Just finished the rewrite of the story, “Bearing Witness.” You might notice the geography of the story matches the actual geography of Fort Davis, Texas, as seen on the front page of this website. Bloys avenue was a dirt road then. Still is now. The Sleeping Lion Mountain lies behind both the church and the Davis home.
In this story, we hear Foy’s father’s name for the first time. Van Zany Davis. Named for his father, who was himself named for a county in East Texas.
The next story isn’t a part two as much as it is a close follow-up. Foy will definitely be thinking about how to help his friend Mickey with this vast theological problem that, he feels, is bearing down on Mickey. These are formative years for Foy, living so deeply in the world of 1960s evangelical Christianity. There are no competing worldviews for him.
I’m pretty happy with the opening paragraph of the next story:
On Monday morning Foy cut across his block, through the neighbors yards, past Fort Street, and turned left on Davis Street. Half a block down was Mickey’s house. The Wallace family lived in a sagging home on a double lot. Buddy Wallace had erected a ramshackle metal building that served as his workshop and garage. Two small sheds about the size of outhouses were attached like hermitages to the sides of the workshop. Indeed, they may at one time have been outhouses. Cars in various states of disrepair filled the workshop and spilled out into the yard, where their rust was slowly bringing them into harmony with the colors of the rocks, the earth, the washtubs, and the old tractor engine that also lay in the yard. On the Wallace property, things sat in the yard until they became part of the landscape, sinking into the ground and changing colors slowly over the years. Above these things flew the colorful flags of the Wallace laundry, flapping in the West Texas wind on two parallel lines that ran from the side of the workshop to a laundry pole set into concrete near the only tree on the property, a scrubby juniper that Alice Wallace watered and cared for as if it was the only thing of beauty in her life.
Gordon
