Papa is a Rolling Stone

Papa is a rolling stone, Mama says. We brought him home in the pickup yesterday, after Mama got a call from him. He told her he was at Hardee's on Ogeechee Road. This is near Savannah, which we have to remind Linus, my little brother, is still in Georgia. Linus still thinks that our town, Smallville, is Georgia, and asks even when we cross over to Claxton if we are in Georgia. Anyway, Papa had got away, like a large Mayan calendar I dreamt the other night, rolling along the narrow dark grey-black ribbon of road and across the Ogeechee to Savannah, where he stayed for six days and seven nights.

If Papa is a rolling stone, Mama is a millstone, fixed to a shaft and always winding, turning, working her way no where but ever turning, here, yes-- it's not fair to say nowhere and yet sometimes I catch a glimpse of a look in her eyes, a silver shimmer like almost still water. Then I wonder if she is somewhere else.

Linus is a panther today, sleek and so dark brown that in the shadows he seems black. They say there are no black panthers, that the ones people say they see quickly like a streak of jet across roads, are really just Florida panthers. Other folk claim they are jaguars from South America, escaped from some menagerie or estate in South Georgia or the Panhandle, across the state line. But Linus doesn't know about this, he only plays at being a panther. Tomorrow he may change to a dog, or a wolf. He even once was a shark, swimming through the water that was for me the air we breathe.

Linus sat listening once, while a wolf I think, as I asked Papa where he had been last winter, after he had flown away on the plane. He told us how he had gone to a place they call Darfur, in the north of Africa.

I see Papa packing every day now. He goes on long walks. When home, he does sit-ups and push-ups. He takes out his guns and cleans them. He says they are tools, that they are not to be touched, and the day will come when he teaches us, but that these tools can do much hurt.

I see him laugh telling us that he can also say he turned into the wind, flew over the Sahel and further across the Sahara. Papa explains that when we hear other people say Sahara Desert, that is like saying "Desert Desert," so we are only to call it the Sahara, which means The Desert. Papa says it is so big, so very big that you feel you open to the sky, and the sky wants to suck you up like so many drops of rain dried by afternoon.

Both Linus and I keep smooth river stones in safe places. We hold them in our hands, close our eyes, and think of Papa far away. Papa says he will try to write to us, but the post is not so dependable. He will turn into the wind again at night, and so visit us in our dreams. Once Mama heard us say this. She looked away, and again seemed to be only her outside, while to me it seemed she had already turned to a breeze, and was looking to see where Papa would be, and could it be so very far?