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12 Homecoming I t would take coming back to Georgia for many of these memories to resurface . Now here I am, falling like Alice down a rabbit hole in pursuit of a forgotten wonderland. Am I seeing the past through rose-colored glasses, or was it truly that way? And how did I come to be in our friend Billy’s car twenty-six years later, driving away from the Atlanta bus station onto once-familiar roads? Route 166. Highway 5. Oh my God, I’m back in the county. The weather is overcast and damp, typical for November. The countryside looks much the same: lots of withered kudzu. More houses along the highway, more Confederate flags than American; a county yet divided. Red clay hills still roll to low horizons where clouds lather over dark groves of loblolly pine. I didn’t know how it would feel to be back, but my return is having the desired effect: the landscape is drawing out shreds of lost conversation—something Depty once said about the rain, the way it deepens the hues of winter fields, bringing out the rust and sere, making brown a primary color. Billy sits quietly behind the wheel. At sixty-seven, he wears his hair short and his beard long, both white as salt, with the same insistent curiosity in his eyes. As if on cue, we start chattering away like the old friends we are. He catches me up on the Waller crowd. First, his son, Basil: twenty-six years old and living in New York City, a drummer and carpenter no less. Billy beams. “Good man. Really good man.” “I bet.” “Let’s see.” He thinks a moment. “Glyn and Sas divorced—’79—’80? Who can remember?” I throw up my hands. “Not me.” 52 Homecoming | 53 “Glyn remarried,” Billy continues. “Divorced again. Sas is back in the county. Her daughters are married with kids. Greg was killed in ’87. You knew that, right?” I nod. “Sas told me. Years ago. On the phone.” Inspired by Depty Dawg, Greg had gone on to play guitar with Jump Street, a band in Atlanta. At twenty-eight, he was struck in his car by a drunk driver and died instantly. Billy grips the steering wheel. “That was the end of an era. Since then Waller’s never been the same. Bubba’s still kicking,” he goes on. “I wrote you he has Hepatitis-C.” “Yeah, how’s he doing?” Billy shrugs. “Good days and bad. Beautiful Helen, gone for decades. Seth is all grown up, a fine young man. Who else? Joe’s in New Orleans. Married with greyhounds. They rescue abused racers.” “That sounds like ole Joe. And Grody Mike?” “Get this,” Billy chortles. “Hotshot water engineer for the city of Austin, Texas. Two kids. Absolutely devoted family man. He’s coming in a few days. He wants to see you.” Then all at once we’re on Old Black Dirt Road, which is now neither old nor dirt, covered with a recent layer of shiny black asphalt. We pull into Billy’s driveway. I’ve been warned to avoid Koko the rooster. Margery shoos him into his coop. At the back edge of the yard is the site of the sheep shed Depty helped to build, torn down years ago, replaced by something sturdier. In a fenced-in field, their last two ewes, fat with wool, still chew without expression. Probably they should not have named their sheep; over the years the flock expanded , but not their pocketbooks. Billy points to the fence. “Dep and Grody put that in for us, remember?” “I do now.” The house has had a lot of work done on it: a new second story, bedroom and bath. Across the lawn at the rim of a forested ridge, the swath of high bush blueberries is ten feet tall and crimson in autumn. “Was that hill always there?” I had pictured the yard as flat pasture. Billy laughs. “Your eyes were on other things then.” Margery comes over now, smaller than I recall, resilient despite a recent battle with breast cancer. I’d forgotten how blue her eyes are, how deep her accent. “Oh, Sybil.” She puts her arms around me and suddenly I’m home again. 54 | Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley Glyn, Bubba, and his second wife, Pam, are coming over for dinner. Glyn arrives first. Almost seventy and far less shaggy, there’s...

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