All my grandparents still lived on farms, and I’d been to visit my mother’s people, where my Granny lived in a three-room wooden shack and kept a big stick by her bed in case she needed to club a snake in the night. My aunt Mildred made biscuits from dough rolled out, spread with butter fresh that morning from her churn, folded and rolled and folded again then cut into full moons which puffed, in the oven, to cream and golden astonishments, a dozen layers breaking apart in your hand like some heavenly shale.

We’d lived in the country too, with my father’s parents—his mother reading the Bible on the front porch, calling me her sweetheart and wrapping me up in thin mottled arms, taking me with her out into the long slope of the fields to pick dandelion greens and poke salad, slipping me spoonfuls of Geritol to fatten me up. His father rocking, cutting plugs of tobacco and spitting the nasty juice into a can, wrapping his ankles in strange fleshy rubber stockings, and hoarding a drawer full of the most beautiful fountain pens, all swirled and marbled celluloid, though as far as I could tell he never wrote anything. Maybe an old account book, with the prices of feed and tobacco and ink recorded? We’d raised chickens there, and I used to watch my father use one hand to soothe a deluded hen, stroking it till it lay still on the stump, then raise the other to strike with one unswerving swing of his ax. Spurting blood smell, and then the hapless, beheaded thing running around crazily till it fell to one side in the dust, soon to be plucked and roasted. How can a body run without a head? Poorly, it would seem, in scrawly loops. Midday Sunday cooking: greens simmering with fatback, chicken roasting in a flecked black pan, mashed potatoes beaten with butter and milk, Crisco cut into flour for a latticed crust over a bubbly thick stew of red cherries. Hurry, please, the perfunctory grace.