Judson Mitcham

But prayer was not enough, after all, for my father. His last two brothers died five weeks apart. He couldn’t get to sleep, had no appetite, sat staring. Though he prayed, he could find no peace until he tried to write about his brothers, tell a story for each one: Perry’s long travail with the steamfitters’ union, which he worked for; and Harvey—here the handwriting changes, he bears down—Harvey loved his children. I discovered those few sheets of paper as I looked through my father’s old Bible on the morning of his funeral. The others in the family had seen them long ago; they had all known the story, and they told me I had not, most probably, because I am a writer, and my father was embarrassed by his effort. Yet who has seen him as I can: risen in the middle of the night, bending over the paper, working close to the heart of all greatness, he is so lost.