Penelope left the sick man for no more than a minute or so, to step into the kitchen for water, to fetch a towel, to look over her own little stock of medicines in the vain hope of finding something she could believe might help him. She sat close beside his bed, the oil lamp turned low and set on a table the other side of the room so that it would not disturb him. He lay with eyes closed, and his breathing was labored and irregular. At one point he opened his eyes and looked at her, but she could not tell if he knew her. She hoped he did, hoped he knew she was there with him. He was wearing a flannel nightgown with long sleeves, and his arms were outside the covering of sheet and quilt.

She said softly, “It’s Pea, Uncle Joshua. Do you know me?”

But he only stared at her without making any sign. She took his hand and held it in hers, praying to herself. His eyes were closed again, and he breathed more and more heavily, the sound becoming a rattling one, something like but not quite like a noisy snore. She realized gradually that it was the thing they called, horribly, “the death rattle.”

She had held his hand so long, she had prayed so long, her hand and brain were numb. At some point she realized that the sound of breathing came no more. The hand she held had died. She continued to hold if for another moment or two, and then she set it down gently at his side.

She got up from her chair, looked around the window curtains and saw that it was still dark. Taking a little clock to the lamp she found that its hands read 4:27. When she set the clock down and returned to the bedside, she was startled, thinking she must have been mistaken after all, for the old man’s eyes were open a little, the way he had looked at her sometimes when she was a little girl and he disapproved of her words or behavior. Then she understood and closed the eyes and held them until they remained closed, or almost.

Not wanting to wake Clarice, who needed her rest, she sat down again beside the dead man to wait for it to be day. As she remembered years and occasions long gone, tears rolled down her face, and she hugged herself in her despair and loneliness.

Uncle Joshua had not married, and as far as was known, he had no other family. At the funeral Penelope and Clarice sat in the front row of the church. They were Joshua’s family in all that counted except blood.

Ricey sat back somewhere with Ichabod. Joshua would not have approved of Ichabod’s giving himself the importance of sitting with the family. So that Ichabod’s feelings would not be hurt, Ricey had been persuaded to sit with him.