The Era of Big Government Is Over. And Marcus Stephens Is Dead.
Esquire, April, 2000 by Charles P. Pierce
OUR LIVES ARE PLANETARY NOW, SMALL WORLDS AND GREAT ONES, whirling together and whirling apart, great bodies pulling at the smaller ones until their orbits nearly converge and the smaller worlds pay a dear price. That's what we have now--Kepler's republic, where Madison's rules bend to Newton's laws--and that's where our stories are formed and shaped to be told to us.
It's on one of those smaller worlds that Marcus Stephens died, on December 4, 1997. He was thirteen years old and he loved Jesus and the drums and his grandparents. He lived all his life in New Albany, Mississippi, a calcined old railroad town tucked into the Buncombe Hills. William Faulkner--who wrote that in the South, the past isn't even past--was born in New Albany. At the local library, bright and...
