Guest Author - Phyllis Doyle Burns
When the boy was born, his ma died right then. His pa just did not want to live without his sweet Nell, so he shot himself in the head and went with her. The baby lay there crying till his Gramma and Grampa showed up a few hours later to see how things were going. Well, they found the babe, "Jist in time, afore he died, too," said the Grampa, so the Gramma called the boy Jistin Time.
Every morning in the summertime, after Jistin finished his chores around the little farm he lived on with his grandparents, he would run over across the meadow and sit by the swamp. He never went into the swamp, for it was "full of all kinds of evil and scary things" as his Grandma always warned him. No, he would not go too far in, jist to the Dogwood tree. Under the Dogwood tree, the ground was solid and soft mosses grew there. It was peaceful, cool and only the sweet little animals would come jist to the edge of the circle and sit and peek at Jistin from behind a bush. He knew they were there, he could sense them watching him with curiosity.
Jistin dug into his pocket for the sweet apple Grandma had tucked in there early that morning for his snack. Slowly he took a bite of the juicy crisp apple and let the piece sit on his tongue so he could taste the sweet juice as long as possible. He sat there, savoring his apple in that slow way of his and listened for sounds of the swamp and thought about all the legends he had heard since he was old enough to understand.
"Is thar really gold in thar?" he wondered for about the zillionth time. Jistin had heard the story since he was knee high to a grasshopper. An old prospector, so the legend goes, was camping out here under the dogwood tree, many a year ago and had carved with charcoal on the trunk of the Dogwood tree, "I baried my gold in the swamp. Leav it be and bewar the danger." Now no one knew what the danger was they had to beware of or even if the legend was true. But if you looked really close at the old Dogwood tree there was some kind of scratching in the trunk, part wore off and too hard to make anything out of it. There was also a big pile of rocks not far from the Dogwood tree where people say the old prospector had been buried by some passersby when they stopped for a picnic and found the old man dead. No one ever took the rocks away to find out if there were bones under there. If there were, no one wanted to be the one to disturb the dead and loosen a ghost.
Now whether this legend is true or not, it did give the people of the villages and surrounding farms something to talk about at night by their firesides. Jistin had finally finished his apple, tossed the core into the bushes for the little animals to finish off and stood and stretched. Running back to the farm, he kept thinking, "Some day, I jist mite go in that thar swamp and find me that gold. Then I can build meself and Grampa and Gramma a bigger house and git us a wagon and some mules." All the way back to the cabin he kept thinking about the fine business he would build up with that wagon and mules, hauling apples and other fruits to the villages to sell and bringing lumber back to build furniture to sell, too.
A few years later, Jistin came walking down the dirt road to the farm. He had been in school all day "gettin his larnin" as Grampa always said. When he rounded the bend in the road he saw a lot of smoke and ran as fast as he could, shouting to Grampa and Gramma, but it was too late. The old cabin had burned down and Grampa and Gramma had gone up in smoke with it.
After the funeral, Jistin was asked by the villagers what was he "gonna do now, with no family and no home?" He was too old to be taken in by anyone, so he just camped out under the Dogwood tree for days. Often, villagers would stop by to give him some food to cook over his fire. One day, Jistin was not there and nowhere to be found. One of the villagers noticed there was a new scribble on the trunk of the Dogwood tree. With charcoal, Jistin had written, "I've gone for the gold." and signed it Jistin Time, which was his name that his Gramma gave him. No one ever saw Jistin again....but,
Many a year later, a man with a fine car and lots of money came into the area and had a new road built, running by the old Dogwood tree and clear to the next town. He built hisself a fine big ole house by the dogwood tree, a big chicken coop, built a shop, too, where he made furniture, and put up a snack bar out by the road, sold hot dogs and soda pops, put a new-fangled market right across the road stocked with all the vegetables he grew hisself and farm fresh eggs and the furniture he made, got hisself a wife and they had lots of babies. He called the place "Just In Time, Too".
