Tad’s housemate, Patrick Trevor, can tell you how much willpower Tad, as the strength lessened, gave to writing his parts of this, Issue # 14. There were several new properties Tad planned to describe more fully, hoping to intrigue a latent buyer. (He was at work on a love poem to Shadowlawn Plantation when he died. But Elkton Green was the only home Tad managed, from his bed, to fully “portray.”) It must be admitted, in his hospital room on March 28 we told Tad that we’d found the long-awaited “fairy-god-purchaser” for Elkton Green. We invented certain details—a family foundation funded by a carpeting concern—a newly retired Connecticut couple looking for some getaway, etc. We told Tad that Elkton Green had been saved, thanks to a faxed copy of his seductive history! We lied to him. What good, by then, to let him know we’d lost the place?

It was just one of the properties Tad had worked years to “wrestle” onto the registry. (He had bought and planted those cypresses three years before the place was even listed with us. It took a whole Saturday and the lad did it all “on spec.”) If we sacrifice any more of these exquisite plantation and small-town homes to the wrecking crew, so much remaining beauty will be taken from our state. It meant everything to Tad, sketching out these farms and houses as only Tad Worth could. His room at Duke Hospital was stacked with deeds and court records, with wills in Xerox, slave rosters, an antique leather “elephant” folio marked “Characteristic Non-Poisonous Spiders of Central and South America, depicted in native circumstances,” architectural and decorating sourcebooks from the 18th century to the present. There were six potted orchids. Somebody had thrown an old paisley shawl over the curtain rod circling his bed. A new nurse walked in one day and said, “So—who lives here? Merlin?” We all laughed and, though weak by then, Tad, never one to miss a comic opportunity, spoke up, “More like Merlin’s maid, honey.”

Tad died on the night of April 1. (He’d once stated he was aiming for that date, intending some final confession of foolishness.) He perished believing Elkton Green had been spared. With some difficulty, he told us just where his prized croquet set was stored, ready. We found the mallet stand already tied with a grass-green satin bow.

•  •  •

May I, as editor emeritus (that is, the only local person “tetched” enough to even try and edit this thing), permit myself the luxury of trying to set down a few memories of Tad? “For the record,” as he would put it. Tad Worth was a great believer in “the record.” No one ever did more to keep our dear state’s record legible or longer “in print.”