A Rock in Walker County

A Rock in Walker County

Miss Lane never married. It was impossible to say how old she was as it seemed like she’d been in our little town forever. Like the red-brick Baptist Church on the corner of Main and 3rd, so old the steeple was tilting. Miss Lane was there every Sunday, rain or shine. Same pew, same dress, same purse. 

She was a quilter and never missed the circles, always bringing her famous banana pudding. Nobody could make a meringue peak like Miss Lane.

How she supported herself was a mystery. She lived comfortably in a nice house three blocks from the church and Main Street. It was a two-story clapboard painted white with a nice-sized front porch. There was a set of wicker furniture there, a sofa, chair and rocker. The cushions were navy blue and the grouping against the white backdrop seemed the perfect spot for company. There were centuries-old oaks in her yard. Pecan trees, azalea bushes and crepe myrtles lined both sides of the house.

Yet there was something not normal about Miss Lane, but I wouldn’t call her abnormal. No, that didn’t fit this elderly Southern lady in pearls and sensible low-heeled black leather shoes. 

Miss Lane was a fixer. She corrected things and people who had gone a direction that wasn’t suitable. Miss Lane never discussed her ways. I don’t know a soul who would ask out loud about them although some most certainly wanted to know and others who knew for sure. 

It could be a small thing or a big thing. Like if the preacher was wound up and going past the twenty minute sermon limit, which was the understood amount of time he should preach. One of the deacons would turn around and catch Miss Lane’s eye and something would happen. Like the preacher would have a coughing fit. Then the choir director would jump up and lead us in a closing hymn and we’d all go home. 

Fixing a big thing was rare but there were a few that I recalled. There was a process by which Miss Lane fixed big problems. Like the church organist’s husband who was a drunk and beat the tar out of her regularly. One Sunday Caroline Beacon looked really bad, even with globs of makeup on her face. Her lip was busted and her right eye was swollen shut. After the service, Miss Lane whispered in her ear. 

What happened next is based on what Carolyn Beacon told and it’s the process others have whispered about. First she went to Miss Lane’s house where she was served caramel cake.

Then Miss Lane asked Caroline to tell her all about the problem. Her husband Wayne was the problem. They made a list of his good qualities on one sheet of paper. His bad ones on another. On the third sheet, Caroline wrote down her opinion of how to best solve the problem.

Miss Lane told Carolyn to fold the third sheet of paper twice and put it in her purse. Then she gave Carolyn a map of Walker County with a big red X on a spot that was near the county line.

Carolyn had to go to the spot to find a huge rock—which was located exactly where the red X was—and leave that paper. She found a crevice in the rock and that’s where she left her note. 

Then she did what Miss Lane instructed her to do. She knelt down and prayed. It was a specific prayer, only six words dictated by Miss Lane but Carolyn had to take those words and absorb them into her spirit and mean every word. Then she turned her back to the rock and walked straight to her car and drove away.

Carolyn drove back to her own home to find Miss Lane sitting on the sofa, knitting a burgundy and white afghan. When Carolyn walked in, Miss Lane said “Good night, child” and left out of the front door. 

The two children, Missy and Maxwell, were asleep in their beds. There was a plate of food on the stove covered in tin foil. The house was absolutely spotless.

There was no sign of Wayne or his car. Carolyn could feel his absence and the ball of steel in her stomach, made of fear and worry, began to melt away. She told my mama she felt simple peace. And joy. 

I desperately wanted to know all about Miss Lane. A lot of problems that us kids thought she solved could have been chalked up to coincidence. But that business of writing down on paper and leaving it in a rock is something that couldn’t have been a coincidence. There’s too much intention behind an act like that. And the results were big and mysterious. I knew some teenagers who had driven every old road in the county looking for that rock and never found it.

I would ride my bike past her house and sometimes stopped to chat if she was in her yard. Miss Lane won Yard of the Month so often from the city that she asked them to give it to somebody else.

Our chats were always pleasant and appropriate for a 10-year-old girl. “How are your mama and daddy?” Or “I hope you’re applying yourself in your piano lessons.” The day after my grandpa’s funeral she invited me to her porch.

“I’m so sorry to hear that Mr. Taylor passed away,” she had said and then she read to me about seasons. Everything has a season; there’s a time to be born and a time to die. It was much longer than that, but that’s the part I recall because I started to cry. I had not cried at all until then. Miss Lane gave me a real hankie and hugged me for a long time. It seemed as if she had taken all the sadness right out of me.

