Cast a Road Before Me Read Free

its own lost little lamb. In such a small place, naturally everyone knew everything about everybody. There wasn’t a soul within the city limits and surrounding countryside who didn’t know my name and my story before I arrived. They all were kind to me. They certainly talked differently, however—half Southern drawl and half what I’d have called plain old “hick.” As for ambiance, Bradleyville was a pretty town in summer. Flowers bloom and ancient leafy oaks sweep the sky. Nestled in the foothills of the Appalachians in eastern Kentucky, Bradleyville proudly displayed some of the greenest lawns I’d ever seen. My eyes took in the town’s charming beauty, my lips smiled at folks’ generosity, but none of it registered. My mind was too full of anguish.
    It didn’t help that my aunt repeatedly gushed over how much I looked like my mother. I didn’t believe it anyway. True, we both had the same wavy hair, although mine was a darker brown, lacking the red highlights. We both had brown eyes and were petite, small-boned. Mom had only stood five feet, four inches, and I wouldn’t be much above that. There was also some resemblance in our heart-shaped faces and upturned lips. But I would never be as beautiful as my mother. Not in face or in soul.
    During my first few months in Bradleyville there was one person who could raise my spirits: Thomas Bradley, town patriarch and war hero. His father, Jonathan, founded the town by building the sawmill on the banks of the Cumberland River a year before Thomas was born. Upon his daddy’s death in 1955, Thomas hadinherited the mill and so was boss to my uncle and most of the men in town. Fortunately, everybody loved Thomas.
    Thomas was fifty-seven when I met him, which sounded pretty old to me, but he was spry, feisty, and quick-witted. He wasn’t a large man, but his presence lit up a room like an electrical charge. Thomas would regale me with a story, and his blue eyes would twinkle until I laughed in spite of myself. He was many things to me—wise, proud, and at the same time, humble enough to want to spend time with a bereft sixteen-year-old. What’s more, he publicly cemented our special friendship by inviting me to call him by his first name. Many times during that first summer Thomas treated me to a milkshake at Tull’s Drugstore, where he met almost daily with his two oldest friends, Jake Lewellyn and Hank Jenkins. Never could two people argue like he and Mr. Lewellyn, both pumping their egos by seeking to outdo the other. Theirs was a most enigmatic friendship.
    Thomas’s pride sprang from not only his daddy’s accomplishments, but his own. You couldn’t be acquainted with him for five minutes without hearing he was thrice decorated in two wars—the Second World War and Korea. That fact would earn him respect in any town, but in an isolated burg like Bradleyville, his feats—abroad and at home—ran legendary. All the same, while I admired his bravery, he and I learned early in our friendship not to discuss war, for the strategy of battle coursed as hotly through his veins as abhorrence to violence ran through mine.
    It was Thomas who opened my eyes to the fact that my aunt and uncle needed me as much as I needed them. Not that Henry could ever be replaced, but they did view me as “another child brought to them by heaven,” as he put it. From the outset, they lavished me with love and displayed only patient understanding at my self-absorption.
    Although my aunt and uncle cared for me with one mind, the two of them were as different as night and day. Whereas Uncle Frank was carefully spoken, quiet and constrained, Aunt Eva was chatty, easily set off, her freckled hands often flitting to pat redcurls into their ill-contained bun. If gossip was the official sport of Bradleyville, Aunt Eva was the referee. “Now So-and-So, sittin’ two pews in front of us,” she’d whisper before church started, “I tell you he’s had the hardest time with….” And she’d