Spillway Review
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    When the wind was right you could hear him singing.  His voice was deep and sad and the air would somehow carry it so you could hear it clearly, and then it would fade and you couldn't hear it at all.  It was a mournful, scary sound that would come and go on the wind.
   
He would sit on his porch and rock and sing in the evening just as the sun went down. It sounded sometimes like hollering at the top of his voice.  But when he started calling for Mary the hair would stand right up on the back of my neck.

    I was ten and Miz Mary Bogan had been dead just about all of my life.

    His house was way off out in the middle of a old field and you could see a patch of his rusty old tin roof from our front porch.  It sat in the middle of a bunch of great big old sycamores that must have been there forever.  I remember him raising corn in that field when I was little, but for a long time there wasn't anything growing on it except weeds and briars.

    One July evening, when the sun dropped behind the treetops, my best friend Bobby and I ran through the field and snuck up on his house. We came up behind his henhouse.  The chickens had gone to roost and when we passed they started making a fuss so we scooted on by in a hurry.  His old hound came up and started beating us with his tail and whining, so we had to pet him to shut him up.

     The whole yard around his house was hard packed dirt
without a blade of grass.  What the chickens didn't pick clean he scraped with a hoe and swept a broom made out of brush tops tied together.  He didn't want a lawn or anything like it.  No sense in cutting yard grass after working hard at the mill all day.

    His house sat up about three feet off the ground on stacks of bricks.  His dog and chickens
stayed under there when it rained.  The house hadn't been painted ever.  The old boards were gray and stained, and the old screens had holes all over. Bugs could get in if they wanted to.

    The evening settled in.  A Whippoorwill whistled out in the field. Daddy once told me a
Whippoorwill was saying "Chip fell out of the Whiteoak."  Old bird wouldn't really say that, but daddy told me that's what he said, and that's what his daddy told him. I knew better. He was just whistling.

    We ducked the overalls and the long-john underwear hanging on the line and waddled under the house like ducks.  We got to where we could see him through some knot holes in the porch floor and we squatted there head to head trying to get a good look.

    Old man Bogan had once been a giant of a man and had worked  cutting logs for the sawmill.  It was told he could take a crosscut saw and cut a pine four foot across all by himself. Then he'd chop all of the limbs off with a single bit axe so that big pine would look like a phone pole in less than 30 minutes.

    Once he chunked a baseball from home plate all the way over the fence at center field, but he could tap dance and was as light on his feet as one of those fancy dancers--big as he was. They said Miz Bogan used to have flowers growing everywhere around that old house. He was a hard man, but mama said his favorites were daffodils and Miz Mary grew a yard full of them just for him every spring.

    He sat in his rocker with his bald head down between his old knotty fingers, crying.  His heaving sobs shook the whole porch.  He'd moan and hit the arms of the chair and then beat his chest.

    "Oohh, my sweet Lord. Come get me. Come take me now. Maaayreee.  Where are you?  I
miss you so much, my sweet baby.  Ohhh, pleeeze come back.  Maayyreee."

    When he started calling for Miz Mary, Bobby and I got close and looked all around.  It
seemed that she might just come  bursting right up out of the ground somewhere any minute.  We were scared enough to take off like scalded dogs, but then he tuned up and start humming a little louder.
   
    It was a deep rumbling at first, like coming out of a cave or something. And then he burst out singing so deep I thought things were going to start vibrating.
   
    "Rock of Ages, cleft for me.  Let me hide myself in thee."  He got louder and louder and finally it was almost like hollering.
   
    When Rock of Ages played out he went straight into Amazin' Grace.  He leaned his head back and opened his mouth so wide you could see his pink gums where his teeth once were.
   
    He would call out Maayree every now and then.
   
    He went on for a long time and then he sort of burnt out and set there without rocking or moving--just looking out in front of him.  I knew he wasn't looking at anything.
   
    He unhitched his overalls and let them fall down.  He held on to the chair arm and stood up unsteady-like and walked through the front door.  Bobby and I slipped out from under the porch and looked over the worn-out boards.  He pulled open the screen door to the living room and went to the mantel over the fireplace where there was a bunch of old pictures in fancy little frames.  He squinted at each of them and finally took one down and come back out on the porch where there was yet some daylight.  He trembled and sniffed a long sniff, looking at that picture.  We could see it well from where we was, peeping over the boards.  He was too overcome to notice us just a few feet away.
   
    The picture was of a lady of a pretty good size with a fancy lace collar standing alongside a tall, big man in a suit and tie.  He looked at it in the fading light and ran the tips of  his fingers over the glass.
   
    He put the picture back and stood there, just looking blank at the mantel.  After a little he sucked in a deep breath and sighed.  He looked tired and pale, as if he had emptied himself out.  He shuffled to the bedroom on the front corner, next to the porch.  The windows were long and came all the way down to the floor.   When he set down in the middle of that sagging old bed it squeaked as if it were about to break. In the almost dark he laid there looking up at the ceiling.  His lips were moving but I couldn't make out what he was saying.  He closed his eyes and in a minut e was snoring.

    Bobby and I ran through the field under an early full moon.  When we got to the trail down the hill to Bobby's house, we caught our breath and stood there for a moment and just looked at one another.  There was nothing to say.  He turned and ran to his house.

    The singing and hollering and calling went on through the rest of the summer until late fall, when it started getting cool.  Then it stopped.

    One Sunday Miss Vitae Mae Wiggens from the Church stopped by his house to bring him a hot lunch. She found him sitting in his rocker on the porch, stiff as a poker, wearing a suit and tie.  He was just sitting there, holding that little picture, the one with the fat lady and the man in the suit. He had a bunch of flowers in his other hand.
   
    Miss Wiggens said he had on the happiest smile, and a look on his face like he was talking to somebody that he was really glad to see. That was true, because I had to go to the funeral and pass by the coffin, and I saw that for myself. The undertaker couldn't have taken that smile off if he'd tried. Even dead, old man Bogan looked happier than when Bobby and I saw him through that knothole.
   
    There had been a couple of good frosts by then, and the funny thing was, the flowers were daffodils, and they just grow in the spring. The ones he held were just fresh picked.