As Grandma grew better she would sit in bed with a pile of pillows at her back. She slept only at night. During the day she was busy listening and counting. She knew how many knots there were in the ceiling planks. She could look at a knot a long time and then tell you a man who had a face like it. Most of them were old folks, dead before my time, but there they were. There was one knot that looked like Uncle Jolly. Grandma used to look at it by the hour. “I’m afeared Til have to piddle away my days looking at this knot-picture,” she would say.

One day she counted the stitches in the piece-quilt on her bed. They ran to a count I had never heard. “I larnt to figure,” Grandma said, “but I never larnt to read writing. My man could read before he died, and he done all the reading and I done the figuring. We allus worked our laming like a team of horses.” We had no calendar, but Grandma counted the number of days until Uncle Jolly would get out of the penitentiary. “It’s nigh on to six hundred and fifty-five,” she said when the figure work was done. The time had not seemed so long before. Now it stretched along an endless road of days.

There were hours of talk about Uncle Jolly. Grandma said he had held no old grudge against Pate Horn. Grandpa used to log with Pate. Uncle Toll had married one of Pate’s daughters. It had been the dam he built across Troublesome Creek that Uncle Jolly hadn’t liked. The fish couldn’t jump it, and none could get into Lean Neck to spawn. He sent Pate word to open one end of the dam until the spawning season was over. Pate didn’t move a peg. Uncle Jolly went down one day and set off two sticks of dynamite under the left bank, blowing out three logs. He went down, with daylight burning, to blow that dam up.

“Jolly ought not to done it,” Grandma said. “Hit looks like the Lord is trying my patience in my last days when I’m weak and porely.”

Near the middle of December the mare stopped eating the nubbins of corn I took her. She would mull her nose in the bucket of water without drinking and roll her moist eyes at me.

I opened her stall door and let her wander into the midday sunlight. She did not go far, lifting her leaden hoofs through the snow, turning from the wind. Presently she went back into the stall and stayed there with her head drooped and her eyes half closed. One morning I went out and found her stretched upon the shucks. Her nose was thinly sheeted with ice. She was dead. I latched the stall door and did not go back to the barn again that winter.