Lullabies and Lightning Storms

An old man crawled down the Ozarks from Elsinore to Gideon. He was dying and wanted to find his son. Six-year-old Sybil sat braiding the hair of a doll while the old man yelled his sad story through her window. Spit shot through the gaps of his missing teeth and splattered against the glass. But in rural Missouri, that was no excuse for a lack of hospitality. Around noon, Sybil’s mom, Cassie, brought the old man some iced tea in a tumbler—the last of her grandmother’s Georgian Lovebirds Depression glasses.