July 13–14, 1965

“The men respect your wisdom, Dub. Your words will go a long way in keeping things from getting out of hand,” the voice pleaded. Why is it about what I say? What I’ve done speaks for me. I’m not responsible for others, Dub thought. Yet, in the small hours of the morning’s darkness, he gathered with friends in the town of Saline, Illinois—the stifling heat being of no consequence.

Through the fog of exhaustion, sixty-five-year-old Dublin Brisco heard himself rattling off with surgical precision the facts and his thoughts of the past two days. He left for another day, or never, things too painful and revealing. He desired, yet dreaded, the thirty-mile drive back to Abingdon, where his wife, Mae, slept fitfully after attending to the family’s health and bidding the emergency workers farewell.

Almost a half hour later, the gravel beneath the wheels of his black pickup truck provided him comfort at arriving home. Relief that the day’s momentum had ended. He briefly smiled, viewing through the windshield the fifty years of labor to achieve a prosperity that had yielded the grandest house in their community. It allowed them a life of ease, including all the modern amenities they could afford.

Exiting the truck, the void in the property’s skyline caught Dub by surprise. The home’s beauty disguised another existence in the far recesses of the property. Behind a large freshly painted storage barn, nestled among the blackberry vines and branches of tall walnut trees, was the incinerated carcass of a windowless one-room wooden shack. Another small patch of burnt wood signaled where the adjacent outhouse had once stood. The home of Dub’s brother Timothy.

Suddenly, a vortex of fatigue and a flood of darkness pulled Dub to the only apparent source of any connection to reality. Red Adirondack chairs in the backyard had hosted games of checkers with friends over the years. As he folded into the seat, the hot night air hugged his body, bestowing solace, much like it had when he’d lived among the cotton fields in Alabama. Deep breaths of charred-wood odors lulled Dub to sleep, overpower- ing every scent from the abundant flowers and vegetables that surrounded him.

And as had happened only twice before over four decades, a familiar shadow, a strut he had seen often throughout his life- time, sauntered up his driveway from the ruins where the shack had once stood. Even sleep could not mask the dichotomy of Dub’s life. Tim Brisco, younger than Dub by seven years, appeared. He looked cleaner and more confident than he had in ages.

“You let me die before your eyes,” Tim said.

“Tim, you had more chances than I did and blew them all. It’s unforgiveable what you did to Mama, despite her faults.”

Pointing behind him to the warm embers of the crumpled structure, Tim said, “You used this to keep me from belonging to your world, Dub. For you to engage in my life meant tainting yourself with my failures. To you, I was a broken man. A drunk.”

“Your choices made that happen. You’re dead, so go away. Go to hell, Tim.”

Abruptly awakening, Dub placed his head in his hands, covering his face as tears took form. A hot breeze from the shack enveloped his body, raising beads of sweat on his chest and face. After yanking off his shirt, he propelled it at the mound of ashes that now demanded the focus of all who observed his life through the constructs of his self-created social status. Dub jumped out of the chair and sprinted into the darkness to the edge of town. His feet became immobilized at a pair of broad wrought-iron gates securing the familiar industrial compound where he’d once worked; the “Tappers Mining Company” sign in bold red capitalized letters, held up by two wooden posts on either side, had remained unchanged since 1924, when Dub had entered the gates for the first time, taking the biggest step toward distancing himself from his beginnings—his parents, Tuttle and Betsey Brisco.

“Why did I want this so much?”

Water flowed from his eyes as he stared through the bars of the gate. Floodlights illuminated the smokestack erupting with white clouds.

He slowly turned around to join Mae in their home.