and did not give me away. It had not been a strange ritual that I stumbled into. It had been a custom my own mother had kept, years before I was born, standing in the shallows in a white dress with a flower in her hands. I do not know how long I sat there. The radio had gone to static. The kitchen window was open on the dark, and somewhere beyond the yard, the night air shifted and began to move toward the hollow. For the first time since I had come home, I smelled honeysuckle.
I said I would come back to Billy. I have put it off for more than fifty years. My father woke me before dawn that Tuesday, and we were on the road to the city before the sun had cleared the pines. He had said nothing at breakfast about the hollow, or about Billy, or about anything else. He bought me the ice cream I asked for, and a pack of baseball cards, and then a second pack, and he laughed in all the right places. I remember thinking it was the best day I had ever had with him. I also remember that he checked his watch more than a man on holiday should, and that he did not once suggest we start home until the light had begun to go. When we turned onto our street that evening, there was a sheriff's car in the Morgans' yard, and another behind it, and every porch light on the block was lit although it was not yet dark. My mother met us on the steps. She did not look at me. She looked at my father, and something passed between them that I was too young to read and have been reading ever since. Billy had not come home the night before. His mother had gone to wake him that morning and found his bed made and the window unlatched. By the time I was getting my second pack of cards, half the county was already out walking the fields. They found his bike by noon. It lay on its side at the top of the rise in the pasture behind the church, at the very place where he and I had stopped and looked down. The kickstand was up. The front wheel was still straight. A man who helped carry it back told my father it looked less like something dropped than something set down, and my father told him to hush. They found the shoe the next morning. It was one of Billy's canvas sneakers, white gone gray, and the laces were still tied in a neat double knot. It lay at the lip of the creek, at the edge of the hollow, and the ground around it held no prints at all. Not the shoe's own, nor any other. A boy does not step out of a shoe with the laces tied. I knew that even then. So did every man who stood looking at it. That was all they ever found. I want to be fair to Lost Fork, because for a few days it was magnificent. Men came from every direction with lanterns and flashlights and borrowed hounds. Women set up long tables behind the church and fed whoever stopped, and no one asked whether they were kin. The sheriff walked the creek bank twice a day. Someone dragged the pond at the old mine and someone else lowered a rope down the shaft. For three days it was a place that cared about a stranger's son. But I was a quiet child, and quiet children listen. I noticed which questions were asked and which were not. Nobody went into the hollow. Men searched the gravel pit, the salt mine, the railroad cut, the old mansion across the tracks, the whole length of the creek downstream and up. When someone mentioned the kudzu, the talk turned or someone found a reason to check on the dogs. The hounds the county sent were good animals, and they ran the pasture happily until they reached the rise. There they stopped and sat down, whining, with their ears flat, and would not be led any farther. Their handler cursed and pulled, and in the end he gave up and took them home. One young deputy walked a few yards down into the vines on his own. He came out pale, sat in his truck with the door shut, and was not seen taking part in the search again. When I asked my father what the man had seen, he said the deputy had a weak stomach. Pastor Jones led the volunteers himself. He was tireless, hoarse from praying, and he sent them everywhere with great efficiency. I have thought a great deal about where he did not send them. Others stayed home entirely. There were men who had known Billy's father from the sawmill who suddenly could not be spared from their work, and women who brought a casserole to the Morgans' back door and left without meeting Mrs. Morgan's eyes. I watched that from my porch. The kindness was real, and so was the shame under it, and I could not have told you then which one was the heavier. My father searched. I will say that for him. He walked the pasture with the rest, shoulder to shoulder, day after day. But he always stopped at the rise, and he always turned back. Once, I saw him standing alone at the top of that slope at dusk with his hat in his hands. He stood there so long that my mother finally went out and led him home like a man walking in his sleep. On the fifth day, the sheriff called it off. The county declared a runaway, and later it was written down as a drowning, though no body was ever found to drown. The Morgans stayed through the winter, which I have never understood. Mr. Morgan walked the pasture alone every evening until the frost. Mrs. Morgan stopped coming to church. In the spring they put the house up for sale. Susan, with her dark hair and freckles, left without a word to me, and I did not think to say one to her. I have regretted that, too. No one in Lost Fork ever spoke Billy's name again, at least not where I could hear it. It was as though the town had found a way to close over him, the way water closes. I asked my father only once whether Billy had gone to the hollow. He said that boys wander off, and he went out to the barn. I turned the whole thing over for thirty years without ever laying the pieces side by side. It took a cardboard box on a kitchen table in 1989 to