“In the kitchen now there was general crying, Jasmine and Lolly sobbing about their mother whenever the mood came on them, and Big Ramona, Little Ida’s mother, went silent and quit the big house altogether, sitting in her rocking chair all day for several weeks.

“I went out there again and again with soup for Big Ramona. I tried to talk to her. All she said was: ‘A woman oughtn’t have to bury her own child.’

“Crying came and went with me.

“I took to thinking of Lynelle constantly, and now Little Ida was mixed up with it too, and each day it seemed that Little Ida was more dead and gone than the day before.

“Goblin accepted that Little Ida was dead, but Goblin had never been too crazy about Little Ida—certainly he had loved Lynelle more—and so he took it rather well.

“One day when I sat at the kitchen table paging through a mail-order catalog, I saw that they had flannel nightshirts for men and flannel gowns for women.

“I ordered a whole slew of these, and when the goods arrived, I put on the nightshirt in the evening and went out to Big Ramona with one of the gowns.

“Now let me clarify here that Big Ramona is called Big Ramona not because she’s big but because she is the grandmother on the property, just as Sweetheart might have been called Big Mama if she had ever allowed.

“So to go on with my story, I came out to this little mite of a woman, with her long white hair in its nighttime braid, and I said:

“ ‘You come on and sleep with me. I need you. I’m alone with Goblin and Little Ida’s gone after all these years.’

“For a long time Big Ramona just looked at me. Her eyes were like two nickels. But then a little fire came into them, and she took the gown from me and looked it over, and, finding it proper, she came into the house.

“Thereafter we slept spoon fashion in that big bed, flannel to flannel, and she was my bedfellow as ever Little Ida had been.

“Big Ramona had the silkiest skin on the planet, and, having kept her hair long all her life, had a great wealth of it, which she always plaited as she sat on the side of the bed.

“I took to sitting with her as she went through the ritual, and we talked over all the trivia of the day, and then we said our prayers.

“Now Little Ida and I had pretty much let prayers go by the boards, but with Big Ramona we prayed for everybody in one fell swoop, reciting three Hail Marys and three Our Fathers and never failing to add for the deceased:

Let perpetual light shine upon them, O Lord,

and may their souls and the souls of all

the faithful departed rest in peace.