“I’ll never forget it. Your mother had been gone about six months. I’d stopped eating, for the most part. Our hired folks had all left, took off for greener pastures, not wanting to be at the beck and call of a woman so miserable she couldn’t drag herself out of bed. I want you to know, Lee, that I nearly did kill myself. I had a knife. It was Jeremiah’s knife, one he would carry around, same as any boy carried around a knife. I had it sharpened and ready. I said my prayers to the Spirit, for it to receive me, to float off into the ether and join my boy. And as I pressed that cold metal to my skin, the room seemed to fade away, the walls and ceiling and floor, until it was just me hovering there in the black, floating like a hummingbird. A light appeared like a window, and through it I saw the Farm, all fixed up and painted and green, a gravel road spread out in front of it. And on that road was a big loud black car, a boy and a girl inside of it, coming slow up my driveway. I remember it same as I remember my mother’s name. It burned itself on my heart like that. I knew just what it was too: My grandchildren sidling up the road, come to join me. Come to bring the good times back.

“What I’m saying is: Lee, honey, you saved me. You and Murphy. I’ve been waiting twenty years, and it finally came true.” She put her arm on my shoulder. “Let me tell you, son, it was well worth the wait.”

Grandma started crying, and I cried too, and we held each other, and I don’t know, I’d never felt loved like that. Not before or since.

That’s when I saw him.

It was the boy from my visions, and I finally knew who he was.

Standing before me was Jeremiah Sanford, right there in the Hummingbird Grove. His hair was blond as milk, his skin soft, his eyes a deep and wondrous blue. He stared out at me, dressed in a black suit, a preacher’s suit. He was hazy, and he seemed to ripple in the wind like he was made of something thinner than air—not a ghost, but something like that. Jeremiah had this pained look on his face, a kind of silent agony, full of regret. I guessed it hurt, watching me with his mother like that. I knew that he wished he could hold her, that he could reach out and be held. But he was dead now, a ghost or a vision, some leftover memory burned into this place forever.

“What is it?” said Grandma. “What do you see?”

Jeremiah held one finger up to his lips in a hush gesture.

“Nothing,” I said. “I don’t see anything at all.”