make me do it. After my parents were buried, and after the journal and the photograph and the flower, I sat up past midnight with the facts, and I will set them down here as plainly as I can. Billy was a stranger. The town had not raised him or buried his grandparents or sat beside him in church for generations. The preacher's journal said that the families of Lost Fork had an arrangement, and that the hollow took something in return for its peace. It did not say what it took, or from whom. Billy had stood at the edge of the hollow and heard what I had heard. I wanted the fruit. He, I think, wanted more than that. My father had known something before supper that Monday. A man does not decide at six in the evening to take a child to the city the next day for no reason. He had been told, by the pastor or by his own fear, that two boys had drawn the hollow's notice. He could not do anything about Billy. He could only take me away. My mother had kept a flower for forty years in wax paper. The women had stood in the shallows each April since long before I was born and sent blossoms downstream. I had always wondered what they hoped to buy. And there was a boy of three in a photograph, whose name was on a paper and nowhere else. I do not know what happened to Billy Morgan. I do not know whether he went back to the hollow that night on his own, drawn by the sweetness, or whether he was called, or whether something else came for him. I do not know whether he is still down there, or whether anyone ever was. I have heard it said that the hollow takes what it chooses. I have also heard it said that it only takes what it is owed. I have never found a way to learn which is true, and I have never gone back to ask. I only know what I saw the following April, when I was nine years old and watching from my bedroom window. The magnolias along the creek bloomed heavier than anyone in Lost Fork could remember, white and wide, thick with flowers to the very tips of the branches, and the whole town kept its eyes on the ground when it walked beneath them.
June 2
Ellen has been gone eleven weeks. The house is too quiet to stand, so I have taken to writing at the kitchen table in the evenings, the way I did on the night I found the box. I find I can say things to paper that I could never say to a living person, and I am sorry now that I never said them to her.
I should have told her about Billy. I should have told her about the hollow and the flower and the little boy in the photograph. She would have listened. She listened to everything else. I told myself for fifty years that I was protecting her, and I am only now old enough to see that I was protecting myself. A man can keep a secret so long it begins to keep him.
The children are grown and have families of their own. The girls call on Sundays. My son drives up from Pensacola when he can, and he sits across from me and watches me with Ellen's eyes. I have not told any of them either. I decided that was the kindest thing I could do for them, and I have since decided it is no longer enough.
July 19
I have been to the attic again. The box is where I left it, behind the quilt, and the preacher's journal is as brittle as ever. I have read his account perhaps forty times. He wrote that the hollow did not mind being opposed, only that it remembered. I have thought a great deal about that word.
I have also been dreaming. Not every night, but often enough that I no longer pretend it is nothing. In the dream I am standing at the top of the rise in the pasture with the wind at my back, and the hollow draws a long breath, and I hear a whisper. Last night, for the first time, I understood a few of the words. I will not write them here. I woke with the smell of honeysuckle so strong in the bedroom that I opened every window in the house.
I am seventy-six years old. I have buried my parents, my wife, and a good many friends. I have watched Lost Fork shrink from seven hundred souls to something like four hundred, and I have wondered, more than once, where the rest of them went.
October 13
I have made up my mind.
I will go to Lost Fork on Thursday. I will go to the hollow myself, in daylight, and stand where Billy and I stood and see what there is to see. I have spent sixty-eight years not knowing, and I find I would rather know and pay for it than carry the shape of the question into the ground.
I do not know what I mean to do when I get there. I have thought of salt, as the preacher did, and of matches, and of simply asking. None of it seems right. I think I only want to look it in the face, the way I could not as a boy, and let it decide what I am worth. I am bringing my mother's flower. I cannot say why. It seems wrong to go without it.
Tomorrow I will mail copies of the preacher's pages, the photograph, and the birth certificate to the police department here in Mobile, with a note asking that they be kept. This journal I will leave on the seat of my car, with the same request written on the cover, so that whoever finds it knows where it belongs. If I come home, I will collect everything and no one will be the wiser. If I do not, there will be a record, and perhaps some day a person who needs answers will find it and know where to start. I could not manage anything better.
I am frightened. I will say it plainly, because I have had a lifetime of saying the opposite. I am frightened, and I am sorry, and under both of those there is something I did not expect to find, which is a kind of peace. Whatever is down there has been waiting for me since I was eight years old. It seems only polite to stop making it wait.
To my children, if you are reading this: I loved your mother more than I ever knew how to say. I loved all of you the same. None of this was your fault, and none of it should become your burden. Let it end here.
