| After finishing the commercial course at the high school in Orphan's Friend, Stewards Tissler left Jackson County and moving to Carthage began selling tickets for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. Diligent and able, Stewards was determined not to rust away on a country siding, and within a few years he steamed up the tracks to Louisville. Once there he shoveled more hard ambition into his firebox and keeping the throttle open and the side rods pounding, married carefully and well and eventually became vice-president in charge of freight operations. Although Stewards sometimes alluded to Tennessee, attributing his success, as he typically stated in an address before the United Daughters of the Confederacy, to the thick red clay he felt between his toes as a child, two decades rolled by before he returned to Orphan's Friend. Then he went back for just an afternoon and the funeral of his uncle Mordecai Bickings. Having scrubbed Jackson County off his feet, Stewards was uncomfortable and didn't know what to say to people he had long since pushed out of thought and, he believed, out of memory. At Mordecai's grave Stewards recognized Isom Legg, coal agent for Orphan's Friend and the nearby towns of Bone, Flint Hill, Buckeye, and Lassiter's Cross Roads. Legg's twin boys had been in Stewards's class in high school, and although Stewards had not liked them, he felt obliged to ask about them. "Mr. Legg," he said, "it's good to see you looking so hale and hearty. I want to know about Amon and Lusk. What's Lusk doing now?" "Oh," said Legg, "Lusk is down to Nashville in politics.'' "Well, that's mighty fine," Stewards replied beaming bland approval, "and how's Amon doing?" "Amon," Legg said, turning aside and spitting over a tombstone, "Amon ain't worth a damn neither." |
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