“Fresh news to me,” Father said. “I hain’t seen one since before I married and was traipsing round in Buck-horn Creek. I wisht all the timber was egg trees. They don’t give off a grain o’ dust. This Little Angus hollow is dusty as a pea threshing. It nigh makes a feller sneeze his lungs out.”

“I’m a-mind to stay on here,” Mother said, her voice chilled and tight. “It’s the nighest heaven I’ve been on this earth.”

Fall came in the almanac, and the sourwood bushes were like fire on the mountains. Leaves hung bright and jaundiced on the maples. Red foxes came down the hills, prowling outside our chicken house, and hens squalled in the night. Quin Adams’s hounds hunted the ridges, their bellies thin as saw blades. Their voices came bellowing in the dark hours. Once, waking suddenly, I heard a fox bark defeat somewhere in the cove beyond Flaxpatch.

Mother had set the funeralizing for the last Sunday in September. Father came on the Wednesday before, bringing a headstone split from Mace Hogan’s quarry. It was solid limerock. The baby’s name had been carved on one side with a chisel. We took it to the Point, standing it at the head of the mound. Father built an arbor there of split poplar logs. We thatched the roof with linn branches.

“It’s big enough for Brother Sim to swing his arms without hitting anybody,” Father said.

Mother climbed the hill to see it. “I wisht to God I’d had a picture tuck of the baby so it could be sot in the arbor during the meeting. I wisht to God I’d had it tuck.”

Father felled locusts, laying the trunks in front of the arbor for seats, and Mother took a pair of mule shears, cutting the weeds and grass evenly.

Uncle Jolly came Thursday morning. He came a-straddle a dwarf pony. His feet nearly dragged dirt. He came singing at the top of his voice:

Polish my boots

And set ’em on the bench,

Going down to Jellico

To see Rafe Shanks.

Holler-ding, baby, holler-ding.

Ol’ gray goose went to the river,

If’n I’d been a gander

I’d went thar with ’er.

Holler-ding, baby, holler-ding.

When he turned over the Little Angus sandbar, Uncle Jolly crossed his legs in the saddle, and came riding the yard path, right onto the porch, and would have gone pony and all into the house if Mother hadn’t been standing in the door. Father laughed, saying: “Jolly allus was a damned fool,” and Uncle Jolly got so tickled he reeled on the porch, holding his stomach, and fell into the pretty-by-night bed.

“Where’s Ma?” Mother inquired. “I wanted most for her to come.”