Brownstonelit's Blog

4/23/10
Two weeks after the trip to Valdosta, a child of mine was admitted to an Atlanta hospital and kept in the CCU for five days. For five days I slept in chairs, ate cold food, drank bitter coffee and stared at machines that beeped and screamed incessantly throughout the night. Television was out of the question and so in an effort to keep my sanity I asked my husband to bring both of Weems books to me. I didn’t want my laptop there for fear it might be stolen in the segments where I was asked to leave the room. Truth was, I wasn’t certain I could have formed a cohesive thought in ink so instead of writing, I read… and read … and read in between seizures and sedations.
Apart from normalcy and regular routine, my mind was free to concentrate on reading. I devoured page after page, hoping that somewhere in all of the hours I was trying to fill I might stumble across something of value. Chapter after chapter was filled with exciting escapades of ATF agents raiding stills and running down moonshiners through cow pastures and piney woods under moonlight. Deprived of sleep for so many days your mind begins to wander. Random thoughts cascade and fill the crevices left in bewteen your eye lids were sleep once used to dwell. Charles Weems was a hell of a guy and after twenty or so chapters, I noticed that there were about a million guys named Charlie back then. Honestly- you couldn’t swing a dead cat around Georgia and not take out four or five of them at a time.Through it all I kept a keen eye towards other names and locations- hoping that something in this guy’s memoirs would send up a flare. And then there on page 172 it began. By the end of 173 I was convinced I had found the reason I was meant to meet this man. It was so subtle I almost missed it. Three days into my nightmare I found what Charley had wanted Weems to show me. It was so obvious, I read the pages over three times. I looked at the clock- it was an obscene hour, but none the less I made a phone call to share my joy. I could barely breathe…
During one of my conversations in Valdosta, a person of interest told me a story about being threatened by a local sheriff. I could go into further detail, but I won’t just yet for personal reasons. During this conversation he told me about a lawyer… a connection … and a favorable outcome. On the top of page 173 I found this lawyer’s name again, only this time it was associated with the other side of the law. I read a story about a lawyer… a connection and a favorable outcome. But this time for a criminal. My eyes were so tired I could scarcely keep them open, still I read aloud in hushed tones to tell my husband what I had found. I thought of R and what she had said about no one being placed in my path by chance that weekend…that I would have an ah-ha moment and that information would come to me as if it were being dropped into my lap and it had! I hugged my book- God bless Charley, I thought. I read through to the end of 175. God Bless R and God bless Charles Weems I whispered into the night.
At 4:00 am they came into the room to draw more blood from my child. I held on for 4 more chapters after that then crashed. At 6:43 she seized again… but this time I was ready!

This entry was posted on April 23, 2010 at 2:24 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.