The experience of some of the most precious moments in life is like that of perceiving a mote floating upon the air, grabbing it, and opening one’s hand slowly to find nothing—as if it had never existed.
     It was years ago…the name of the place was Daylight Donuts, located in the town of Taos, New Mexico.  Taos is over 7000 feet up in the Rocky Mountains.  The famous mountain man, Kit Carson, lived there at one time, and the first American governor of the New Mexico Territory, Charles Bent, was killed (I’m talking arrows shot into his face—pretty much maximum hostility) by an angry mob of locals in 1847.  It seems that strangers, especially Anglos, were not always welcome in these parts.

 
     Just how long a shadow does an evil act cast in time, if any?  I am not sure of the answer.  Is it like what Faulkner said, that “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past?”  Or is the situation more neatly summed up by the epitaph on the gravestone of John Keats: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water?”  Such thoughts worry my mind like troubled mice as I look at the photograph of the statue of Chief Duck.
     The statue is easily missed as one cruises up Highway 51 north of Jackson, Mississippi—perhaps at the southern limits of what might be considered “Faulkner Country.”  The statue is located in the town of Duck Hill…nowadays a quiet, sleepy little place, home to some 732 residents in the 2010 census.  I don’t even recollect that there was a stoplight to slow one’s progress, heading up northward to bigger towns like Grenada.