Hers was a large room, compared to the rest of the house. Yet the bed filled it up, and in the still heat of early August she lay there, beneath a ceiling fan that slowly mingled the shadows, telling me tales of my grandmother, my grandfather, and their fathers and mothers. All as I looked about the grey sickroom sitting in an old rocking chair scanning the room for answers. She would cough every now and then, a hacking, violent cough that sent her frail body into spasms. She would laugh while wadding the phlegm up in tissue paper and tossing it into the already full trash can; she would look at me with the largest brown eyes I have ever seen, almost comically so, and then resume her yarn without skipping a beat. The smell of sickness seemed to grow in the room, thick like the smell of chitlins and collard greens, a smell that caused me to remember . . .

Margurette Honeyblue was not extremely old; she told me she would be seventy-three on her next birthday, November the twenty-second (“Your great-granddaddy Thomas Cross, why that man was out plowing the fields on his eighty-second birthday. With a mule! Yes sir. The day he died he had just finished breaking up the new ground over there by the Pickett Cemetery for spring planting! The very day. Eighty-two!”) She had no notion she would live to see seventy-three. Back in January the doctors had told her she had only six months (“Nowadays they seems to be telling everybody, ‘Six months,’ ‘Six months.’ And the truth of it is: They don’t know. They don’t know a Goddamn thing—oh, excuse me, boy. I mean . . . I forgets you a preacher and all”).

Never large, a tawny, lean tiger of a woman, she appeared now a skeleton, her arms and legs emaciated (“Look here, I can reach my entire hand around my thigh. Just like that. Just like that. Ain’t nothing left of me but the skin on the bone. The skin on the bone”). She had lived in the dim light for so long that her already big eyes had a child’s wide-open gaze. She looked off in the distance, even at nothing, with a wan and incredulous stare, her huge, beautiful eyes belonging to a gal of eighteen, searching.

The room was clothed in shadows, full of bureaus and borrowed chairs from other rooms to seat the many visitors, the windows open with the curtains drawn. She would fidget in the bed, which would in turn groan only slightly. She would look at the clock by her bedside and holler: “Viola! Viola! Where is you at? It’s time for my medicine!”