October 15
I am writing this in the car, parked behind the church. They have painted it again. The old parsonage is gone, and there is a new fence along the back of the lot, and past it the pasture runs down to the rise exactly as I remember.
It is a clear afternoon. I can see the top of the hill from here, and the green line of trees beyond it. I have been sitting for an hour, working up the nerve, and in all that time I have not heard a single bird.
The wind has turned. It smells exactly as I remember.
Missing Persons Report
Mobile Police Department. Investigating detective's notes, for the file.
The package arrived by mail on the Wednesday before the subject was last seen. It contained photocopies of a second, much older journal, one photograph, one birth certificate, and a short cover note asking that they be kept. I read the note that night and put it down as the work of a grieving old man. I want that on the record, because I was wrong.
The subject's vehicle was located the following Friday, parked behind the church in the town named in the note. Doors unlocked. Keys in the ignition. A full tank. No sign of struggle or forced entry. On the driver's seat lay a handwritten journal, addressed on its cover to this department, and on top of it a single magnolia blossom, fresh and unbruised, white to the edges. It was the third week of October. I have since asked three botanists, and none has been able to explain it.
I spent two days in the town. The sheriff was cooperative and incurious in equal measure. Everyone I spoke with was polite. Everyone gave the same answers, in nearly the same words, and no one asked me a single question in return. In thirty years on the job, I have never interviewed a witness who did not want to know why I was asking. Not one resident admitted to seeing the subject. Several said they had never heard of anyone by that name, though three of the oldest, when pressed, would only look at the floor.
The town is small and very clean. I saw no litter and no dogs. The church had been freshly painted, and the pastor, when I spoke with him, said only that the subject would have been welcome to stay. I noted that he did not ask who the subject was.
I walked to the rise at the back of the church lot, as the journal describes. I will state for the file that I did not go down into the hollow. I made it as far as the top of the slope. The vines on both sides of the creek are thick and unbroken, and the air between them is perfectly still, though the wind was blowing at my back. I smelled honeysuckle, and I smelled fruit, and I stood there for what I believed was a minute and learned afterward from my watch that it had been closer to forty. A deputy who had volunteered to walk me out told me it was nearly dark and that I should go.
I want to record my own impressions, as they may not be admissible but may be useful. I did not feel unsafe in the way I have felt unsafe in other places. I felt watched, which is a different thing. I felt, standing at the top of that hill, that I was being weighed, and that whatever was doing the weighing was in no hurry.
I left before dark. I drove with the windows up. I have a daughter, and I did not stop for gas until I was across the county line.
Disposition: open. No evidence of foul play. No evidence of voluntary departure. Request for a further search of the property behind the church was denied by the county. I have asked not to be assigned to any further matters in that jurisdiction, and the request has been granted.
The journal has been entered into evidence. I have made a copy of my own. I have not been able to bring myself to throw it away.
Iraq, 2007. I was in a perimeter tower with a fellow soldier whose name is lost to time. It was night like any other night. Hot, quiet, stinking.It was late, I was reclined back on my rucksack nodding off when the unmistakable thump of a mortar landing in the distance made my eyes pop open. Another one, closer.I sat up just as the base warning system for incoming rounds started going off. A third one, much closer now.I grabbed the radio and started calling in the hits from my position. A loud thump/crack as I was talking. It sounds just like a cooler lid slamming shut onto ice. There was a flash and I hadn’t even realized I had hit the deck.Debris was raining down onto the tower. I could smell soil, smoke, hot metal, and powder. I could taste it in the air.I broke out into a sweat. My words over the radio a tangle of nerves and adrenaline. I looked at the other guy to make sure he was ok. Physically yes. Mentally, less so. He just kept saying something about not wanting to be posted on the perimeter anymore and that he needed to go home.He was checked out. If there had been another round or a follow-up attack, he would have been at best no help and at worst a liability.I was 21 when that happened. In the years that I have told that story, people always responded as if they understood the other guy better than me.I remember being asked once how I felt and I said I was excited. That made people uncomfortable. A man not being afraid of death was odd. A man being excited about death in front of him, unsettling.I learned to change how I told that story over the years. To lie and say I was afraid of dying. I never was though. Not then, not my entire time in Iraq. Now, I don’t ever tell it.And if I did tell the truth of how I felt back then. That mortars and gunfire were less of a big deal than if the chow hall ran out of French fries.Nobody cares anymore anyway.
