Mrs. Agnes Belere is ninety-three years old. We sat upon her porch one autumn day. It was Indian summer; the sun’s ethereal rays cascaded down downward upon a solitary dogwood. Instead of beautifying it, the rays revealed the austerity of a dogwood without the frippery of pink blossoms. The sunshine could not reach and expose Mrs. Belere, hidden as she was in the porch-shadows.

Wearing a saffron-colored dress, she did not sway to and fro in a rocking chair, nor did she knit and request me to hold her yarn. She sat erect in a straight-backed chair, her hands folded in her lap gracefully, unartificially. Her voice did not quaver, and was a clear treble.

Miss Agnes Barnes wed Mr. Otis Belere on August 1st, 1901. She was twenty; he was twenty three. A rail-road engineer, Mr. Belere could not see his wife nearly as much as he wished.

And so Mrs. Belere did charity-work by day, trying not to reflect upon an empty flat awaiting her at 316 River Street, Chicago, Illinois.

Eventually, Mrs. Belere could no longer continue to bring soup to the crippled, and read to the homeless. The orphans of Saint Ambrose's dredged up memories of a little girl named Agnes, who lay awake at night, listening to the other little girls’ even breathing.

On December 12th, 1914 Paul Joshua Belere was born in the River Street flat. Mr. Belere and Dr. John Clay resided. In 1918, William Otis emerged, and in 1921 Gardner John followed.

In 1939, Mr. Otis Belere fell in between two trains and was subsequently crushed. Mrs. Belere went to work in an automobile plant. At the outbreak of war, automobiles were suddenly deemed unpatriotic; tanks were not. And so Mrs. Belere helped assemble machines of destruction and death. And while eating a paper-bag lunch, she would wonder who would die, and for what reasons, because of her morning labors.

1942: Gardner, William, and Paul enlisted. “Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" and “Uncle Sam Needs YOU.” The boys climbed a train for New York. They were going to kiss pretty girls and kill the Japs. Schoolboys on a holiday.

1943: A Western Union Telegraph boy delivered two telegrams to Mrs. Otis Belere of 316 River Street, Chicago, Illinois. They were signed for, and placed on the hall table, untouched until 1945 and Gardner's return.

“I couldn't open them. I couldn't. I will always see them on the New York train, going to join the regiment, drinking beer and singing bawdy songs.”

Gardner returned as a grilse. Three years of mess kits and shrapnel, stumbling over trenches and praying for life, he could not cope with the chicaneries of civilization, the hypocrisies of men. He was found in a Newark, New Jersey alley in 1947.

The coroner's verdict was acute alcoholism.

Mrs .Belere came here to the South shortly after Gardner's death. She had never been to the South before. No memories hung in abeyance, waiting to muffle her.

The sun reaches the porch. And Mrs. Belere is beautiful – unlike the dogwood.