Sequoyah looks over at me and nods. He knows how I feel. But we both also know what far too many others feel about the work he has been doing.

He picks up the stick that he drew those symbols with and begins to scratch it across those carefully drawn shapes in the red mud.

“We shouldn’t leave these where someone may come across them. At best, it might just confuse them. At worst, it might frighten them. It might frighten them so much that they’d do something foolish.”

I remember how my friends reacted.

“Hawa!” I say. “You are right.”

I pick up another stick to help him. Soon every symbol has vanished back into the moist earth.

When we are done, my father smiles that gentle smile of his again at me. But this time, there seems to be something else in his expression. It is sadness.

“Do you know,” he says in a soft voice, “the story of what happened before I left for Arkansas? The story of what my wife and neighbors did to save me from my. . . craziness?”

I nod my head. He is speaking of the time I have already mentioned when my stepmother and his neighbors burned his cabin and all of the markings he had made.

I nod. “Yes, I have heard about that.”

“Good. Have you heard also about the way I acted that day? How I did not try to save the work I’d done? How I did not cry or moan?”

I nod my head again.

My father puts his arm around my shoulders and looks down again at the clean bank of red clay that had once been covered with his markings.

“It is hard,” he said, “when people do not understand. It broke my heart to know that my own wife and my best friends thought I was crazy and that they had to save me from myself. But what good would it have done for me to weep or complain? Sometimes the face that we show the world must not mirror what we feel inside.”

My father squeezes my shoulder. “I think you know that, my son. Your face is much like my own.”

I nod my head a third time, knowing that my face at this moment is far from blank, but mirroring the pride I am feeling. I have never felt closer to my father or prouder about being his son.

“There was another reason I did not mourn the loss of all that work I’d done,” my father continues. His voice has changed. It’s charged with excitement. “Have you ever followed a new trail and come to a place where you can go no longer? Perhaps to a river too wide to cross, a cliff too steep to climb?”

“Yes,” I say, even though I am not sure what this has to do with the story.