Good Old Boy

A legend by now, it's been told so many times,

how Granddad and his buddy wandered home from

Appomattox

past cow barns and dog bark, pines and moon,

through crisp Virginia mornings and the leafy sun,

eating grits and chitlins in defeated mountain shacks,

Granddad the constant clown, laughing all the way.

How he paid his younger brother to go and fight for him

but when the kid was old enough to join for himself

Granddad made the sacrifice and marched off to war.

How they walked home through the battle-tainted mountains

rich with the rot of shattered mountain boys,

their Alabama accents and Indiana twang-

Dixie mixed with Yankee Doodle in the evening air.

Soft Kentucky voices in the Blue Ridge fog,

their singing sounding ghostly in the air.

Granddad bringing home a fresh batch of stories-

stuck his hat on sticks to tease the crazy yankees,

or how the captain fainted from horse blood on his leg

then moaning, "Lift me gently, Boys-I'm about done."

Wed a girl from Charleston who loved to hear him talk,

she there in the mountains to avoid the war.

Begat a dozen children who mostly raised themselves

while he told jokes and stories at the mill.

He needed living men around him,

not a mulch of country boys sunk in the bog,

men to talk and laugh with or bring home to dinner

and spend the night talking by the potbellied stove.

As they died, one by one he stole their army stories

until you'd swear he must have fought the war alone.

Granddad the big hero-a molecule of history, 143