Marksberry Road

When we lived on Marksberry Road, it didn’t have a name. I don’t mean it wasn’t named something. What I’m saying is, nobody ever called it anything. It was always just the road that you turned off the main road onto when you got to the picnic woods.

And then, sometime after Daddy died, after losing control of his car and running into one of the big ditches along Marksberry Road, they put up a sign and then the road had a name. Daddy’s dying on the road had nothing to do with them putting the sign up.

The sign saying Marksberry Road was light blue, of all colors, and looked like the signs you see on street corners in cities. It was tin, oblong and narrow, and it sat atop a silver-colored metal pole above everyone’s heads, pointing the way, in white lettering, down Marksberry Road. It looked out of place on a country road. I remember the first time I saw it. It gave me a shock. I looked from the sign to the road and back, thinking, This road has a name?

They also blacktopped the road around the same time they put the sign up. When we lived on the road, in the little gray cinder block sharecropper shack, it was gravel and deep dust that cars and other vehicles threw up into long, rolling clouds behind them as they went and that, after they were gone, settled on everything, time and time again, layering it thick. The dust would literally get ankle deep in some low places by August. Always barefoot in summer, I remember wading in it like water.

After they blacktopped Marksberry Road, it was even more strange. Gone overnight were the clouds of dust, which also meant that the dust was gone from the ditches, as well. I was used to the weeds in the ditches being covered gray with it. Even the grasshoppers in the weeds were gray with the dust. After they paved the road, and after the first hard rain, the dust was washed off the weeds—and the grasshoppers—and both were made bright green again. Stones were no longer thrown up onto the roadsides and into the ditches by passing vehicles, either, because there was no more gravel. Long after the road was paved, a few of the old stones still lay along the roadside, though, and were a reminder of what the road had once been. The blacktop didn’t keep the watery shimmer of heat waves from rippling up from its surface, either. That still happened, just like when the road was bright white with gravel. What was different was that, while the sun and heat had only made the gravel and dust hot, they just about melted the blacktop, because the road would get downright soft and spongy by hot July, after a few weeks of sun beating down on it so relentlessly. And the sounds on the road, the soft crunch of tires on gravel and the occasional hard ping of the stones hitting the metal underneaths of cars, were replaced by a gentle swish swish as vehicles now rolled effortlessly by on the new, smooth surface. It became very quiet on Marksberry Road.

Marksberry Road was not an important road. What I mean is, it wasn’t a main road. Any road that gets you from here to there is important, even a narrow, dirt and gravel, winding road with big ditches on both sides.

The main road was called Route 431, or Livermore Road. It was big enough and important enough to have two names. Technically, it was not really a road but a highway, and a US federal highway at that. It never got a sign like Marksberry Road calling it Livermore Road, but it did have highway markers all along it with the number 431 on them.

Surprisingly, when you thought about it, Route 431 wasn’t a whole lot different from Marksberry Road, once you got past the prejudices surrounding the two, and after Marksberry Road got paved. The main...