One
“Whatever
happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time.”
Marcus Aurelius
In
a time long past, giants of men filled the land I knew as home. Their stature
was measured in character, not height, and they built and drove this nation
forward through dangerous and unstable times. Their essence was distinguished by
their courage to face challenges with bravery, their resilience to bounce back
from difficult situations, and their strong sense of rugged individualism. On a
warm summer afternoon in 1974, I sat beside one of them as he slowly opened his
pouch of Red Man chewing tobacco for a refill. His dusty front porch looked out
on the curve of a narrow dirt road and a yard full of farm tools rusting in the
humid air. His name was James Alfred Bunch, and he was my great-grandfather.
He
was from a time of horses and wagons, one room schoolhouses, and kerosene lamps.
In my earliest memories, I was about five years old, and my grandparents would
deliver groceries to him each week. He lived in a single-story two-bedroom
clapboard structure like the ones that dotted the landscape and lined the back
roads of rural Stanly County, in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, about
45 miles northeast of Charlotte. The local area was known as Palmerville. It
wasn't exactly a town, just a loose collection of small houses over the span of
a couple of square miles. There was a Baptist Church with an ancient cemetery,
but not much else. He wore a sweat stained brown felt hat, faded denim
overalls, and usually had a “chew” of tobacco tucked in his cheek. During his
life, he had been a teacher, a farmer, and worked backbreaking shifts in a
local factory that turned the rich red clay of the county into bricks used to
construct many of the state’s buildings. He was a humble but confident rock of
a man. Like a biblical Patriarch, he was firm, wise, and steadfast. As many men
of that time, his family and close friends called him by a nickname, and his
was "Poster" (the “o” was a short “o” sound like
"possible"). The name came from my aunt Carolyn trying to pronounce “grandfather”
when she was very young, and it stuck. He didn't seem to mind.
In later years, I would recognize his
philosophy. He was a Stoic. Like Marcus Aurelius from Roman times, he lived in
accordance with the will of God and nature, taking whatever came his way with
calm, serious determination to do the honorable thing without complaint or protest.
He was born in 1882 in a small town outside of the state capital of Raleigh,
only 17 years after the end of the Civil War. The world he grew up in lacked
modern conveniences such as electric appliances or running water, and he lived
until well after airplanes crossed the globe daily and a man stepped onto the moon. He was my earliest hero.
I was his only male descendant. His
oldest daughter, Pauline, was my grandmother. Pauline had two daughters, one being
my mother. James Alfred’s youngest daughter, Virginia was afflicted by a
serious illness and high fever when she was a toddler. The common treatment of
the time was to "sweat" the sickness out, so they held her over a
cauldron of boiling water and let the rising steam envelop her. I can only
imagine her desperate cries and the fear of those in the room as they realized the
seriousness of her condition. Crippled for life after this illness, she could
not fully form words and only walked with great difficulty. Virginia still
lived with him in the small house they had moved to when the old family farm
got to be too much to take care of.
James Alfred’s wife was named Rosa,
and her maiden name was Morris. The Morris family had lived in the area since
before the American Revolution, proudly farming their land. Recent years had
been difficult though. The family estate that had once been several thousand
acres was now down to around a hundred and in bad shape. Sometime in the 1950s,
Rosa had been afflicted by a mental illness that sounded like early onset
Alzheimer’s disease. The Sheriff had brought her back to the farm after she had
been found wandering, and my grandfather had driven her up to the state Mental
Institution in Morganton. Far away from her home and family, she passed away
soon after arriving.