It was just a stump now, but once it had been a grand and glorious tree that soared far above the ground with great branches that spread like a protective umbrella over its part of the world. Its thick canopy had given protection from the elements to both man and beast for a long, long time. The very thing that killed it was the force from which it had once given protection to others. On a stormy day when the wind roared and the rain lashed, a jagged bolt of lightning raced from the clouds, struck the great tree, and shattered the life out of it all the way down to the tips of its roots deep beneath the surface of the earth. I missed that old tree, and also the nuts the squirrels and I had collected from it. They were hard to crack and the meat inside was minuscule, but sweet and tasty. After I had cracked the nut, I used the curved end of one of my momma's hairpins to pick out the meat. It had been a black walnut tree. After the tree had been dead for awhile, sometimes during a full moon I would gaze out the window and marvel at the amazing display of shadow and light the moonshine played upon its bare, silver branches. Then one day my father and some other men came in a big log truck with chains, ropes, axes, and a crosscut saw, and with two mules tied behind. The men cut the dead tree down. It crashed to the ground with a thunderous roar and its dead branches shattered and exploded into the air. They used the mules to load that giant tree trunk on the truck. I heard one of the men say they were going to take it to a sawmill, that black walnut was very valuable wood. I wondered where they were taking the old tree. There had been a sawmill about a mile from our house, but it had closed back in the late summer. The men cut up all the branches, and my two older brothers, Ned and Fred, stacked them to be used as firewood. That was a good thing because winter was coming and we would be burning a lot of wood soon. I had loved that tree, but now it was gone with only its stump left like a tombstone that shone in the moonlight, to remind the world it had lived long and served a purpose in the world. I hung out around that stump a lot, and that's where I was on Saturday afternoon when I heard Fred approaching from toward the house. "Hey, boy, what you doing?" he called out. "Cracking nuts," I replied. "What kind of nuts? There ain't no more walnuts out here." "I picked up some hickory nuts while I was squirrel hunting with Ned this morning." "What for? There's even less meat in a hickory nut than in a black walnut. You wasting your time, unless you are a squirrel." "Nothing better to do." "Wanna bet?" my brother said. I paused from digging around inside that nut with my hairpin and looked up at him. I knew my brother, and I could tell from the look on his face that something was up. He was good at making up games and building toys. We had toy log trucks and bows and arrows he had made, but we had grown tired of both. Now, he had something new he was hiding behind his back. It was getting dark before we left the stump. We had sat around it for hours playing checkers on a checkerboard my brother had made from a piece of cardboard he had cut from the side of a box that apples had been shipped in. On the outside was a picture of a big red apple, but on the plain inside he had used his ruler and a pencil to draw off the sixty-four squares of a checkerboard, after which he had colored every other square black or red with some stubby crayons. The checkers we used were the tops off Nehi and RC Cola drink bottles, which he had gotten out of the drink box over at Miss Lena's Store. He played with his bottle caps right side up and I turned mine upside down. "It's your move," he told me. "I can't hardly see anymore. I can't even tell which of my checkers has been crowned." "All right, we'll call this game a draw," Fred said as he raked the bottle caps up and put them in his pocket. "You know, this old stump ought to be good for something besides a place to crack nuts and play checkers." "Like what?" I asked him. "I don't know, but I'll be thinking on it." My stomach reminded me what time it was. "What do you think we're having for supper?" Fred turned toward our house, leaned his head back, inhaled deeply and said, "I think it's collard greens, baked sweet potatoes, and corn bread." "You can smell all that?" I asked in amazement. "Well, not the cornbread, but you know we gonna have that." It was late October in the fall of 1948, and there was a chill in the air as we walked toward the house. "It's gonna get cold tonight," Fred said. "I'll take a load of wood in with me and start a fire in the fireplace. You grab a load of stove wood for the kitchen." There was a large pile of stove wood beside the chopping block where our oldest brother Ned had split it. This was the wood for the kitchen stove, split into small pieces so our momma could feed them into the little door of the fire box. I never complained, but I hated that job because every time I carried a load of stove wood toward the back door leading into the kitchen, the sharp edges of the pieces cut into my arms. It was worse in the summertime when fat green caterpillars sometimes hid on the wood and I would squish them on my arms. That really gave me the creeps. The only thing worse was stepping in chicken droppings when I was barefoot and getting it between my toes. As I knelt beside the woodpile and loaded my arms, I was thankful that it had gotten cool and I didn't have to worry about fuzzy or slimy caterpillars. And, I had my shoes on in case a chicken had gotten out of the pen. Fred had been correct about what was for supper, except for one thing: he hadn't sniffed out the blackberry cobbler that was sitting on the apron of the stove. It was all good. The collards were tasty, especially the pot likker, which I crumbled my cornbread into and ate with a spoon. The baked sweet potatoes had little droplets of moisture on the outside of the heavy skins. We peeled and put butter on them and ate them with the cornbread, and washed it all down with a big glass of sweet milk. After all that my momma dished out the blackberry cobbler in servings large enough so nobody needed any seconds. Everything was good, but the sweet potatoes had been my favorite. I noticed there were some raw ones lying on the counter and figured my momma planned to slice them real thin and fry them up for breakfast. Most sweet potatoes were red or orange inside, but occasionally you would come across a white one. Folks argued about which was the best, but I really couldn't tell much difference. I just knew that we always had plenty of them. The good thing about sweet potatoes was that they would keep all winter. All you had to do was build yourself a potato bank, which was pretty simple. Sweet potatoes were harvested in the fall after they grew underneath the ground like roots to vines that grew above the ground. What you did was plow or dig them up sometime in October before it got real cold. My Uncle Curvin grew them on a piece of land he