Survival of the Sparrows

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The southern live oak that had given great comfort, shelter, and shade to May Wellbeloved’s family for four generations had died five years ago, having succumbed to oak wilt. It was a fast-spreading disease that took the imposing tree in just one season. May mourned the loss of that tree as she peered out of the back screen door of the white colonial house her great-grandfather built with his own hands in 1904. She blamed herself for not catching the fungus sooner — for not noticing that the spotted leaves were dropping in mid-summer when the tree should have been producing flowers and nuts — for forgetting that its foliage should have been the same deep hue of mossy green that she had treasured for the past sixty-six years she had known the tree — for letting her ancestors down. That tree had protected her family from the hot Georgia midday sun and from several hurricanes for one hundred twenty years. Now, it was gone; the spot it had shaded replaced by a lush and verdant green lawn, the tree’s wide and glorious trunk the sole remnant for May’s imagination. Her father had said the tree was over three hundred years old. He had a habit of divulging that fact, as if it were top-secret information, to everyone who visited the rural two-acre Johnsonville, Georgia property. May’s father was Johnsonville’s first black mayor, serving the small community of less than a thousand inhabitants from 1970 to 1988, when he died of a stroke at the age of fifty-four. Mayor Wellbeloved was truly well beloved by all. He was an honest, stern, and demanding man who expected the residents of Johnsonville to behave with the same reverent morality and social dignity that he demonstrated as their mayor. Mayor Wellbeloved also expected these qualities of May, his only child.

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