The Arrangement: Part Three
In October of 1938, Jimmy's grandfather Thomas walked around the back corner of the barn before daylight and found something eating out of the crushed cane pile behind the sorghum mill. When he described it at breakfast, his father Will asked about the color across its shoulders and the way its left foot traveled, and then told him which one it was. The family had called it the boy since it was young, and nobody on the place had seen it in more than 10 years.
Part Three of Jimmy's account covers the years when the north Georgia farm passed from Will to Thomas. Through the late 1930s and early 1940s, Thomas met the boy again and again, at the apple stump, at the top field, and across thirty feet of water at the spring branch, and it never once let him close the distance. In those same years he learned to tell the animals on the mountain apart by build, color, face, and the way each one walked, and he later taught that to his son and to Jimmy.
In 1943 Thomas took his family to Marietta for war work at the Bell bomber plant, and Will stayed on the land alone. When Thomas came home in the fall of 1945, the fences were down, the orchard was broken up, and his father told him it wasn't like it had been. A year later, Thomas walked in on two of them feeding in the upper hollow, and one of them followed him half a mile down the mountain, breaking timber and throwing rocks.
This episode also covers the timber cruiser who came down off the ridge in November of 1947 talking about a wild man, the men who showed up with hounds and rifles, and the night Will sat the family down at the kitchen table. It ends with Will's last sighting from the porch in October of 1949, and with what Thomas found in the bottom of his father's trunk a few months later.
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