After that, the mystery of Miss Lane faded from my list of urgent matters to ponder. It was still there, but became part of the fabric of my early life, what I stood on as I grew up and left for college and then a job in Birmingham. 

Things were great. I had a brief marriage that brought forth the miracle of my son. My joy and my everything. He was only four when my phone rang and it was my doctor’s office calling. She wanted to see me. The news was devastating. Then came a double mastectomy, chemo and radiation. I was too sick to work and moved back in with my parents in Walker County. It was the right thing to do as I hurtled toward certain death because Lukas needed family around him. I didn’t fear death but I did fear leaving my son. The pain of that bond being severed was unbearable. 

As I lay in my old bedroom contemplating another round of chemo and its misery, my thoughts turned to Miss Lane. It had not yet occurred to me to seek her out. She made problems disappear so maybe she could make cancer disappear. Surely I had nothing to lose. 

I called before I went over. She didn’t sound surprised to hear from me and invited me to come see her before I had a chance to ask.

“It’s so nice to see you!” she said. We hugged and she directed me to her front parlor. She made small talk while she cut cake slices and poured tea. 

“Tell me about your son.” I hadn’t told her I had a son. My heart, my everything. I spoke for awhile about him, which was a good transition for me to tell her why I was there. 

“Miss Lane, I’m sick. It’s cancer and I’ve done everything the doctors said to do, I don’t deserve to live any more than any other cancer patient, but when I think about Lukas growing up motherless, it wrecks me. I’m mad, I’m terrified. And I’m just very sad.”

Miss Lane kept a steady gaze on me as I spoke. She handed me a real hankie just like she’d done years ago when my grandpa died. She didn’t speak but her gaze never left me.

“The thing is, Miss Lane, over the years, I’ve heard that you help people with their problems. I’m sorry if you think I was gossiping, as it was not gossip. It was…it was gratitude. And I have no hope. So if you can give me hope, that’s why I’m here.”

She sipped her tea for a few seconds before speaking. “Faith and hope walk together, child. Sick or well, you exist in many ways, miraculous ways.”

I didn’t understand that at all. Maybe I was too sick to wrap my brain around it.

“Miss Lane I don’t know how you do things for people, but I know that you do. Carolyn Beacon told my mama about coming to you and then her crazy husband just disappeared. Into thin air.”

“Gracious child, you make me sound like the mob!” She was smiling. “Wayne came by to see me just a month ago. He is in AA and has been sober for six years now. Carolyn has forgiven him and married a delightful young man. An accountant I think.”

I was stunned. I’d never given too much thought to what happened to Wayne. In my child’s mind, I thought he just went “poof.” Courtesy of Miss Lane.

She walked over to an antique captain’s desk and opened the top of it. She picked up a piece of paper and a pen and handed them to me. 

“While I’m clearing these dishes, write down exactly what you want to happen. Just one sentence. Take your time.” I didn’t need time to think. Time was not my friend. I wrote “Take this cancer from me.” 

Miss Lane came back from the kitchen and instructed me to fold the note and put it in my purse. She then went to an antique buffet in her dining room which I could see from where I was sitting. She opened the big drawer and pulled out a map. 

“There’s a rock on the county line, Walker County side. It’s more of a boulder. Follow this map, the red X marks its location.”

So there really was a rock! I felt a jolt of energy just thinking about it. Wayne Beacon may not have been “poofed” away but the bad part of him was certainly exorcized. That was all I wanted for myself.

“When you get to the spot, walk toward the rock carefully. It’s not an easy path. The rock has a crevice on the right side. Once you’ve put the note in, kneel down and pray this prayer. You must truly mean it, dear.”

She took my hands in her warm, soft hands for a second, then leaned in and whispered a prayer in my ear. Just six words. 

The sun was setting and I knew it would be dark before I made it to that rock of hope. I drove straight there without letting my family know what I was about to do.

This was a county road with no streetlights and I passed only one car as I approached the spot. It was so dark that I could see nothing after I turned off the car’s headlights. 

I used the flashlight on my phone to spot the path and started walking gingerly down toward where I thought the big rock must be. 

A sudden intense stream of blue light beamed from above directly onto the rock which was about twenty yards from me. It was as if a helicopter was shining a spotlight, but there was no helicopter. Everything was silent but the ground under my feet seemed to vibrate. 

