The Front Porch Prophet by Raymond L. Atkins Page A

to walk. A.J. had sprinted out and sent the mortified youngster to the dugout with a pat and a reassuring word. Then he had turned to Eugene.
    “Do you know what hubris is?” he had asked.
    “No,” Eugene had said. “What is hubris?”
    “Hubris,” A.J. had replied, “is when God screws you over for being a smartass. Move the Jeep.” The words A.J. had spoken in the outfield now rang in his ears.
    “Who knows about this?” Maggie asked.
    “I get the impression that you, me, Doc Miller, and the Emory boys are the long list,” A.J. said.
    “Do you think he intends to tell his family?” Maggie asked. “He can’t just die and disappear. Diane and the boys need to know. He owes them a chance to say good-bye.”
    “Who knows what he’s thinking?” A.J. was privy to Eugene’s strategic plan, but he was unclear on the smaller, tactical details, and Eugene tended toward a random logic that made his actions difficult to predict.
    “When you go back up to see him,” Maggie said, “try to find out what his plans are for informing his family.” A.J. was silent. “Whoops,” she said, looking at him. “I’m sorry. I was assuming you were going back. Are you?”
    “I suppose I am,” A.J. said with reluctance. “I don’t want to, but I said I’d do it. To be honest, I don’t want anything to do with this. I don’t want to see him dying, and I don’t want to see him dead. I must be a coward.” He had developed a bad headache, his lifelong habit when dealing with cosmic no-win situations. He rubbed his temples in the darkness.
    “Well,” she said after a moment, “I’d really be worried about you if you were looking forward to it. And you’re not a coward. You’re just a little more honest than most men.” She reached over and patted his chest. “Which isn’t saying that much, really.”
    As he was about to respond, they were interrupted by a commotion coming from the house. The screen door slammed and Harper Lee’s voice came to them across the gloaming.
    “Mama! Emily says I’m adopted.” Emily Charlotte was the Longstreet’s oldest child at eleven years. In a break with a tradition that had been handed down from mother to daughter for generations in Maggie’s family, Emily Charlotte was named after not one but two of her mother’s favorite authors, the Bronte sisters. A.J. was unaware of this unusual family tradition when he married Maggie but probably would have taken her to love, honor, and obey anyway, had he known. The other two children, Harper Lee and J.J. (short for James Joyce, much to A.J.’s dismay), had to resign themselves to being living tributes to only one of Maggie’s cherished writers. Emily took every opportunity to point out this literary shortcoming to her siblings, because it was her job to torment her younger brother and sister. It was a duty she took seriously.
    Maggie, born Margaret Mitchell, had been named by her mother, Jane Austen Callahan, after the celebrated author
of Gone with the Wind,
a self-help manual that dealt with the subject of how best to cope with Yankees when they venture south.
    “Mama? Daddy? Am I adopted?” Harper’s voice had a small quaver in it.
    “Absolutely not,” A.J. replied. “We got you the regular way. Mama and I went down to the hospital and picked you out. Emily, on the other hand, we bought from a roving band of Gypsies. We gave nineteen dollars for her, back when that was a lot of money. We wouldn’t have paid so much, but we really wanted a son. Emily was the only boy they had, so they charged extra.”
    “But Emily is a girl’” Harper protested.
    “Well, sure, now she’s a girl. But she was a boy when we bought her. She changed when she caught the chicken pox right after we brought her home. I looked all over for those Gypsies to get my money back, but they were long gone.”
    “Really, Daddy?”
    “Absolutely. I have a receipt around here somewhere.” Harper was very quiet. Then Maggie and A.J. heard the screen