“Lemuel Hawkes?”
“Why, sure.”
“That kind of chubby guy whose voice wasn’t changed?”
“Well, by the time I married him it was changed,” Gram said. “Good heavens, Jamie.”
“When I knew, when I knew—” He laughed, and the laugh ended in a wheezy little cough. “When I knew him he was sending away for all kinds of creams and secret remedies, that’s what. He had this kind of black syrup made by the Indians, you’re supposed to put it on your throat and lie out in the moonlight with it, and it was guaranteed to give a manly vibrance to your voice. A ‘manly vibrance,’ that’s the exact words. Only his mother found him lying under the clothesline and all she could see was something dark and wet all over his neck, oh, God—” He choked and choked again and still laughed, with his little wheezing breaths pulling him almost to a sitting position.
“When I knew him,” Gram said firmly, “he sang bass in the Baptist choir. Had his own business, and—”
“Did he have a little sort of pot above his belt? With his navel sitting on it like a button on a mountain? Oh, God—” and he was off again, laughing delicately this time so as not to choke.
“And,” Gram said, “I married him and had four girls and a boy and all of them healthy. Lemuel he died after the children were grown on account of having influenza, but the children are all alive to this day excepting Phillip, who passed on due to a combination of circumstances. And he left behind him seven children, Joanne Ben Joe Susannah Lisa Jane Jenny and Tessie and a wife and a granddaughter Carol who is just as—”
“Let me say mine,” the old man said. He struggled up higher against the pillows and folded his hands across the sheet. “While making bed linens in New Jersey I married my secretary though of good family and not just an everyday secretary, mind you, and to my grief she died having Samuel our son—”
“You’re not married any more?”
“Don’t interrupt me. You always were one to interrupt me. I raised him honest and respectful and first he kept books—”
“A bookie?”
“A bookkeeper, for our company and gradually rose to an even higher position than I ever had. He has now got a wife and six healthy children Donald Sandra Mara Alex Abigail and uh, uh, Suzanne and one of them—”
“I got a grandchild named Susannah,” Gram said.
“One of them, I say—”
“How’s she spell it?”
“One of them went to Europe!” the old man shouted joyfully.
“Is that so!”
“Summer before last, she went.”
“My Susannah is spelled kind of like ‘Savannah,’ Georgia,” said Gram. “Only it’s Susannah.”
“Well, mine’s not. It was Sandra that went to Europe. She got to see the Pope.”
“The Pope!” Gram’s mouth fell open. “Why, Jamie Dower, you haven’t gone and become a—”
“Oh, no. Oh, no. But she went with this touring group, her and her aunt, and the itinerary said they could have an audience with the Pope. The family came to me and asked what I thought of it; they ask me about everything important. And I said, ‘Sandra, honey,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you what do. You go visit the Pope and then right after that, the very same day, you go see a Protestant minister too. And encourage him in his work and all.’ Only it turned out the touring group had to move on before she could track down a Protestant. She was heartbroken about not keeping her promise.”
“Did she sell the clothes the Pope blessed her in?” Gram asked.
“Oh, yes. Excepting her shoes. I think it’s good to keep something he blessed her in, just in case, you know.”
“Ma’am,” the nurse said, “remember what I said about keeping it short, now. If you could be thinking about drawing your visit to a close …”
She was standing in the doorway with her hands pressed neatly together in front of her, and when they looked up she smiled. Ben Joe, leaning silently upon the window sill, nodded at her. When she was gone he turned back to look out at the view, but Gram and Jamie kept on staring blankly at the place where she had been. Their faces seemed crushed and pale. Finally Gram forced her bright smile again and began anxiously working her dry little hands together.
“Urn, Jamie,” she said. “Do you remember the time your cousin Otis bought a wild horse?”
“Horse?”
“I was thinking about it while watching a Western the other night. He bought this wild horse that couldn’t nobody tame and rode off on it practically upside-down, the horse was bucking so bad, but he was waving his scarf and shouting all the same, with your mother and your aunt on the porch watching after him and crying and wringing their hands. And after dark he came back safe and sound and singing, with the horse so polite, and dismounted into the sunken garden and broke his leg in two places. Oh, law, I reckon I never will forget—”
“You know,” said Jamie, “I just can’t recall it.”
“Well, it came to me out of the blue, sort of.”
He nodded, and for a minute there were only the kitten squeaks of his breathing.
“Then I reckon you remember Grandfather Dower getting religion,” he said finally.
“Not offhand I don’t.”
“Sure you do. Along came this revivalist by the name of Hezekiah Jacob Lee, preaching how nothing material is real and things of the spirit is all that counts. He only stayed for some three days of preaching, but Grandfather Dower, he latched right on. Gave up his swaggering ways and his collecting of old American saloon songs and went around acting unfit to live with. And one day, after Hezekiah Jacob Lee had been gone about a month, Great-Aunt Kazi got stung by a bee on the wrist knob and naturally she went to Grandfather, him being a doctor, and he stamped his foot and shouted, ‘Don’t bother me with your material matters; put mud on it, woman!’ when suddenly he frowned and his eyes kind of opened and he said to her, ‘Why,’ he says, ‘why do you reckon Hezekiah Jacob Lee went off and left me holding the bag this way?’ And what a party there was that night, with alcohol floating on the garden path—”
“I declare,” Gram said, “it rings a bell, sort of. I just vaguely do remember.”
They were quiet again, thinking. Jamie Dower drew the edge of his sheet between his small, brittle fingers.
“About all that’s left now is Arabella,” said Gram.
“Arabella.”
“Your cousin, the fat one. Auntie Adams’s little girl.”
“Oh, her.”
“I don’t see her much,” Gram said. “She was always kind of a prissy girl.”
“She was. She was at that. She went to study in Virginia, I remember, before I’d even left home. We heard from her regular but stopped reading her letters.”
“It was on account of her mother, I believe,” Gram said. “She was the same way. Told Arabella to watch out for germs in public places. Every letter Arabella sent us after that sounded like something from a health inspector. All these long detail-ly descriptions of every — You remember that? Auntie Adams finally wrote back and said she would take Arabella’s word for it, but I don’t recall that Arabella paid her any mind.”
“How about her brother Willie?” Jamie asked.
“Oh, he was prissy too. That whole section of the family was prissy.”
“No, I mean, what is he doing now?”