Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
“Yes, Thalia, Harry and Maggie are going to drive us back down, and Harry is going to drive our car because Lil' Robert and George's eyes are falling out of their head with my great-uncle's stories and they don't want to separate from him, and there is more room in Harry's truck. But also, I'm no good, my wife … to be acknowledged by my grandmother's family as a son … the only family that ever knew how to love me …”
Capt. Ludlow choked as the memories flooded him … the nameless fears he endured of his murderous Slocum-Bolling relatives … the fact that his father had said to them after their murder not that they should not have done those murders, but not in front of him at under nine years old! From five years old onward … to live in such trauma and fear …
But then his mother's mother, Hilda Lee Slocum-Bolling, disowned her own sons and came to live with the Ludlows … and she became his link to a different kind of life, a life illustrated by the story her last surviving brother was telling his her little great-great-grandsons as their eyes kept getting ready to fall out of their heads …
“To have seen one of the last of the Appalachian mountain lions, and to have killed that beast, would have made a great man of me in the eyes of the world … but to recognize that creature as also a creation of God, and to find a way that both it and the community I belong to could live, was the call to greatness that I heard.”
Old Horace Lee told of how he relocated that mountain lion like other men talked about picking up their dry cleaners … by using food, he had lured the big cat out of the inhabited areas it was nearing, so that “by the time she gave birth to her cubs, she was once again in a place where I could keep her great secret: the mountain lions of the Appalachians are returning!”
Of things returning, being renewed, being healed … of the work of reconciliation God was doing in Christ, so little highlighted in a country for whom strife and greed were nearly their own religion … even large and dangerous things, beautiful in their time and proper place with their progeny … or a large and dangerous man, with his progeny, restored to the right family at the right time …
But then – anguish flooded the captain – if only he had known while his children were small like his grandchildren – if only he had the strength that Hilda's father, Horatio Lee, had while only 16 years old … to turn from the world and its temptations, at any cost, to God, and to have only of life that God was happy to give from His hand! If only – and the captain's anguish deepened – he had known before his first marriage!
But how could he know, raised in that house in which murder of certain people was all right to be seen by nine year olds? He could only visit such a world, not build upon it … but Hilda Lee Slocum-Bolling had done what she could and sown the seed … a seed still growing up well as five-year-old Lil' Robert and nine-year-old George sat wide-eyed and learned of how to save a mountain lion, of how to preserve life and not destroy it.
“Walk with me, R.E. … just walk with me.”
Capt. Ludlow had literally wandered away into his own past, not realizing it … but the strong arms of his cousin Harry Lee were around him, for the retired colonel recognized his fellow veteran with preexisting devastating trauma was having an episode.
“Thank you, Harry … I'm no good right now.”
“But you are on your way to better – just walk with me, to better. We'll make it.”
The captain would never know how long it was that they walked far enough away so that his grandsons would not be alarmed, and his cousin knelt beside him as at last the sobs he had been holding in came forth … so much and so many emotions for so many reasons, but in the end, what was left was joy.
