There was a long pause. Then his son said, “I’ll come see it. Maybe next spring.”
Festus set down his coffee cup. “I came back.” the homecoming of festus story
“You always did run, son. Ran from the thresher. Ran from the funeral. Ran from your own blood.” There was a long pause
At midnight, Festus heard it—not a sound, but a silence. A particular quality of quiet that exists only in deep country. And within that silence, he heard his father’s voice, not as a memory but as a presence. “I came back
By noon, he had his plan. He wasn’t going to sell the land to a developer, as everyone in town had assumed. He wasn’t going to restore the farm to its former glory either—that was a young man’s vanity. No, Festus Higginbotham was going to do something quieter. He was going to plant a grove of pecan trees. They took a decade to bear fruit, and he was sixty-eight. He might not live to harvest them.