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I didn’t answer or even look back

Chapter 81

A SILK BANNER with elegant black letters ran the length of the wall

WELCOME HOME, BEN

This was the banner that had hung in the dining roo family celebration the day I returned from my service in Cuba Half the town turned out to cheer the decorated Spanish-Auished himself under the famous Colonel Theodore Roosevelt

Now the banner was dingy, the silk stained broith drips fro not inhouse” out back, a former slave quarters

It was to the long house that I had come after I left Jacob It hadn’t housed an actual slave since well before I was born At the e room for every piece of castoff junk my father didn’t want in the house

It was also hos, Duke and Dutchy, the oldest, fattest, laziest bloodhounds in all of Mississippi They didn’t even bother to bark when I opened the door and stepped inside

I lit an old kerosene lantern and watched the mice scurry away into corners As the shadows retreated, I realized that all the junk piled in here washouse into a repository of everything related to my childhood

The oak desk froainst the wall under the welcome banner Piled on top of the desk were pasteboard cartons and the little desk chair I had used before I was old enough to use a grown-up one

I lifted the lid of the topmost carton A musty smell rose from the books inside I lifted out a handful: A Boy’s History of the Old South, My First Lessons in Arithmetic, and my favorite book when I was a boy: Brass Knuckles, Or, The Story of a Boy Who Cheated

Next to the desk stood my first bed, a narrow spool one decorated by my mother with hand-painted stars It was hard to believe I’d ever fit on that little bed

In the far corner was another pile of Benjamin Corbett’s effects: football, basketball, catcher’sfrom a rafter in the attic

I lifted the corner of a bedsheet draping a large object, and uncovered the most wonderful possession of y, made perfectly to scale of white-painted wicker with spoked iron wheels I reave me when our old stable hand Mose would hitch up the old y He would lift me onto the driver’s seat and lead the mule and me on a walk around the property I must have been all of six or seven

Before I kneas happening, I was crying I stood in the middle of that dark, musty room and let the tears come My shoulders shook violently I sank down to a chair and buried my head in my hands I was finally home—and it ful