pred 6 d.
Went out early Tuesday because August in Tennessee only lends you the morning and takes the rest of it back. Ran the Heritage north on 12 with the fog still sitting in the bottoms along the river, thick enough in spots that I could see the tops of the corn and nothing under them.
There is an old brick church out that way with a cemetery beside it and a gravel lot that has been packed hard by about a hundred years of Sunday parking. I have gone by it more times than I can count and never once pulled in. Tuesday there was a fella on a riding mower working his way between the stones, so I turned in.
He shut the mower off when he saw the bike, which I did not ask him to do. Said he cuts it every other week from April to October and nobody pays him for it and nobody asked him to start. His people are in the third row from the fence. Then he looked at the Heritage a while and told me his granddaddy rode an Indian Chief home from Nashville in nineteen and forty-seven and put it in a barn in fifty-one and that is the last anybody knows of it.
I asked whether the barn was still standing. He said it was not.
We stood there in the wet grass another ten minutes not saying much. The fog was starting to lift off the field behind the fence and the day was fixing to get hot. Then he started the mower back up and I got on the bike, and that was the whole of it.