I stopped, frozen in place. It was an astonishing thing to witness. It’s difficult to describe what I saw step into the light. Who I saw. At first I couldn’t comprehend it. Because what I saw was me. Healthy and glowing, a normal weight and a head full of hair. Me.

She—I—walked into the light and approached the rock carefully. She touched it and seemed to be using her hands to find something. Then she found it, the crevice. The one Miss Lane told me about. She reached into her pocket and I watched her pull out a piece of paper, kiss it and then carefully insert it into the crevice of the rock. 

Only a minute or two had elapsed but it felt like an eternity that I watched her—me—walk into this light and proceed to do what I was supposed to do. Maybe I was seeing a vision of my future, fully recovered and here to leave a note of thanks. Nothing else made sense. Surely that was it.

I continued to stand in the same spot. The other me seemed to be kneeling by the rock and I assumed she was saying the six words. Words she had been told to absorb and make them truly her heart’s desire like Carolyn Beacon did. 

She appeared to be standing up from her kneeling position but instead she rocked back and sat down on the ground. Then she wailed. It was the most mournful sound I’d ever heard. She hit the ground around her with two closed fists, which didn’t fit with my theory of what my future healthy self would do. So confusion set in. 

I had to consider that I was just hallucinating. I’d been pumped up with so many drugs over the prior months, it was entirely possible that this was all a figment of a sloshed brain. 

Just as suddenly as the light and my clone appeared, they disappeared. Gone. Poof. I continued to be frozen from shock. It took a few minutes to gather myself but eventually I was able to move on down the path toward the rock. Whatever hallucination I had just had mustn’t deter me from what I needed to do. 

I used my iPhone flashlight to help me navigate the twenty yards to the rock. I looked down to see if there was any evidence of what I’d just seen. But I saw nothing. No footprints or flattened grass. 

I had a job to do that superseded whatever that was that I’d just witnessed. And I braced myself for the beam of light. But it didn’t come so all I could do was carry on as if nothing bizarre had just happened. 

I found the crevice, shined my dimming flashlight inside and didn’t see anything coiling to bite me, so I put my hand in to feel around a bit. Perhaps there was a little shelf or maybe a slot where I should put my note. Instead, I touched a piece of paper. Without thinking, I picked it up and stepped away from the rock. 

There was no doubt that I was going to read it because I knew with all certainty when I saw it that this was the same paper I’d just seen myself leave in that rock. There was even the faint imprint of a lipstick kiss on the outside of the paper. I had to compose myself first and quiet the storm of crazy thoughts blasting my mind. How was any of this possible? And why did I see it in the first place? 

I opened up the paper, which looked exactly like my own piece of paper. Same black ink and there was my handwriting. There was no mistaking that I had written this note but I had no idea when or why. 

I slowly unfolded it completely. On the paper, I had written these words: “Take this cancer from Lukas and give it to me.”

I fell to my knees, barely able to breathe. I had no recollection of writing this, no memory of my son ever being sick and certainly no idea that I’d ever been here. Yet I’d just seen some kind of Twilight Zone replay of me putting this note into the crevice of the rock. 

It wasn’t a glimpse into my future. It was a look into my past. A past about which I had absolutely no recollection. But if my prayer, my wish had been granted, would I remember it? Were there rules that even came into the picture in attempting to understand this? No, I was certain there were no rules. 

All I knew was that I saw myself put that note into the rock. I had watched as the transparent me kneeled and most likely said the words as instructed by Miss Lane. And it was those six words that brought me to the full understanding of what I must do at that moment.

So I did. Just as I’d seen my earlier self do, in this my own private Gethsemane. I knelt down and put my hands on the rock and said aloud: Nevertheless, not my will, but yours. 

I stood and turned back toward the road and started walking away. Like Miss Lane had instructed, I didn’t look back. Wasn’t hard as I had no desire to. Everything was clear and crisp. I felt calm and peaceful. The only task I had to complete now and forever was to go and thank the perfectly not normal Miss Lane. I would not be telling her about what I’d just been a part of because I knew for certain she was fully aware. 

But I would write Lukas a letter to open when he’s grown. I’d tell him to visit Miss Lane and see if she’d serve him caramel cake and tell him stories about his mama. I was confident the ageless Miss Lane would still be there, not being quite normal and providing help to those who asked. Then I hope he’ll walk down that path and feel some essence of my spirit, my love that’s forever tethered to that big, mysterious rock in Walker County.