Prologue

Prologue

Sweet little Jessie was the center of my life. From the day she was born and I held her in my arms—all pink and new, wrapped in a cotton blanket and singin’ a song that only she and God knew the words to—it was plain she was gonna grow up into somethin’ special.

Her dark hair and beamin’ blue eyes put off enough light to kindle up a whole room. And not just an ordinary light neither. The kind of light that don’t appear without a purpose. No, that kind of light was put there. The Scripture says we know His voice when we hear it. What it don’t say, but maybe it should, is we also know His light when it meets our eyes. And Jessie was filled up with His light, no doubt about it. I saw it right away, and then I just kept on seein’ it the more time I spent with her.

We got to spend some good time together, too. Her mama—my daughter—married a hometown boy, thank the Lord, and they settled just three blocks away from me over on Eaton Street in Slidell, Louisiana. Once she got old enough, little Jessie walked as far as my house every mornin’, and I’d be waitin’ for her out on the front porch with my coffee, black and strong, and I’d walk her the rest of the way to school. When the three o’clock bell rang at the end of the school day, we’d do the same thing in reverse. She’d walk as far as my house, and I’d walk her home the rest of the way. After we shared a cookie or an apple, she told me what she learned in school. Jessie always liked learnin’.

“Grampy, you know what?”

“Tell me.” This was the way nearly every one of our after-school chats began.

“You know that planet with the rings around it?”

“Saturn.”

“Yeah, that’s it. Saturn. Well, if you had a big enough bowl o’ water, and you plunked Saturn down into it, you know what would happen?”

“It might drown, I reckon,” I answered her, hidin’ my smile behind my coffee cup.

“No! That’s the funny thing,” she said, that light lightin’ up her pretty face like a solar flare. “It would float.”

“Nah, it wouldn’t float,” I teased. “It would sink like a stone.”

“No, Grampy, it would float. I promise!”

“Well, I’ll be.”

Got me to wonderin’ that day—the way grandpops do sometimes—if my Jessie might become the first female astronaut or one of those astronomers who discover new planets. Whatever she did, I knew she’d be somethin’ special, and I prayed to the Good Lord every mornin’ and every night before my head hit that pillow that—whatever it was that she did—she would do it with faith in the Lord above.

That’s a child’s only hope in a world that changes as fast as this one.