CHAPTER TWO

THE GREYHOUSE

This short introduction to American Letters must have a setting, a base of operations for the tales to come. And that would be a place that has been in my family for decades. Built by my Grandfather in the late 1960's, it is a mansion of many rooms, and for many long years now, most of them have been empty, except for the haunting memories that remain. It was a treeless vista when it was built. The land was ancient, as all land is ancient, but the old growth forest of centuries had been cleared away to make a farmer's field sometime before the Civil War had come and for decades that is what the land remained, giving up it's bounty when the seeds of Farmer Ferguson were plopped into the ground and waited on rain and sun to finish the work of seed and man. Farmer Ferguson died so long ago that his story has long now been but fable and as the 20^th century put distance between his antebellum empire and the modern world, his farm eventually became just one small house and an acre of land on a dirt road not two miles from where this house now stands. Many men own the land now that once was owned in total by Farmer Ferguson, but his heirs have cash reserves to show for the sale of all that. The present generation of Lord Ferguson is a lawyer of some kind, very modest in his success and comfortable to sit, modestly, on the land his great-great-great-grandfather once lorded over.

After my own cash reserves were manifested the first thing I changed about the place was the installation of a fine, black porcelin urinal in the bathroom. Had always wanted one and why they don't install them in personal homes is beyond reason to me. That, and I put in the backyard a spacious cinder-block shed with a concrete floor for the storage of lawnmowers and weed-eaters and such, as I remain a firm believer that a man who manicures his own place will keep a proper humble quality to his thinking. The old shed had outworn itself and was crumbling away. There is nothing so humbling as a man coming to the manor and inquiring of the gardener if the lord of that manor is about and it being the gardener. Arrogance is a quality that success breeds naturally and when one is neck-deep in success if he wishes to keep his head he had better find a way to keep perspective on the matter. I use, among other methods, dirt and grass clippings and lawnmowers to achieve that desired effect. It has worked wonders. Besides, it is good excercise.

There are trees now. Many of them. Silver Leaf Maples and Ashes and Live Oaks and Bradford Pears. I had them planted in the spring and summer of '95 and now they have overtaken the stars and one must find the hole in the leaves, atleast in the warm months, to view the heavens. The English Ivy I set on the north front of the home long ago made it's way across the entire face of it and for working on two decades now has been a breeding ground for the amicable and happy English Ivy Beetle, which lives only in English Ivy and brings joy and wealth to the occupants therein. The rose bushes, white and red, that my Mother planted in the early 1980's still bloom every spring and that is thirty years now of Mother's love, hanging and twining itself on the fence. Mother is gone, but her roses remain. There is a beauty to that that needs no poet's description. The rose blooms that have dropped over all the years have made the earth around the bushes something sacred, I am quite sure of it. The manse had been many colors over the years but in the middle 1980's it finally settled on the one color it liked the best: grey. And by the summer of 1990 'The Greyhouse' it had come to officially be called. There is a mailbox with a great stone lion on top by the road and he has been nicknamed "Leo the Lucky" since he arrived on American shores from France; Grandfather had made a trip to that fine country in '68 and brought Leo back with him, calling him 'The Lucky' when he had been dropped in both loading and unloading, but neither paw nor mane broken.

The cash that had been my Grandfather's decent, though small, fortune, seemed to disappear, for the most part, the day he died. My Father did not live long enough, nor did he ever have the ambition for it, to make any of his own besides what he required for a decent and proper living. And so I grew up poor and by my 19^th year, was as indigent as any church mouse, and not the rich church of the Modern-day American South, but the poor church's of the ancient world, when the christians were pulled apart and burnt at stakes for their odd beliefs. I would build back the family fortune, I did not know how, but I would do it. I set to work, thinking and thinking, day and night, for year upon year, before I ever set foot into the thought that would eventually be the reworking of fortune. In the time being, I was beset upon by all manner of poverty and struggle and pain. I was a young man bereft of all, and hell-bent with ambition to correct all things that had gone left and turn the world, or at least my side of it, back to right....