his mother, recalling her saying, "You know the first thing my nurse told me after you were born, darling? She said you were the most beautiful baby she had ever seen. You were so pink and pretty. Not red like most new born babies. Your aunt Emma named you that first night. She was going with a boy named Gaylord and when she suggested it, I liked it immediately. I was afraid your daddy wouldn't like it, not naming you after him, but he wasn't there that night and afterwards he liked it too."
His mother had told him about that night. About the small hospital room in which these words had been spoken. About the storm that had raged outside. She had made it all so clear, so real that even as a child he had heard the deafening blasts of thunder tearing at the shuddering, rattling window-panes. Had closed his eyes on visualizing the flashes of lightning sweeping through the room.
And when he had asked her where his father had been she had only said, "I don't know." A dim smile had curved her full lips and in her eyes had been a serene look he had not understood. "I don't know where he was," she had continued. "But he did come shortly afterwards." She had looked at him and opened her right hand. Pale pink color had flashed on the tips of tapering fingers before him and he had thought the hand excitingly feminine, though perhaps the skin a bit too rough, too coarse for perfect beauty.
"Mother, why are your hands so red?" he had asked.
"Mother's worked hard, honey. Before I married your daddy, I lived on a farm and girls who plow don't have pretty hands. I've worked hard with these ugly hands."
"But they're not ugly," he had answered, "they're just red."
His mother's stories flashed before him now and worked down deep into his mind. They spread before him like an oil painting of familiar interwoven lines and across it trailed a dirty road, rough and crooked. It continued by fields of cotton, white as the floating clouds, passed hay meadows and black earth and stopped at a farm house. Here, in this almost unpopulated setting his mother had lived and grown up.
He loved to hear her tell about how she had plowed the earth; picked the cotton. Tell about the wild tangle of weeds she rode over on horseback to school. Yes, he loved these stories that she told as they
