Here, our baby brother, Wayman, fell sick. It was in the heat of late July. The train was halted, that the darling child of four years could be tenderly cared for, but he instead became unconscious and passed away. The soil here was thin and full of rocks. My poor father, broken-hearted, had the men cut a cavity out of the solid rock jutting out of Burnt River Mountain, and here, the little form was sealed beside where the only living thing was a little juniper tree. Every time today I have a gin, or really now any drink, even a glass of water, I think of Wayman, and raise of glass to him as a toast. My brother Henry found it, amazingly twenty years later, and he cut off some of the bark of the juniper tree and brought it back to my father. My father had carved Wayman’s name on the tree.
