Steven Cornelius was born and raised in Northeast Mississippi and is married to a beautiful, auburn haired second generation Irish woman with deep roots in Galway and Sligo. His love of books began at a very early age. When night fell on the farm and chores for the day were complete, he and his family sat around the fire and read until bedtime. Many of his childhood adventures are featured in his writing. He attended the University of Mississippi, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees while participating in Air Force ROTC. Steve completed more than thirty years Air Force service in the US and overseas. For the Distant Traveler Trilogy, he drew upon experiences and memories collected during assignments around the world. After retiring in 2015, Steve decided to get serious about a lifelong passion for writing. His most recent work has been published in Mississippi magazine (October 2022) and Louisiana Living (November 2022). He just finished a multicultural novel set in Cuba and Houston Texas featuring Hispanics as the main characters. Steve has written one hundred and five short stories collected in two volumes and posted stories on the Mississippi Folklore and True Appalachia webpages and has a following of more than 3,000 regular followers on each page.

Natural Talent

By Steven Cornelius

            During the mid-1970s a ripple in the fabric of time put me in limbo for almost a year.  Those of you alive back then probably weren’t affected by it, but I certainly was.  I had taken a two-year break from my college journey courtesy of the draft and the US Army and worked frantically to cram four and a half years of college into three.  In those hectic years, I finished college, with two degrees, was commissioned as an Air Force officer, married my sweetheart and moved back to my hometown to await active duty orders.  Counting my Army time, I’d been busier than a one-armed paper hanger for five years.  Then I suddenly hit a brick wall where nothing was happening, life slowed to a crawl and the highlight of each day was checking the mailbox for much anticipated Air Force orders.  At some future date and time, the chance to see the world was in the offing; and I was impatient to get my new life underway.  Until then, I needed to earn a living, eventually finding work as an unemployment counselor with the State of Mississippi on a one-year “temporary” contract.  I upgraded my ratty wardrobe and started working downtown and stayed busy providing health and counseling services to downtrodden area residents, helping them with life skills, including how to find a job and keep it. 

            Flash forward three months into my new job; I sat wading through mountains of paperwork and heard rustling outside my office door, looked up and saw a painfully skinny young woman.  She stood looking at the floor, unsure about stepping into my office.  Her name was Rachel, and she was a pitiful sight, one step away from being a street beggar.  As we talked, she mentioned a brother at home that was “teched in the head.”  A few minutes later, I asked, “Why didn’t your brother come with you?”  Rachel looked at her feet and twisted her fingers together nervously, “He don’t like to come into town.  People make fun of him.”  Such an admission made me even more determined to help them, so I asked, “Where do y’all live, and when can I come visit?”  Rachel raised her head, briefly making eye contact, “Anytime this week I suppose.  He mows yards in the morning but comes home after dinner (lunch to y’all); he don’t like to mow in the heat of the day.”

            We agreed on a Thursday visit, and she left.  As I later learned, she’d hitchhiked twenty miles back to their shack of a house.  Two days later, I signed out a green and white state sedan and headed west on Highway 72, looking for the small house where she and her brother lived.  Thirty minutes later, I rolled up in their front yard, shut the car off and sat for a minute taking in the place they called home.  A punishing sun and unrelenting wind had warped the siding, turning it a weathered gray.  A rusty tin roof kept the rain out while a brick chimney leaned precariously against the northeast side venting woodsmoke.  By any reasonable standard, the place should have been condemned, but it kept them almost warm and mostly dry and sometimes that’s enough.  I walked across a rutted dirt yard, stepped onto the rickety porch and knocked on the front door…waited a minute but heard nothing.  The door shook on its hinges as I rapped harder a second time; a few seconds later, I heard faint footsteps.

            Skinny Rachel pulled the door open, face expressionless as an uncarved Jacko lantern pumpkin. Stepping to one side, she motioned me inside.  Quickly scanning the room, I noticed a threadbare couch and a couple of unpainted straight-backed chairs flanking a rusty wood heater.  I glanced at Rachel, whose old flower print dress seemed to disappear into the faded background wallpaper, “Where’s your brother?”  She silently pointed toward the back door.  I nodded and slowly made my way through the kitchen, such as it was.  No running water or sink to wash dishes or refrigerator to cool groceries.  Stepping toward the back door, I heard someone strumming a six-string guitar and wailing out a blue grass song that sounded a lot like “Wildwood Flower.”  I stopped and listened, captivated; the young man was very good with that cheap old guitar and his voice wasn’t bad either.  It made me wonder what he could do with a quality instrument.  I stood listening for about two minutes before stepping onto the porch, causing boards to creak and the young guitar player to stop.

            The youngster jumped when he realized someone had heard him playing; his face turning a deep embarrassed red.   I smiled, “That’s very good.”  He looked down at the ground and said nothing.  He was small framed and rail thin with a pinched face, close cropped sandy blonde hair and terribly cross-eyed.  He sat barefoot, wearing threadbare clothes.  Rachel found her voice, “This is my brother Dennis.”  Then pointing at me, she said, “This man is here to help us.”  Dennis carefully laid his ten dollar guitar on the porch and shot me a questioning look.  I sat down next to him on the steps and talked about what we could do to help him and his sister.  We spent the entire afternoon on that back porch; me asking questions and then filling out forms.  Over the next three months, I delivered them to area clinics for a full battery of physical and mental evaluations.  It didn’t take long to discover that Dennis was dyslexic, clinically blind without corrective glasses, and his teeth were almost nonexistent.  Rachel was in slightly better shape.

            Over the next six months, a social services case worker and I took care of their most immediate needs.  The first and most important priority was corrective glasses for Dennis.  His reaction to suddenly being able to see clearly was humorous and touching.  He chased butterflies around their yard and allowed grasshoppers and other insects to crawl on his hands so that he could look at them.  A dentist in town did the best he could with their teeth; decent clothes and shoes that fit came next.  We provided common conveniences that most take for granted but those two never had.  Once he became comfortable around me, Dennis would sit and play for an hour or more on that beat up guitar.  He had a natural ear.  I would challenge him, playing a song on the radio and then point to him.  Dennis would nod and then echo the song back to me, playing it note for note. 

In a strange twist of fate, God reached down and touched that young man with a wonderful gift.  He was the best natural guitar picker I ever heard.  Never a lesson or anyone to show him a single chord.  I’ll never forget my last meeting with them.  My orders had finally come through and I was excited about traveling to California for Air Force training.  They came into my office happy as clams, Dennis wearing his glasses, new shoes and donated clothes; Rachel even ventured a shy smile.  Their smiles quickly disappeared when I told them another counselor would work with them going forward.  I suppose they knew what I didn’t want to think about.  Once I left, it was doubtful that anyone would lift a finger to help them, no one had before.

            For years afterward, during long hours spent flying from one part of the world to another, Dennis would occasionally pop into my thoughts.  I couldn’t help wondering what happened to him and Rachel.  He was a sweet guy with an amazing gift, but no real skills other than a magical ability to make a guitar sing and the physical strength to mow lawns.  Undiagnosed dyslexia made his academic prospects poor, and he stopped going to school after seventh grade.  On endlessly long flights, I sat and stared out the cockpit into blue infinity and wondered if God finally used the talent he’d given such a sweet young man.