by Pamela Morsi
I pulled up the actual text. The long brown leger pages that had been carried from house to house and from farm to farm had been laid flat and photographed. The families were listed only in the order of their interviews and indexed only to the page. So I had to read down a long list of head-of-household names written in crisp readable letters.
I was more than halfway down the page when I found it. Lemuel C. Medford, head of household. Age forty-two. Occupation: merchant. Beneath his name was Essie, age thirty-nine, a housewife.
“Oh my God, oh my God!” I said aloud.
Below Essie’s entry were the couple’s two children. A son, Clafford M. Medford, age thirteen and daughter, Sophrona, age eleven.
“Oh my God!” I continued.
I had to show it to Phrona. I couldn’t believe it, but I could. I hit the print button. I stood eagerly, impatiently, waiting for the paper to come out of the machine. It took too long.
“Come on! Hurry up!” I yelled at the machine.
Finally I had my paper in hand and went running out of the office and back to the house. I burst into the kitchen.
“Grandma, I found them! I found Lemuel and Essie!”
“You did? Well, good for you!”
She quickly wiped her hands on a dish towel and hurried toward me.
“They were alive, just like you thought,” I said. “They were using her maiden name.”
I handed her the paper.
“Where were they?” she asked.
“They were right here,” I told her.
“Here?”
“He was a merchant in Jonesborough.”
“For heaven’s sake,” my grandmother said, shaking her head. “After all that, they came home.”
REAL LIFE
34
It was gray and blustery the day I came from school to find nobody. Both the Dodge and the Saab were gone. I wasn’t worried. I figured Vern had gone downtown to pick up Mom, and Phrona had to run to the grocery store or something.
Nobody was home next door, either. Spence’s little brother was three days old and had come home from the hospital that morning. He and Del had headed over to his mom’s house in Sequoyah Hills to say hi.
I unlocked the door and Rocky came trotting toward me.
“Looks like it’s just you and me, guy,” I told him.
I went ahead with my normal routine, expecting someone to show up soon. I changed clothes, played with Rocky a few minutes and sat down to do my homework. I was done except for my composition essay. I saved it for last so that I could take my time and not feel rushed. I wanted to say something about the chaos theory and why it was just beginning to be understood, by me and the whole rest of the world. We’d written our thesis statement in class. I thought mine was good.
As an instrument of exploration, the computer is to chaos theory what the telescope has been to the understanding of astronomy.
This probably wasn’t going to be the easiest subject to try to explain. The girl who sat next to me was writing on why cheerleaders should be able to letter in their sport like other high school athletes. Her boyfriend, who sat behind her, was postulating that golden retrievers were the best friends among man’s best friend. Science was never the easy choice, but it was always interesting to me. And there was the added benefit that the English teacher rarely had a clue of what I was talking about, so I never got graded on what I said, only how I said it.
The front doorbell rang.
My first thought was to ignore it. Then I remembered that I was the only one in the house. Rocky met me in the hall to check it out.
I looked through the peephole and saw an old man standing on the porch. He wasn’t anybody that I recognized. But he didn’t look like he was selling anything, either. He was a tall guy, pretty muscular to be so old. He was wearing striped overalls and a bright orange cap. I opened the door.
“Hi,” I said.
He smiled at me. He had a great big smile that took over his whole face, making his eyes sort of disappear in the creases of it.
“Well, hi there, yourself,” he said. “This is the Leland place, right?”
“Yes, it is,” I answered.
He looked at me closely. “You’re one of Sonny’s little girls,” he said. “You look just like your daddy.”
“Thank you,” I said, and then wondered if that was the right response.
“Are you the younger sister or the older?” he asked.
“The younger,” I said. “I’m Dakota.”
“Ah…then I guess we haven’t met. Is your mama around?” he asked.
I shook my head. “She’s not here,” I told him.
Just then the dog pushed his way past me and rushed up to the man, jumping up and down, tongue hanging out and tail wagging.
“Well, hello, boy,” the man said. “You’re a happy guy, huh.” He let the dog stand up paws at this knees. He rubbed him behind the ears with both hands. “Is this Rocky?”
“Uh…yeah. You know Rocky?”
“I do, but I wouldn’t have recognized him,” he said. “He looks a lot different from that little puppy your dad picked up at the pound.”
“You knew my dad?”
The man was still playing with the dog, but he glanced over at me with a warm smile.
“Sonny and I were friends,” he said, simply.
I would never have suspected that. The guy was closer to Vern’s age than Sonny Leland’s.
Rocky was calmer now, just sitting at the man’s feet, wagging his tail.
“I’m really sorry I missed Dawn,” he said. “Would you tell her that I came by?”
“You know my mom, too?”
He nodded. “A long time ago. I didn’t know she was back in town,” the man said. “My daughter works in the courthouse and recognized her name on a volunteer list. I came as soon as I heard.”
“We’ve been here all summer,” I told him.
