The Scar Left of Center

Foolish act results in a story worth telling.

The Scar Left of Center

         Billy Terry never could say exactly when the past stopped being a place he visited and became a place that lived inside him. Somewhere between the smell of soot and the sound of a plow blade striking red Alabama clay, time folded in on itself, and he found himself thirteen again, hands calloused and raw, the reins of old Nell in his grip, sweat stinging his eyes like some kind of baptism.

         It was late spring in Poplar Creek, 1945, and the cotton rows were already promising a hard summer. The war was winding down overseas, though it never really touched their little town in any way but absence—boys gone, telegrams received, gold stars hung in windows like badges of sorrow. Billy Junior wasn’t old enough to go yet, and he wasn’t young enough to stay a child. That year, his daddy took a job at the aluminum plant in Muscle Shoals, and the fields were Billy’s alone.

          “You’re the man now,” his father had said, not quite looking him in the eye. “Don’t let the land go dry.”

         So, he harnessed Nell, the old mare with a swayback and eyes like wet glass, and he hoed, and he plowed, and when the sun slipped low, he sat on the porch drinking well water, wishing for a Coke and dreaming of Roy Rogers galloping across the screen down at the schoolhouse auditorium.

         He’d saved up ten cents each week from odd jobs—chopping wood for Old Man Dillard, hauling water for Miss Trudy who lost a leg to sugar, even selling spare eggs door-to-door. Every Friday, he’d slide into one of those creaky auditorium seats, the ones that pinched your thighs if you weren’t careful, and watch Gene Autry and Roy Rogers do what none of the men in Poplar Creek could—ride fast, shoot straight, and always, always win.

         It was after one of those Friday shows that he got the notion to ride sidesaddle. Roy had done it in a stunt, leaping from one horse to another like it was nothing. Billy figured if he could tell a good joke and stay on a horse that way, he’d be a king down at the poolroom. The men there didn’t read books, not really, but they read each other like scripture—body language, tone, a twitch in the lip before a bluff. That’s where Billy said he earned his “degree in psychology.”

         So he climbed up Nell’s side, barefoot and lean, the bones of his hips sharp as fence rails. The sun was behind him, and the light threw long shadows across the field. For a second—just a second—he felt it. That Roy Rogers air. That cowboy glory. Then Nell shifted, startled by a bee or a breeze or some memory of her own, and down he went.

         The hoof glanced his chin, not a full kick but a brush with something ancient and unforgiving. Blood poured like it had somewhere to be, and he ran screaming to the house, one hand cupped under his jaw. His daddy was back that evening, home early from the plant, and didn’t say a word. Just took him by the arm, sat him on the porch rail, and shoved a pinch of soot from the stovepipe into the wound.

          “Heat’ll seal it,” he muttered. “And the smoke’ll keep the spirits from following.”

         Billy never asked what spirits he meant. He just sat there, eyes wide, tasting iron and ash, feeling the sting of something he couldn’t name.

         The scar healed a little crooked, just left of his chin’s centerline. It made his smile look lopsided, and for years he hated it. Even tried to part his hair differently to draw the eye away. But in time, he came to admire it, the way one admires a tree that’s survived lightning—damaged, yes, but also marked by something holy.

         Years later, when Peggy was alive and the world had changed so much it sometimes made him dizzy, she’d trace her finger along the scar before bed. “That horse did you a favor,” she’d say. “Gave your face some character.”

         Billy never told her he’d once thought about falling off the other side, just to match it. Some ideas belong to the boy you were, not the man you became.

         Now, in the quiet stretch of his life, with Peggy gone and his siblings mostly buried, except Mary who still called every week and on Christmas and Easter, Billy found himself talking to Nell more often than he meant to. Not the real Nell, of course—she’d gone not long after that fateful summer, laid down under the pecan tree and never got up—but the Nell that lived in his mind. The one who still pulled the plow through memory.

         Some days, he sat on the porch and traced his scar, wondering what would’ve happened if he’d never fallen. Would he have gone off to college instead of the Navy? Would he have met Peggy, or someone else entirely? Would he still have learned how to read men’s hearts over a game of eight-ball and a bottle of RC Cola?

         He didn’t know. But he was grateful for the fall, in a strange, slow-blooming way. Grateful for the field, for the dime movies, for the sting of soot and the smell of Nell’s sweat. For the way life had taken him down, hard, and then set him back on his feet.

         That’s the shape of things, he thought. You think you’re on top, then something kicks you. You bleed, you hurt, you learn. And if you’re lucky, you climb back out of the hole with a scar and a story worth telling.

         One evening, just as the sun was bleeding into the hills the way it used to when he was a boy, he stood in front of the mirror, tracing the line on his jaw. He grinned. A bit crooked, but still a grin.

          “Maybe I’ll get that other scar after all,” he said to no one in particular.

         And somewhere, maybe in memory or maybe in something deeper, Nell whinnied, and the wind stirred the porch swing chains like laughter.