Written by George Ellison – 

Sunlight was refracted in multicolored beams through the stained glass window in the east-facing wall of the care worn church in what is known as Burnt Cove. The purple mountains, white lilies and red roses seemed to glow within the leaded confines of the rectangular box.

The black dwarf of indeterminate age was an ordained minister named Duane Turner. Everybody including his mother had called him Mister Duane since he was four and took up preaching. As was his habit, one moment he wasn’t there and the next he was. He was standing near the first pew on the left-hand side of the congregation with his hands clasped as if in a trance until the room began to quieten and many turned as if beckoned.

Almost in a whisper he asked: “See how the sun come through that church-house window?”

“I do,” a man’s voice answered..

“Thank you,” Mister Duane replied as softly as before. “And who sent us that window from France 45 years ago this month if not this very day of May in 1948?”

“Aunty Trayland Justice,” said a man.

“Thank you, Uncle Willie,” the dwarf replied. “And she be your real aunt I believe?”

“Blood kin,” he answered. “My mother’s sister. Job had thistles and Isaiah had those golden brambles. The good book is filled with weeds. But Esdras … not often remembered … had ‘seven mighty mountains whereupon there are roses and lilies.’

“She be anybody else’s aunty in this room?” Mister Duane asked, raising his voice from a whisper to a velvet-like monotone.

“Be mine,” a black man in a suit said. “Old white woman sent me off to school and said she’d kick my ass if I didn’t graduate.”

“Mine too,” said an Indian woman with long gray hair. “Picked me up and gave me a home when I was all alone.”

Other voices joined in from around the room . . . “be mine” … “be mine” … “be mine” … until the dwarf walked up the middle isle halfway … looked around … and spoke in a voice that came from another realm:

“Brethern an Sisturn !… black and white and red!  … that woman be everybody’s aunt in this room … be everybody’s mother … I came to bring you that message …that why you here on a workday afternoon  … she die but she ain’t gone … say that out loud for me so I can hear:

 ‘She die but she ain’t gone !

“She washed in the blood … rise up in the cold gray light of dawn and think of her and she ain’t dead …die at ninety-eight and we gonna put her body in the ground this afternoon … but Aunty Tray she won’t be dead … think of her when you driving home or next week or month or year an she’ll be there again … gone but not dead … living on in memory ,,, washed in the blood … still looking down on us through that church-house window … making sure we do what we supposed to be doing even when we don’t want to hear about it!”

Mister Duane walked over and laid his right hand on the casket.

“Nobody is here. Auntie Tray is gone. Gone away into another realm beyond comprehension except when she arises in our collective or individual memories of how she walked and the way she talked … for the food she raised in her garden and cooked on her woodstove … of the gap in her teeth when she smiled and the dimples in her cheeks when she threw back her head and laughed. Can’t you just hear her now? She’ll be here not in the ground or beside us but with us for so long as her memory’s alive.”

And then he was gone, too … was there and then wasn’t. Everything was quiet for awhile until a woman in the back of the room said to no one in particular:

“Mister Duane always could raise a ruckus when he set his mind to it.”

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Artist and paper-maker Elizabeth Ellison has exhibited at NC Arboretum, NC Botanical Garden, Schiele Museum and numerous other facilities. She is the owner-operator of Elizabeth Ellison Watercolors on the town square in Bryson City NC and prepares the artwork for the weekly Nature Journal column she and her husband, George, contribute to for the Asheville Citizen-Times. Contact and see more of her work at www.elizabethellisonwatercolors.com.

Writer and naturalist George Ellison was the winner of the Wild South Ashe-Roosevelt Award for environmental journalism in 2012. That same year his Permanent Camp was one of three finalists for the Southern Independent Booksellers Association award for poetry, and his Blue Ridge Nature Journal had previously been a finalist for SIBA’s non-fiction award. He writes columns for Smoky Mountain News, Asheville Citizen-Times, and The Newsletter of the Southern Appalachian Botanical Society. Contact him at www.georgeellison.com.