Crown of Old Men

The boots belonged to my grandfather. They are not easy to wear. It takes both hands to pull one of the boots up by the straps and they ride almost all the way up the calf. There’re golden fireflies engraved on the soles and there’s dust that clutters down from there. There’s a bullet hole in the left heel and a faded blood stain. They’re colored brown and red as it were the sun and the dirt itself which manufactured them. They were made from the skins of Tennessee cattle and white-tail Georgia buck and bull shark. The leather over the years has been caked some and the lined cracks appear throughout the boots how cracks come into stone. They’re old but they still walk pretty good. There’s still the smell of thoroughbred war-horse in them. They were my grandfather’s and he gave them to me for my thirteenth birthday, about three years before they fit me just right, about three years before he passed away from earth.

He was a carpenter and wore the boots each day he rose from bed and went to work. He framed a lot of houses. The Rapture Community in the woods he built entirely from stone and wood from antique logs and did the landscaping too with the fountains and flowers and birdfeeders, digging up and stocking the twelve-acre pond with trout and bass and catfish, filling it with natural water from the Leotie Creek. He did it for cheap, using limestone from the Blue Ridge mountains but it looks expensive. I saw not too long ago a community very similar where each house to live in costs about half a million dollars. The community my granddaddy built doesn’t cost but what a trailer home costs. He’d never build anything that wouldn’t be affordable and never would build anything if it didn’t look good in his own eyes. The people who live there even still don’t have a salary but what a plumber or schoolteacher might make. They can afford to live there though it was always important to him that they could.

He built the churches too. The Catholic one and the Baptist one. He did this in his spare time, without pay. They tried to pay him but he refused.

He built the courthouse and the school and two bars and a motel fashioned after a pioneer’s cabin that Daniel Boone would have stayed in. The President at one point on a nature tour did stay there. It’s on record that he admired the fireplace an awful good bit and wanted one just like it. My grandfather installed it and he supplied the logs for it too, to keep it burning through the winter.

I used to split the logs with him. It’s because of him that I work with my hands to this day, odd jobs—splitting logs or installing windows, planting gardens or working with the horses and the cows in the fields at my uncle’s farm. That’s my mama’s brother. I work in these boots that were once worn by my grandfather for the better part of eighty-eight years. I feel his breath over my shoulder when my palms bleed, whispering that’s good, that’s good grandson.

The boots were purchased by my grandfather’s maternal great-grandfather just outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, in February of 1862 with his first paycheck. The boots cost two dollars and thirty-four cents. He had a pregnant wife at home and they wrote each other weekly until he died, save for his few months in a Confederate prison camp. I still have three of those letters. He addresses her as Firefly. He was issued Army boots, but he believed those government boots to be hard and mean and bitter on the horse when he’d hug his ankles into its ribs.

He was wearing these boots that are now mine when he escaped the Rebel prison in the winter of 1863 and walked eleven hundred miles north, behind enemy camps and under their siege of the country, and was enlisted into the Third Pennsylvania Cavalry. He carried the flag at Gettysburg until he was shot off his horse, and he fought the rest of the day with his feet trodden against the earth, amidst cavalry charge and gun smoke.

It was the Fourth of July when they found his body, barefooted. In all, it had taken seven bullets to steal him from earth. He was surrounded by a pile of Confederate corpses. He didn’t depart gently. He was smiling up at the stars dancing in their performance of The Northern Lights in the sky as it were a canvas casting a reflection against the glinted eyes of the dead down there.

It was a Rebel who got his boots and returned them to his wife, saying that he was with him when he passed, and it was a request and one of the last things the dying man had spoken, to return his boots to his family, and so he did.

These boots are nearly two-hundred years old now but they still walk pretty good. Long as there’s dust and country somewhere, they ought to tread another two-hundred years. With every step it seems as though their sole carves into the earth the soul of my own blood.