Selection from "All Over but the Shoutin" by Rick Bragg.
He was living in a little house in Jacksonville, Alabama, a college and mill town that was the closest urban center—with it's spotlights and a high school and two supermarkets—to the
country roads we roamed in our raggedy cars. He lived in the mill village, in one of the houses the mill subsidized for their workers, back when companies still did things like that. It was not much of a place, but better than anything we ever lived in as a family. When I knocked a voice like an old woman’s, punctuated with a cough that sounded like it came from deep in the guts, told me to come in, it ain’t locked.
It was dark inside, but light enough to see what looked like a bundle of quilts on the corner of a sofa. Deep inside them was a ghost of a man, his hair and beard long and going dirty gray, his face pale and cut with deep grooves. I knew I was in the right house because my Daddy's possessions, a velvet-covered board pinned with medals, sat inside a glass cabinet on the table. But this couldn't be him.
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