I feel the world closing in. The land grows busy when it used to be silent. The empty backwoods feel as though they have disappeared. The south is stuck in this odd place where the old, dilapidated clings on like moss while the new slowly spreads like mold. Cities can be modern, vibrant. Or dead and abandoned. Towns can be storybook quaint. Or feel like the last remnants of a forgotten past. Haunted by its past and its future. Awkwardly uncomfortable with its present. It is changing. Good or bad, it is changing. What that means for those who live there, who can say. There are those that resist. Those that embrace. Those caught in the middle. Dreaming of a memory. Nostalgia for something that may not have been true. Hoping for a future that doesn’t kill the perceived soul of where the call home. You cannot freeze time. You cannot paint the present. Only whispers of what you believe it to feel like.
They say that home is where the heart is. Or even home is where you make it. Strange then that my heart and where ive laid it, is in a place that can bring such grief. As magical and charming the deep south can be, it is forever haunted by numerous plights that it has endured. Not merely one after the other but almost a continuation of one long endless suffering that moans in discomfort. It is a patchwork of faith and superstition. Progress and backwards ways. Not yin and yang, for they do not attempt to compliment each other though they often do. If one could stamp out the other it most assuredly would. No the south has transcended beyond simple daily life and the futile attempts by academics to categorize every facet of its swirls and eddies. The common folk have learned to just accept how it is. You would get the same ambiguous response from the ether if you asked God “why are we here?”. The south breathes. It is alive. Tormented, but alive. If you just listen to its siren song you would know but not understand. As it has always been. As it should be.
It is a sore travesty to bear witness to men who surrender their work ethic to the false comfort of indifference. To watch a man wear his bones thin from the seat of complacency believing it is better for him to endure unnecessary prolonged hardship rather than attempt extra effort to alleviate his suffering.
And yet that same man will complain often and loudly about his plight yet choose to do nothing. Preferring the aid, attention, and effort of someone else to fix his problem rather than render it himself. He eyes the other who would do more than asked not out of curiosity but out of spiteful indignation and haughty reverence for self. Fool he thinks. Not realizing that his own predicament is self inflicted. Whether from willful blind ignorance or a lack willpower that he is somehow unable to summon.
And so he trudges onward in his affliction. Bemoaning his circumstance as if it was caused by another or by some hateful greater power he did not please. Never realizing he is the author of the story he finds himself in.
Sacrifice is a man’s middle name. It should be as visible a trait as any other that belongs to him. And belong to him it must.
Sacrifice should be on his mind every day. All of him should be laid on the offering table.
He may hesitate. He may resist. But in time, sacrifice becomes not the exception but the reflex— the first response rather than the second thought.
People will seek it from him. Many will demand it. He will not be thanked, nor will they consider what it costs. It will be expected, and he will be judged harshly when the offering is not immediate or does not feel sincere enough.
Yet sacrifice he must, to fulfill his duty and his calling. Heavy is the cost of leadership, and relentless the suffering of one required to empty himself for the good of others.
This must be his calling. Refusal or escape brings only the hollow ache of abandoning a role he was shaped to bear.
Loss is the price, whether he steps forward or not. One loss is carried with grace and peace. The other with loathing and resentment.
Sacrifice is part of him. It is the greatest love he can offer.
One path leads to death. The other leads to death—but not without hope.
Has any man ever known a greater hunger than the longing for a woman? A desire so deep and primal that it feels as though your skin would split, your bones would shatter. That’s how I felt for her. She was a delight to look upon. A gift to the eyes that my mind has unwrapped a thousand times. Not love but lust. The heartbreaking urge to feel, inhale, taste. For the two of us to be lost and entwined with burning passion so severe it would cause one to weep. Forbidden fruit is always the sweetest. Yet I would bite. I would indulge in her and her in me. Sin so hot… it is best left unspoken. I confess I have thought of this more than once. Every time the pain of unfulfilled envy drives me to fury and madness. A fire that has no hope of being put out. I am cursed to suffer, never knowing what unholy things our bodies could accomplish. I would not trade it for peace. So, I wait with clenched teeth and tight fists. Dreaming of her mouth, her breath, her body. Settling for just a smile, while I burn for her.
A woman can catch a man like a trap catches a wild animal. And so she caught me. I was enthralled by her. Mesmerized to the point of madness. Every thought was about her. Her scent drove me wild. Her eyes dazzled like pools of starlight. Her hair flowed like grace given form. I imagined her skin was softer than rose petals. Her lips are like a ripe peach. Every curve, dip, and bend. Carved from immaculate marble by the good Lord himself. And when finished, He declared her a masterpiece. A desire, ancient and primal, welled up within me. So strong that I would forsake all I knew and believed in to have her. Hold her. Be with her. It was not mere lust but the overwhelming urge to know her in a way that is customarily reserved for the Almighty. Yet I would forsake heaven and embrace hell just to experience her. I wanted her. I needed her. I had to have her. The same way a drowning man needs air or a thirsty man needs water. She had trapped me. Whether by design or not. She would have all of me. From until the world burned and the stars fell. I was hers. In her was truth and life and all the purpose of my life. If only she could see.
