places in Alabama, and believe me, that's really poor."
"Yessir, that's true enough," Raff agreed.
"The woods up there for the most part are scrub, not much good except for chipping and pulp, and quail and turkey, I guess, and rattlesnakes. A few people, like the Millbrooks of Brewton, made a lot of money a hundred years ago, logging long leaf pine. Now that's long gone. And the counties are a little far away for Mobile to have much economic input. Your dad would tell you that much, judging from his own hardware business. And I expect you understand it yourself, now that you're taking college courses, that they need better schools in both those counties. Developing Nokobee, if it's done right, and I believe it will be done right, is going to give that area and especially Clayville an economic bump up. A lot of people down here will see real estate around Clayville as a good investment."
"Why would they do that?" Raff asked, perking up a little bit, thinking he'd found a crack in the argument. "It's still a long way from Mobile and Pensacola, and there are all kinds of recreation places around there and on down to the Gulf."
"Your problem, Scooter--and I don't blame you because you're young--is that you don't have vision. Nokobee's isolated now, sure, and its recreational facilities may never compete with the ones we have around Mobile and on over to Pensacola. That'll stay true even after the housing and lakeside docks are built at Nokobee. But this part of the Gulf Coast is filling up with people real fast. And they're not just sharecroppers coming out of the cotton fields either. They're mostly well-educated, hardworking people, with solid incomes."
Raff tried to widen the crack he thought had opened. "But why would just bringing in a lot more people be such a good thing?"
"Look at me, Scooter. You want Nokobee and Jepson Counties to just stay redneck heaven forever? Is that what you want? Please understand, nothing's going to stop progress on the Gulf Coast anyway. We're already a very important part of the Sun Belt. Mobile and Pensacola are expanding fast even by Sun Belt standards. Am I right?"
Raff hesitated. Then he spoke, almost in a whisper. "Yeah, I guess, yessir." He didn't want to agree with his uncle, but he couldn't think of anything else to say, and he had to be polite.
"Now just compare what used to be with what we have now," Cyrus bore in. "When Granddog was a boy, just about all the land south of Mobile was undeveloped woods and swamps. You could drive all the way from Dog River down to Cedar Point and see only a few houses here and there. The last stretch of the road wasn't even paved. And when you got all the way to Cedar Point, you could look over to Dauphin Island. It was a beautiful place, with beaches and the old Civil War fort at one end, but you had to rent a boat to get there. A lot of that island was simply vacant land. Now most of the area between here and Dauphin Island is developed. It's a thriving part of the economy of Alabama. There's a bridge to Dauphin Island, and you can drive across it in a few minutes. Now, that is progress, Scooter. That is real progress. Don't you see that?"
Raff's battle with his uncle was lost. "Yessir," he said, looking down at his knees and then back up.
Then he was surprised to see that his uncle hadn't finished. He was getting excited. Cyrus had stubbed out his cigar on the tray. Now he removed his glasses and waved them at Raff.
"Scooter, America didn't become great by sitting on its ass. We had to be tough and we had to work hard. We thrived on war, to be perfectly frank about it. Just look at American history, and I don't mean the girlie left-wing version they give students in school. We had to push back the Indians to get what God meant us to have. We went to war with Mexico to double the size of this country. That took us to the Pacific. I won't say the way we did it was right and good but that just happens to be the way the world works. Grow or die! We, especially the Semmeses and the Codys and the other old families around here, were the winners, and that means there had to be losers.