Saturday, August 29, 1964

“Where you headed?” the Greyhound bus driver asked his passenger sitting directly behind him.

“Chillicothe, Ohio,” Chet Henry answered, looking away from the passing scenery.

“I guess I can get you there,” the sturdy, balding, middle-aged driver responded. Then with his dark eyes reflecting in the long rear-view mirror, he added, with a chuckle, “Or I could get you to Chillicothe, Missouri, or maybe even Chillicothe, Illinois, if you’d care to see one of them.”

“I’d probably be as well off,” Chet said, eliciting raised eyebrows from the driver.

“What are you going to Ohio for?”

“I’m goin’ to college. Winfield College.”

“Chillicothe is a nice town. Ever been there before?”

“No, sir, I don’t know much about it. I just know it’s almost three hundred miles from home.”

“Where’s your home?”

“Hanks, Virginia. It’s just a wide place in the road. You’ve probably never heard of it.”

“No, can’t say as I have. How come you picked Winfield College?”

“My dad’s cousin is a teacher there.”

“So he’s gonna take you under his wing, I reckon.”

“Yes, kinda like that, but his cousin is a woman.”

When Chet had failed to be admitted to Emory and Henry College, near his grandparents’ home, Cousin Joann had encouraged him to come to Winfield. She said it would be a good place for him “to grow” and college would “broaden his mind.” It was true that there many things he had never seen or done, though he wasn’t convinced he needed to see and do them.

Chet turned back to his window and the outside blanket of fog that shrouded the mountains of the Virginia-Kentucky border as the laboring, lumbering bus snaked its way north on U. S. Highway 23. He leaned against the back of his seat, closed his eyes, and thought about his grandfather’s breakfast-table prayer from three days earlier.

Amos Fuller had begun his table grace as he always had, but after a pause, he had added, “Lord, we come to You today to ask a special blessin’ on Chester, here. He’s gettin’ ready to leave us, d’rectly, and we’re gonna miss ‘im. We ask you to go with ‘im, help ‘im with his studies, keep ‘im safe, and help ‘im, Lord, to not forget who he is. You’ve spent eighteen years workin’ on ‘im, and now he’s ready to fly. So don’t let ‘im fall too low nor fly too high.”

On this day, there was little danger of Chet flying too high. As Amos was prone to say, Chet was feeling “lower than a snake’s belly in a wagon rut.”

“What do you want to do when you finish college?” the driver asked, interrupting Chet’s thoughts.

“I’m thinking about being a teacher.”

“My mama always said I could have been a teacher—maybe because I like to talk so much. ‘Course, I get to do a lot of talking while I’m driving this bus. My teachers would have probably laughed if they knew I’d ever thought about being a teacher.”

So would mine, thought Chet.

On that last Saturday in August, as the bus plodded through the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, Chet saw farmers working in their hillside tobacco patches, cutting and hauling in their crops. He could picture his grandfather back home doing the same, pulling a loaded wagon with his orange J.I. Case tractor, all the while sorely missing Chet—the only boy among four grandchildren—and at least in Chet’s view, his right-hand man. Of course, there were others in the community who Amos could call on for help for such late-summer work, but who could replace his right-hand man?

“If I was still at home, I’d be doin’ that today,” Chet observed, pointing to the farmers loading a wagon.

“You live on a farm?”

“Well, my grandparents do.”

The driver leaned back on his seat, stretched out his arms, and placed both beefy hands on the top of the steering wheel.

“I was raised on a farm down in Georgia,” he began. “My daddy wanted me to take over the farm, but I couldn’t wait to get away from it. I figured whatever I ended up doing would beat that. Besides, I wanted to see the world or, at least, this country. Well, I’ve seen a lot of it through the windshield of a bus. When I left the farm, I also left behind a little blue-eyed Georgia peach,” he said with a laugh. “Now, sometimes, I hear some old song, and after all these years, I’ve still got Georgia on my mind.”

This talk of home wasn’t helping Chet, so he tried to change the subject. “Will I stay on your bus all the way?”

“No, you’ll change at Portsmouth,” the driver answered. Then after a brief silence, he continued, “You know, life on the farm is hard on the body, but it’s easy on the mind. Yeah, I thought the grass would be greener somewhere else.” After a pause, he added, “It’s not.”

There had been no shortage of advice as Chet was preparing to leave home. His mother had frequently reminded him to go to church, beginning the day after he arrived in Ohio. His father had admonished him to stand straight, hold his head up, and show people that he knew what he was doing—even if he didn’t. Chet’s grandmother, Maribelle, had told him to “not get above his raisin’”, and Amos had instructed his grandson to get on the good side of the cooks at the school, right out of the gate. Amos’ friend, storekeeper Eustace Clay, had also weighed in with some of his sage counsel.

“Chester Drawers,” began Euse, with the moniker he often used for Chet, “now don’t go up ‘pare with the idea you ain’t gonna like them Ohi’ people just because they’re different. Give ‘em a chance. You might even find there to be some nice ‘uns.” That seemed to leave considerable room for doubt.