Appaloosa Radio offers
Contemplating Evil
An audio story
which includes original, period-specific music
performed by
The Howlin’ Wolf,
Vernon Dalhart,
And Billy Murray
He drew a lungful of smoke from his ever-present pipe. He was now 87 years old. He once estimated that he had spent over two-thirds of his life with a pipe between his teeth, filling his lungs with burning Prince Albert pipe tobacco. To be more precise (since he was one who valued precision and accuracy), his estimate had been that he had spent 68.2 percent of his life with a pipe in his mouth.
He came from a generation of Southerners who believed that smoking a pipe was genteel, the sign of a contemplative gentleman, one who measured life carefully, and reached conclusions only after the consideration of all the available evidence.
He sat on his back deck looking at the hills behind his property. Just the merest hint of fall color. If it does not rain, in a couple of weeks the hills will be aflame with all the seasonal colors, and the looki-lews will be coming up to the mountains from Atlanta for their fall pilgrimage. Restaurants and hotels would be full. Craft fairs. Mountain music. A good time to stay home, he thought.
Still, it was good to live in the Georgia mountains. They understood him as no mortal did.
He sat on his back deck, smoking his pipe, in deep contemplation.
He could have been remembering the good that had happened in his now long life.
But he was not.
Yet, as he sat on his back deck, his thoughts were not on any of these.
Instead, they were on a photograph that had been printed as a postcard.
It was in his always locked gun safe, in a special drawer that had its own lock.
