Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

This is the piece for which my peers presented me with a first-place accolade last night. It ran almost exactly a year ago. Copyright retained by the publisher. To Mama ER, who died a year and a week ago.

--ER


(MY HOMETOWN) -- The light fixture over this bed has rattled every time a train has passed, on the Union Pacific line out of Van Buren, Ark., since the house was built in 1978.

Sometimes it rattles before I notice the train. But then I hear the rhythmic clatter of steel wheels on steel rails, the sound swimming over hills and ravines here for ages and slaloming among houses and businesses that weren't the first time I noticed the rattle.

An engineer blows his air horn at every country crossroads: Paw Paw Road about a mile east, Cottonwood Road a quarter-mile east, Dyer Boulevard, three-quarter mile west. The trains are lined up tonight, one after another.

Neither the traffic on now-always-busy U.S. Highway 64, right in front of the house, nor the screaming semi-tractor trailer trucks barreling up and down Interstate 40, just a half-mile south as the crow flies, detracts from the train sounds.

The trucks on the interstate come close. They're always loud at night. Something about the lay of the land collects and funnels the noise and sends it right into this room, my room, the one at the end of the hall next door to Mama and Daddy's.

These sounds are as familiar to me as my own face in the mirror, although unlike my face, they have not changed a lick over the years. The trains and trucks have never bothered me at night or kept me awake.

Tuesday night it was all too loud because the house was so, so quiet.

(Mama ER) is gone.

(Mama ER), 84, died Sunday night, three months and three days after she went to a hospital in Fort Smith, Ark., with trouble breathing, 86 days after risky surgery at Oklahoma Heart Hospital in Oklahoma City, a big gamble with a bigger potential payoff in improved quality of life, and 50 days after the stroke that took away any real chance for her to win.

Tuesday night, I thought it odd that this house, a brown brick ranch, had never felt more like home. "Home" has always been a toss-up between this one and the farmhouse next door where I started growing up, which Daddy and his daddy built in 1946.

Wednesday at sundown came a snapshot for my memory to go with those cherished train and truck sounds.

After the funeral at First Baptist, after a graveside prayer, the Twenty-third Psalm and "Amazing Grace," after most friends had left and all but me, my brother and two sisters remained, I gave some attention to the Creator and his handiwork.

The Lord gave it back in "good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over," as Luke 6:38 puts it.

Sitting alone on the tailgate of my truck, I looked west to the farmhouse, where my brother lives now. The whole sun, situated between the one column and front outside wall, seemed to be setting on the porch. A pecan tree older than me, almost spooky in its denuded dead-of-winter bleakness, towered over the house, silhouetted against sundown.

Mama and Daddy's old room was on the left, the walk-through bathroom in the middle, the other bedroom - my two big sisters', then my big brother's, then mine - on the right.

I remembered my baby bed in Mama and Daddy's room, then sleeping on a pallet, or on the divan, in the living room, then getting my own room when my brother moved out.

Of all things to remember about the old house this week, how odd that I would think about where I slept in it - the same place these thoughts began in the "new" house, under that rattling light fixture, with the trains clackety-clacketing and the big trucks screaming in the middle of the night before my sweet mama's funeral.

Then, there on a tailgate, where many profound thoughts have come to this country boy through the years, it dawned on me: These two houses, as fond of them as I am, are just houses.

Home is where the heart is. I get it now. My heart is with Mama and Daddy, who are in heaven, doctrinally speaking, but with me always now in immediate reality. Home, I think, finally, can be where I lay my head.

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