“That’s good,” he said. “Please tell her that I came by. I’ll try to catch her another day.”
“Okay.”
He started down the steps. Somehow I didn’t want to let him go.
“Wait! You didn’t tell me your name.”
“Oh, yeah, my name’s Beale, Lonnie Beale.”
“And you were a friend of my dad,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “Sonny Leland was the best friend a man could have. He saved my life.”
“He what?”
“He saved my life,” Lonnie said. “Didn’t your mother tell you about how he died?”
I walked out on the porch, shutting the door behind me.
“She said he died in a logging accident.”
“And that’s all you know?” Lonnie asked.
I shook my head. “I read the report.”
“Report?”
“The OSHA report on the accident,” I said. “A friend of mine found it on the Internet.”
“The Internet?” Lonnie shook his head in disbelief. “Now that’s a strange place for a girl to learn about her dad.”
I shrugged. “I think it hurts my mom to talk about it,” I told him.
He nodded slowly as he thought about that. “I’m sure it does.”
“It’s not fair, really,” I told him. “He’s my dad. I need to know what happened.”
“I guess that’s true,” Lonnie said. “But I understand what your mother is thinking. It’s easier to talk about the good times, the happy times, when they were alive. My wife died almost twenty years ago now. It’s her life I want to share with my children, not her death.”
“But you wouldn’t mind if somebody else told them,” I said.
“No, I guess not.”
I sat down in the glider and offered him a seat beside me. “Tell me about my dad,” I said. “Tell me how he saved your life.”
Lonnie looked at me thoughtfully for a moment and then climbed the porch steps a second time. He sat down. Rocky scooted up close and lay his snout on the cushion beside Lonnie’s hand. With a little c
huckle the man began to pet him again.
I waited. I didn’t even know what question to ask.
“I met Sonny when he came to work on my crew,” Lonnie said. “He was a good kid, smart, hardworking. All the things that a boss looks for and a friend admires.”
I nodded.
“I knew a bit about what was going on in his life,” he said. “He was a happy, optimistic guy, though I knew that he’d had to drop out of college to support a young wife and a baby.”
“Did you meet my mom then, too?”
Lonnie nodded.
“Sonny was crazy about her,” he said. “And she felt the same about him. They were very different, but I think they brought out the best in each other.”
“She loved him,” I said.
It wasn’t a question but he answered it anyway.
“Yes, I know that she did,” Lonnie said. “And he knew that she did.”
“How did he save your life?” I asked.
He hesitated for a moment, almost as if he didn’t want to remember. Then he laid a hand on the bib front of his overalls like he was touching his heart.
“It was the day he died,” he said solemnly. “It was a dark day, not wet, but gray. That’s how it all seems in my memory, very gray. We were out near Burke’s Ridge cutting some trees on a hillside. We’d been around that area for three weeks or more.”
“The report said there was another crew cutting too close.”
Lonnie nodded. “Technically the crews weren’t breaking any rules,” he said. “But all the loggers knew that we were working too close. So we stopped simultaneous cutting.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we let that team fell trees on their side while we waited,” he said. “Once they had some of theirs on the ground, then we’d cut while they waited. It makes the day longer, but we thought it was safer.”
“But it wasn’t.”
He shook his head. “Sometimes things just go wrong,” he said. “You can’t figure out the why, you can’t find the mistake. You don’t know who to blame.”
“What happened?”
“We were just standing around,” he said. “A feller from the other crew was topping out a tree. By everything that we know about cutting trees, and we know a lot, it should have fallen straight down, but it didn’t.”
“Why not?”
Lonnie shook his head. “Some speculated that the cut was miscalculated. Other people thought there might have been a gust of wind,” he said. “But I heard it. It cracked wrong. It was a rogue and there’s no way to predict that.”
“What’s a rogue?”
“It’s a tree that’s not right, it’s not like other trees,” he said. “Maybe when it was a sapling or even a seedling, something happened. It made the grain run differently or form a weakness. It’s like an invisible defect in a plant that was probably fifty years in the making. Completely undetectable until something happens.”
“And that was the day something happened,” I said.
“Yes, when the cut was made, it was almost as if the tree threw the top into standing trees,” he said. “The speed and the weight broke limbs on a half-dozen trees as it came down. One of those limbs came right where we were standing.”
“So the limb landed on my dad,” I said.
Lonnie nodded. “It was actually worse than that,” he said. “I wouldn’t give you the details, except that you can’t understand what happened without them.”
“Tell me.”
“As it came down, the jagged edge of the limb came right at us, like a giant spear,” he said. “It landed exactly where I stood.”
He stopped talking for a moment and just stared into space as if he were seeing it all once again.
“It should have killed me,” he said quietly. “It would have killed me. But at the instant before it landed, not even a second, much less than that, Sonny Leland stepped in front of me.”
I was speechless.
“I’ve gone over that a billion times in my memory,” he said. “I’ve tried to understand if he did it accidentally or instinctively or if it was a deliberate choice to give his life for mine.”
