Linda Rochester writes about her life in Clay County, Alabama

Linda Rochester - A Love Affair with Place: An excerpt from her story Gold

I. Gold

Mrs. Teel's head bobbed then sagged over the cup and saucer that sat on the table right under her nose. Reading coffee grounds had been her occupation and her gift-maybe even her sentence, some said-since she was a young girl. Today, she was reading the fortune of an older couple who had missed out on the wonders and glories of life. All they had in the world was a run-down house, a pack of mangy dogs, and an unmarried granddaughter, who had been abandoned on their doorstep as an infant. How much of this information was known to Mrs. Teel as she sat down at the table is gone because she was the only one who could have answered that, and she's been dead these last thirty-odd years. When she was alive, she answered questions about her gift by posing the following question:

"How could I have known that?"

With that even the most reluctant believer was often silenced, because time and again, Doubting Thomas had to face the uncomfortable truth: there was no way. In this case, Mrs. Teel might have known the story of these people's meager existence, after all, they had lived in an adjoining community all their lives. But these facts were the ones that we knew-the Baggetts neighbors. The sad and lonely people in the Baggett's house would have been the last to see themselves that way. No man wants to be pitied.

If the Baggets had ever seen themselves as failures, then all that disappeared with the prophecy. Oh lucky day! The day when life changed for the Baggetts because once they rambled about their home place fixing up this while that rotted down, and that while this suffered the same fate, now the Baggetts found direction and purpose. Now they too might reap the benefits of ownership. They might truly belong to the world of the gainful, the endowed. Who knows what they saw in their minds, the ragged old couple- the man in a wrinkled up, too small black suit and shriveled tie to match, the only half-nice suit he'd ever owned-the one he'd be buried in, in a few short years; the woman in her Sunday best as well, a brown dress with a bit of lace around the collar-her burial outfit also, though she couldn't know this: the future stood between them and the end. It sat as close to them as the strange woman at the table, peering down beneath her glasses-looking far and wide into a future that was written with the careless abandon of coffee grounds shaken up and let loose into the saucer of a cup.

"I couldn't see nothin but them grounds scattered 'round, but what I see'd was her face, all kin of a glow, kitchin 'us dark in the shade, the light bein' behind her, kinder fell on her face at jes the moment she saw what she saw. I seen her eyes squint kinder surprised-like. Don't think she 'us expecting to see what she saw in that cup. Ain't everbody that comes in there, comes in with with that kind of fortune. I told the wife, she's gotter have wondered at what she saw, gotter have stammered and stumbled around fer words like she did. 'Mr. Baggett,' she said, 'I see gold! Gold in your front yard.'"

Mr. Baggett told the story of the prophecy to every noisy neighbor and city relative that came within ear-shot for years. When he stopped telling the story, if he ever did, nobody ever said. Hopefully, he never stopped telling the story, because if he did, then that would mean the dream disappeared. The shack that he and Mrs. Baggett lived in would be the place that they died in, and the funeral clothes that they wore to Mrs. Teel's on that Saturday morning back in 1958, would be the only suitable clothes they had for burial. There would be noone to barter their belongings anyhow, not if Mrs. Teel's prediction didn't come true. The truth would have come at them hard, the way it did for so many country folk, but the Baggetts had something more: they had gold. Gold. Mrs. Teel had seen gold in the grounds. That was as good as money in the bank, Mr. Baggett reasoned. You could lose money in the bank, but you couldn't take nothing away from a fortune teller because she didn't have nothin to start with. It was the same to her whether she told him he would drop dead tomorrow. She would have gotten the five dollar fee anyway, because she collected first, and dropped the five into her apron pocket before she ever looked at them grounds. She didn't have nothin to gain so there wasn't one thing for them to do except go home and start to diggin. They'd dig a hole to Chiner if they had to. Their future was as close as a hole in the ground.

Mrs. Teel said these words to the Baggetts that morning: "You're rich and you don't even know it because gold is beneath you. There it is, right there in your own front yard."

From "Gold", 2005