I can remember the way Ma used to stand behind the counter in the store and talk to customers. She had a way of standing, her legs one in front of the other but spread wide. She always wore a cotton dress with an apron, and when she would talk to customers she would always say, “Ain’t that swell?” No matter what they were telling her it was always “Ain’t that swell?” She had a big belly and little stick legs. She was left-handed too. Ma was pretty when she was young, but when she got older she lost her looks. She looks like George Washington in the last picture I have of her, and her little stick legs look like Babe Ruth’s.

Chunky and I lived in the house across from the store. Chunky was a weakling and never kept a steady job. He was sickly. He was always seeing Tootie about some ailment, and she made him feel better. If she couldn’t kid him out of his troubles she gave him some pills. What they were was sugar pills. We all had to laugh because we knew, but Chunky was in the dark and said those pills made him feel like a new man. Tootie liked Chunky and would listen to him after he got religion. Tootie was interested in religion since the time she got her headaches and saw the dancing lights of heaven and talked to the angels. One day she came home and told Ma she had joined the Catholic Church. We were Lutherans, German Lutherans, and Ma just about died. I remember there was a big fight about it in the store. And while the fight was going on there was a terrible thunderstorm with lightning. Lightning hit the walnut tree, which sat just outside the window near the cash register. Scared me enough to kill me. It sounded like the world coming to an end, with a smell like I never knew.

When Ma was a kid living out on the prairie, one of thirteen kids, she was sitting by a Franklin stove when lightning struck through the stovepipe and knocked her out. That’s why she had lightning rods on the store—three of them. There was one on the gas station. Three on the garage. Two on the little house. One on Weasie’s shack. One on the back house. Two on the barn, but none on that blame walnut tree. Boom! It sounded like the world cracked in half.