“Which is it?”
Lonnie shook his head.
“Did he leave us on purpose?” I asked.
“Sonny had a lot to live for,” the man said. “He had a wife who loved and needed him. Two little girls who would never really know their daddy. And his whole young life ahead of him. I don’t believe he wanted to die.”
“So it was just some quirk of fate?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I’ll never know. And I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter. It happened the way that it did. What it means for me is that I need to live my life as if it were worth being saved. I’ve tried to do that. I continue to try every day.”
My dad had died for this man. It was hard to get my mind around it.
“I have six children,” Lonnie said. “They lost their mother when they were very young. Of course, they all know the story about how Sonny Leland saved my life. They’ve always empathized with you and your sister. We all know it hasn’t been easy for you.”
He reached over with a tender gesture and rubbed my head.
“I just wanted to tell you and your mother and sister, that on behalf of myself and my family, we thank you for the sacrifice you’ve had to make.”
I nodded, still not sure exactly how I felt.
“Thanks for coming and telling me,” I said.
Lonnie nodded.
We sat there in silence for several moments. He was remembering. I was imagining.
“I have a scar,” he said finally.
“A scar?”
“Yes….” He hesitated. “I told you the limb came at us like a spear. It went right through Sonny’s body and into my own.”
I looked up quickly, his words startled me. I could tell instantly that he regretted being so honest, but it was too late.
“A doctor told me later that it was very quick,” he assured me. “So quick, Sonny probably never felt anything.”
There was some comfort in that.
“This probably won’t make any sense to you,” he said. “But when I touch the scar on my chest, I’m aware that it’s the place where his body and mine were fused together as he died.”
I tried to imagine what it had been like. I tried to imagine a limb falling like a spear. I tried to imagine my father and this man fused together for the last instant of his life. It was hard to imagine.
“May I see it?” I asked him.
I was surprised at my own question.
“The scar? If you want to,” he said.
I nodded.
Lonnie unhooked the bib of his overalls and opened his shirt. There on a chest sparsely covered with hair was a jagged road map of healed flesh.
He ran his huge, age-toughened hand along the lines.
Tentatively, I reached out and touched the marks on Lonnie’s chest. It was the closest I’d ever been to my father in my whole life.
There were tears of loss and somehow of joy, as well.
“Thank you,” I said finally as I pulled my hand away.
“I’m so sorry, little one,” Lonnie said, quietly. “He was a good man. You would have loved him. I know he already loved you.”
Those were ordinary, typical words for the comfort of the family. But I knew, somehow, that Lonnie meant them in a way that no one else ever could.
We sat silently together for a long time.
Eventually, we began to converse again. Lonnie told me stories about my dad on the job. His perceptions of the young Sonny and Dawn. The hopes and dreams of a man I would never know. We talked about happier times, things my dad had said. Even words that he’d had for me that morning.
“You were the last thing we talked about,” he said. “You were only weeks away and he was anxious to meet you.”
“I wish he had,” I told him. “All my life, I wish he had.”
The m
an nodded.
I was grateful to Lonnie for talking about everything. For talking to me about my dad. For telling me the truth about the accident. For trying to live his life so that it was worthy of my dad’s sacrifice. Which, I guess, was my sacrifice, too.
That was the strangest part. He had stepped in front of Lonnie. That had changed everything for all of us.
I said goodbye.
“I won’t be a stranger,” he promised in his country way of speech. “I’ll be back to check on you, talk with your mother and sister.”
“Thanks.”
Rocky and I went back inside the house. I returned to my room and my essay, but I couldn’t write. I couldn’t think about anything but my dad and what had been said and the scar on Lonnie’s chest.
This had been my dad’s room. This had been my dad’s house. Sonny Leland had been my dad. I didn’t want to ever forget that.
From beneath my bed, I dragged out my suitcase. Still wrapped in the old T-shirt was the soccer picture. He looked like me. He was smart like me. Or maybe I was smart like him. I looked like him.
Lonnie wasn’t the only one who had a reason to make his life count for something.
“Dakota! Dakota!”
My sister was calling out to me as she came through the front door. There was something in her voice, something that had me racing up the hallway.
We met in the dining room.
“What’s wrong?”
“Hurry, come quick,” she said. “Vern’s waiting in the car outside.”
“What’s happened?”
“Mom’s bad, real bad. They’ve put her in the hospital.”
As I followed her out, I realized I was still holding the soccer photo. I set it on the dining room mantel where it had come from in the first place.
SONNY DAYS
35
The partnership with Paul was a success so surprising that it almost caught the two inexperienced entrepreneurs off guard. They secured the patent and began to approach people about it. Paul reasonably assumed that the equipment designs would be studied and improved upon a dozen times before a prototype was built. The manufacturer would test market it and if they were lucky, someone would show an interest. Sonny fully expected that no one would show any interest, that they would need to find a political solution to force the safety issue onto the industry.