The Laughter of Adam and Eve

Escaped to Tell

65 Escaped to Tell No reason in the world for driving so fast except you absolutely have to get to your son in trouble in these hills— in custody, a Southern sheriff versus a high school boy: a rescue this is, no less, through darkling Georgia, but what will rescue you? The rain storms torrents into the ditches, gouts across the windshield, sheets over the road in the amber headlights of the rental, pocked as beaten bronze, and you are not exactly riding a wave of luck yourself of late: late sister, late brother, too early ferried over that other river, and then your father, also. New prisms in each eyeglass lens do help with the persistent double vision, but you can see the setting clearly enough. In the wind, the tall pines blade-bend in actual multiples, the slash of each branch, the road’s scythe-curves, quick-lit in lightning, slicing left, slicing right. The edge you have 66 against the ridiculous abundance of bad enough and worse still, as much as the anxious ownership of fatherhood, to bring you through for him and back to us, is that even fully in the midst of everything you’re half aware of what a hell of a story it’s going to be. Is. ...