Bobby

That summer my second wife and I lived on the state road in rural North Carolina in the 6-room farmhouse I got for $100 a month, amid the tobacco fields, which by the way have lovely, pink flowers in the spring, and oh, yes, that spring, too, the beauty of the white birds on the juice-green meadow outside my study all but made me faint. Summer was different. Heat rose from the road's black asphalt in visible, radiating waves. Every day around noon, looking down that road that parted fields and woods as far as you could see, we'd spy a tiny figure, who would slowly grow, trudging past our house half an hour later, then slowly shrink till he disappeared in the opposite direction. One day I decided to ask him where he was walking every day. 'My name is Bobby, ' he replied. 'My daddy's sick. I walk ten miles there and ten back every day to give him his medicine.' After that, we'd wave when Bobby passed. A couple weeks later one day breathing very hard when he got to our place, he collapsed. Thinking he might die, I drove him to the Tabor City hospital, half-carrying him in to the Emergency Room, then to the room they admitted him to, remaining there, holding this man I hardly knew. 'Jesus loves you and I love you! ' I told him over and over again. Bobby didn't die, it wasn't his heart after all, they said. Some kind of indigestion. Calling back those days is like remembering heroes at the dawn of time. The world was different then. Or I was young.