The Marshallville Chronicles…

  * * *        …Tom’s mother, Marian, walked into his room in the wee hours one Sunday morning, woke him and told him that fellow church member Graham Bell was dead.

      Tom sat up in bed. “When did it happen?”

     “At five o’clock this morning,” his mother replied.

     Tom blinked his eyes and stared at the clock. “Mama, it’s only three-thirty.”

     But Marian was convinced, so he humored her. “Why don’t you call him, and tell him whatever he’s planning to do at five o’clock, not to do it.”

     Marian shook her head. “Whatever is going to happen can’t be prevented.

     “Well, how…

The Marshallville Chronicles…

(Vingette from “119,” in remembrance of J. T. ‘Mac’ McElheny, Sr. of Marshallville, GA)

Photo date: 1976

Across the little branch that ran to the river past the turn-off to Indian Lake at Vinings Road, the pavement ended and the dirt road began to climb. The brothers slowed. They parked the car just beyond the curve, and left it to navigate the ditch that separated the pavement from the edge of an escarpment, colloquially known as “the Bluff at Bryant Hill.” It overlooked an expansive clay canyon etched by the prehistoric, erosive actions of the Flint, and its colorfully striated embankments trailed down into the river swamps.

A few paces down the ridge on the left, they reached the site where the dilapidated structure formerly known as the Stage Coach Inn had stood for years amid dying oaks. Built by a man named Nathan Bryan in 1810, as a stylish carriage roadhouse along the old…

The Marshallville Chronicles…

Moonlit Gully