Lives Between the Dimensions

T he five men stood beside their horses, reins in hand, staring without spoken word down the rock rubble of the road. Puddles in potholes were frozen with a crisp, hollow layer of ice. The road disappeared from their intense study a few hundred yards up around a curve among the sturdy trunks of a dense stand of hickory and oak. But, they stared intently nevertheless. As if the forests and hillsides did not impede their view at all of the community and homesteads a mile or so up the way. It was just after daylight and a bitter cold morning. There had been a heavy frost the night before and every mile they had covered since leaving the relative security of Mingo Swamp seemed to drain their bodies of what precious little warmth they had left. Their breaths exhaled through the woolen scarves tied around their heads, over their ears and mouths leaving clouds of steam in the stillness of the December morning in Wayne County, Missouri. Actually they weren’t scarves at all. Not anym...

For Our Courageous Grandmother, Mahala If you had asked me who Mahala Ward Tarlton was 20 years ago, I would have had no idea.  Once, when we had a family reunion in the Old Greenville, Missouri historic park, I remember my brother and I walking through the old cemetery by the St. Francis River and one of my aunts mentioning we had some Carltons or something similar in our family tree, and that we might find one of their headstones as we strolled through the repository of remains of Wayne County's early citizenry.  It was not to be, of course. My mother had told me, several times, the story of one of one of my grandfathers being murdered during the Civil War.  The story and the details of the cowardly act upon my ancestor remained vivid throughout all the years of my adolescence  but a busy career and a family that included three sons kept the name in obscurity until well into my late 40's when my fascination began with with my ancestry in earnest.. B...