sharecropped down near Coffeeville. I had helped him plant them back during the first part of July. He always said you had to get the little potato sets in the ground by July 5. He had brought us a pickup truck load last week, and we had fixed us a potato bank. I don't know if it was called a potato bank because it was where you saved your potatoes, or because you banked dirt around them and then covered them with pine straw and more dirt. Anyway, when you wanted to bake them, fry them, or make a potato pie, you just dug through the dirt and pine straw and pulled out what you needed. Later that evening after the fire in the fireplace had died down, we roasted some peanuts by putting them in a flat pan and setting it on some hot coals pulled out onto the hearth. The fire made me drowsy, and it wasn't long before Momma chased us off to bed. Fred beat me into bed and told me to close the window. Just before I closed it I gazed toward where the great tree had stood and imagined it still being there. I remembered begging my father not to cut it down, but he explained that it was dead and would eventually become a hazard by falling down on its own. Instead of letting it do that or rot, it was better to get some lumber and some firewood out of it. He told me that I would encounter a lot of dead trees in my life, and that I needed to learn they should be disposed of and how to accomplish that. I figured out later that he was comparing dead trees to situations in life, and I thought that did make some sense. The other thing he used the tree to teach me was that you could save things in your memory. "Do you remember what it used to look like?" he asked me. "Yes, sir. It was the biggest and prettiest tree I've ever seen, and it was real easy to climb." "Well, then," he said, "that tree will live forever in your memory, and no one or anything can kill it or cut it down." From then on I concentrated on remembering good and pleasant things and cutting down and hauling away the bad things in my memory. I missed my daddy. He was on an island way off in the Pacific Ocean. He was so far away that I couldn't even imagine the distance. After the sawmill behind Miss Lena's Store over on Center Point Road closed, he was out of work for a while. He went down to Mobile and picked up some carpentry work, but that, too, had played out. I don't know how or when he found out about the civil service job on Guam Island, where they were rebuilding after World War II, but off he went, signing up for a year of service. Even though he was gone, he didn't forget about us. Every month he sent Momma a check for forty dollars, which more than bought groceries and the other needs of our family. My daydreaming was interrupted when Fred said, "Hey, close the window and get to bed. We got to get up early tomorrow morning and go to church. They're introducing a new preacher and we'll probably be stuck in there till the cows come home." Our last preacher had lost his position for drinking on the job. We had heard he was over in Mississippi, had himself a new church, and was dealing with his demons quite well. I closed the window and slid between the sheets and pulled a quilt up over me. It wasn't long before my brothers began dueling like two bull frogs with their snoring. I pulled the covers up over my head and fell into a dream world where trees were never cut down and where your daddy never had to go off to some island we had never heard of. Some time during the night it got colder, and I pulled an extra quilt up over myself and went back to sleep wondering what the morrow would bring, other than having to go to church. I liked the new preacher right off. When we walked through the front door of the Center Point Road Baptist Church, he grinned, tousled my hair, and gave me an assuring wink. Once he got started preaching, I was happy to see he didn't rant and rave like the old preacher. He didn't stomp around, point fingers, yell amens, or work up to a fever pitch. His name was Brother Earnest Hillsboro and he said he had fought over in Germany during the great war we were attempting to recover from. I don't think he liked war too much because he talked about it a lot while he preached and he concluded his sermon by saying, "War is always about young men fighting and dying while old men talk and plan. Perhaps one day if the young men could withstand the enticement rendered by the rhetoric and reject the call to arms, no one would die, no one would have to grieve over lost loved ones, and the horror of war would cease to be. "However," he continued, "young men believe they are immortal and old men can't stop talking, so the wars go on while the children, the women, and the innocent suffer its consequences." The church was so quiet you could have heard a gnat's wings buzzing. Fred and I usually played some subtle game to pass the time in church, but when I glanced his way, I saw that he, too, was absorbed with what the new preacher was saying. Brother Hillsboro took a deep breath and continued, "Yet when evil raises its ugly head, who can defend us better than the strong young men, and who can plan better than the wise old men who have fought and survived wars themselves when they were young men?" Everyone in the congregation sat frozen in place waiting for the preacher to answer his own question. "The answer eludes us. We can only hope and pray the young men stay strong and brave, and that the old men are wise and resourceful. The truth is, there is a far better King than anyone leading an earthly army. All we poor mortals can do is pray, have faith, and praise Him." The new preacher was a big hit. After he had dismissed the service, I noticed that all the adults gathered around him outside the church, shaking his hand and telling him how much they had enjoyed his sermon. Fred and I sat on the running board of Uncle Curvin's old pickup truck watching everyone mill around in their Sunday finest. "I think everybody likes the new preacher," I said. "Yeah," Fred replied. "He'll be eating free fried chicken dinners for a month of Sundays." Uncle Curvin took us all home, and Fred disappeared shortly after that. He didn't tell me where he was going, but he said to meet him out by the stump later. I had just about forgotten his request, but I was out at the stump digging around with my hairpin attempting to get a speck of meat out of a hickory nut when I heard the ruckus. It wasn't like anything I had heard before either. It was coming from the thick woods toward the trail which led through them to Friendship Road, and it was a combination of sounds. At first I thought it was a wild pig because of the grunting, scraping, grinding, and rustling racket. Little chill willies jumped up all over me, but I forced myself to venture into the edge of the woods to investigate. When I saw what it was, I just stood there, my feet frozen to the ground.

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Excerpted from Secret of the Satilfa by Ted M. Dunagan
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.