Excerpt from The Loner
The Jacksonville East Lawn Cemetery is located four miles north of town. Maggie’s grandparents are buried there. In the near future, Charles and Catherine Haggerty will join Maggie. My parents are there, too. One hundred steps to the northern corner of the cemetery. My grandparents, on the other hand, never ventured far from Benton. Their final resting place is only three miles from the old dealership.
With a slight breeze at my back and the early morning sun reflecting off my face, I looked south across the valley. Back in the early 1950s, you could locate the old farmhouse in a fraction of a second.
Not anymore. New homes now filled the valley, all the way to the forest line. I stood next to Maggie’s gravesite and looked south, following the tree line to the old railroad track — the stretch of track I hopped and skipped my way to town on as a young boy.
Some say you can never go back. I think that might be true, although I do not have a clue who made such a claim.
I remember the hunting and the fishing. The yellow bus I took to school. The old high school basketball gym and those awful, prehistoric, oversized leather balls we used to play with. I remember cruising up and down Main Street, pulling into the drive-up hamburger joint, and ordering just about everything on the menu at one time or another.
Life was so simple then, long before I boarded that runaway train and never returned.
Note: All my books are free to read on my blog. Search for The Loner, The Legend of Bucket Smith, The Dancer, Where Eagles Fly, and Billy's Victory in the February/2026 issues. Happy reading!
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