I. Father Byrd

Centuries ago Father Byrd crossed those worn and weathered mounts into the wild untamed unclaimed Mississippi River valley, settled down and farmed land in a place that came to be called West Tennessee sent grandsons off to Franklin to die for the Confederacy, sat and wept and said not a word until he died of a broken heart, let his sons and their grandsons and their sons and their sons farm his acres ‘til TVA took half of it, and the mechanized farmers across the Mississippi made the rest useless, and the next generation went off to college and got Yankee jobs, and his last son sat dying of Alzheimer’s in a Lay-Z-Boy in front of a TV screen, and his brother drove the last stake of barbed wire fencing into the ground, rolled over and died of a heart attack in the timeless pasture. He was eighty-six. I’m seventeen and here I sit using my hands not for plowing, not for splitting logs, not for shooting deer, not for fencing, but for writing the history of those who came before and made this life possible.