There are two crape myrtles in my backyard.
One is overly tall and broad. Its roots clustered close to the trunk. Its branches stretched outward awkwardly in all directions. Reaching, the way a man does when trying to find himself. That allowed a vine to creep in and take hold. I spent the better part of a day cutting that vine out and pruning that tree into a reasonable shape. And though it is healing from the intrusion, it has left scars.
The other is shorter, less broad. Its roots spread outward, grounding itself firmly to the earth. It also had stands of the vine in it but not nearly as extensive. Its branches didn’t reach out but instead went up. It produces far more flowers, and the bloom is a sight to behold. It required pruning as well but much less than the other.
I am the first tree. Not rooted properly and always over stretching myself. Which allows the vines of life to creep in and take hold.
She is the second. Rooted deep in wisdom and crowned with beauty only the Lord could bestow.
Both needed pruning from the great gardener but one more so than the other. They are a match for each other. And it would not surprise me one bit if the Lord had those trees planted long ago knowing we would one day buy this house, so every time I look at them, I am reminded of us.
Hot water has no mercy in it It may wash a man clean of dirt But it does not clean the mind or the soul
It brings no relief to trepidation or contradiction The steam it produces chokes and blinds Like a conscious burdened with sorrow and loathing
One may close their eyes and believe they could be hidden in a smothering cloud of mist If only their wretched thoughts would let them
A pitiful attempt at drowning out the cacophony of a turbulent mind A response to an unexpected situation that was neither looked or asked for
Spend enough time standing there and silence will arrive Not from the water but from a mind that has spun itself into exhaustion No hot water has no mercy in it
Dignity is a thing most often treasured only after it’s been lost. It rarely announces itself. It makes no demands, and it seeks no praise. And perhaps that’s why it’s so easy to overlook—until it’s gone. It is not the same as pride. They are cousins, perhaps—but not equals. Pride is louder, stronger, more easily offended. Dignity is quieter. It can bear insult, endure humiliation, and still walk away upright. People rarely mourn the loss of dignity in others. They scoff at the idea, preferring to protect their pride instead. But dignity is the truer strength. And when it is stripped from a man, something sacred is lost. Even if no one else sees it.
I no longer believe that the meaning of a man’s life is found in purpose. It is found in love. Explicitly the love of a woman, in a woman. He cannot be complete without her. She is the driving force for all that he can and wants to be. He has to be and should be willing to give up all that is him for her. Not because she needs it but because he needs to. His soul needs it like a parched throat needs water. She is his purpose and she will drive him like the wind drives a storm.
There are times in a man’s life when the pillars that hold him upright begin to form cracks. Not from physical events like divorce or death, but from something quieter and more dangerous: the moment when reality no longer aligns with perceived truth.
At first, the cracks bring trepidation. He wonders whether his belief is weaker than he thought, whether it was ever as sturdy as it needed to be. He tries to repair it with denial and renewed zeal, but over time he begins to examine the thoughts that caused the fractures. Before long, he deepens the cracks himself, until the pillars that once held him aloft finally give way.
This is usually done alone, without aid or understanding. Others see it as foolishness, or weakness of will. After all, their pillars are strong and intact. Some even grow fearful, wary that his inspection might prompt them to look too closely at their own foundations.
There should be no fear if the pillars are built on truth and held together by a resilient framework. But there is reason for concern when the structure is made of cheap emotional manipulation. The system that designed those pillars requires faith in itself, not faith in truth.
Truth is like the blazing summer sun. Only materials of real substance can endure it. It offers no quarter and shows no mercy to what cannot withstand its heat. Those who rage against it, who strike at it in defiance, do nothing but hasten their own collapse. To endure it, a man must learn to live under its terms, for truth has no concern for those who would impose their own.
It is in this unrelenting furnace that pillars are tested and broken. It is where institutions built on falsehood and shallow understanding finally fail. Once exposed for what they are, they no longer hold power.
And so a man may walk alone, holding fast to truth, and still be mocked by those who refuse to let that same truth do its work. They cling instead to systems of comfort and false reassurance, preferring them to the costly freedom of grace.
It is a terrible thing for a man to have his pillars cracked. But it is far worse for them never to be tested at all.
