I was sitting on the porch when I heard the sound of the dove come from the old millpond. The dove’s mournful call stopped, and then I heard death coming down the country road that ran passed my grandparent’s farm. It broke the Sunday afternoon apart and silenced the dove.
My grandmother’s name was Gloria Roberts. My grandfather was already dead by that fall, finally killed by the gas that began to eat his lungs in the trenches of France in 1918; buried with his Croix de Guerre.
My grandparents lived in the tobacco country of eastern North Carolina, in a place with a name you couldn’t find on a map. They lived in the midst of horizon-to-horizon tobacco fields that grew over my head; hid me in forests of green like the jungles of Tarzan, and where I ran wild, invisible to the world, feeling the hot sand of the fields between my bare toes.
I was ten year old, sitting on the porch of my grandparent’s house and dreaming a boy’s dreams, when the call of the dove stopped.
I heard screaming metal, an engine trying to tear itself apart, howling like a tortured animal. I looked toward the road. I could see the small white dot of my grandmother’s mailbox, atop its post and leaning a little to the right, on the other side of the road.
Then I saw it. It came from the left, a flash of blue. And it began to fly. If left the ground and climbed toward the sky over the tobacco fields, trying to fly over the ditch by the side of the road. The sky and the car were almost the same pale-blue color.
Halfway up the arc of its climb, the car rolled, like an airplane doing stunts. I could see the workings beneath it. They were lewd, as if the car was naked. The car seemed to hang at the top of the arc, its black belly exposed, and then it fell.
The car fell into the ditch and kicked up dirt that floated and drifted in the air around it. It landed on its top and the wheels kept spinning. The roaring engine died when the car hit the ditch and I could hear the spinning wheels. They made a rumbling and whirring sound.
I jumped off the porch and ran. I don’t know why I didn’t run to find my grandmother. She was in the garden in the back of the house, bent over her black-eyed Susan’s. But I didn’t run for her, I ran toward the upside down car, its wheels starting to slow down now, but still spinning. I was thirteen years old and I was running toward death. But I didn’t know it.
There was a breeze ruffling something; making something pink move and dance. I kept running. I saw a woman lying on the white line in the middle of the road. The breeze was moving parts of her pink dress.
I stood in the middle of the road, breathing hard from the running, and felt the heat from the asphalt on the soles of my bare feet, like standing in my grandparent’s fields. I looked down at the woman in the road. She was an older woman; she was a thin black woman dressed in her Sunday church best.
I looked both ways down the road. There were no other cars. The whole world was filled up with me and an elderly black woman in a pink dress lying like a rag doll in the middle of a road surrounded by North Carolina tobacco fields.
Then, a car came. I didn’t know it was there until I heard the door slam and a man came toward me.
“Son?” the man said. “Better get out of the road, boy. I’ll go on down to Pappy yoke’s Store and call an ambulance. You’d better get out of the road, son.”
“I know,” I said.
“You Van Robert’s grandson?” the man said.
“Yessir,” I said. Now, I wanted to cry. As long as it was just me and the woman lying in the road, as long we were all there was in the world, I didn’t think about crying. But now, I wanted to cry.
