“I asked her how long she’d lived in that cabin, and she told me since she was born,” Sally said. “When the community wanted to put up a historical marker out there, she told them no. When they persisted, she told them to go to hell. When they did it anyway, she took it down and used the metal for the bottom of a feed bin for her old mule.”

“But the cabin has to be a hundred years old,” Lily said. “Why wouldn’t she want it memorialized?”

“She said it would bring people out there to her place. She didn’t want strangers coming around, and if they did, she was a real good aim with her shotgun. That’s when the ‘No Trespassing’ signs went up,” Sally said. “But it got me interested in her story, so I went to the old newspaper files at the library. Her mother and father were some of the first folks of German descent that settled here. She was the youngest of six kids, and her father was a farmer. The older five children were boys, and they went to school. But evidently, those folks had different ideas about girls because Johanna Hayes Mayer was never listed on the school rolls.”

“So that’s her name?” Lily asked. “If she was never listed on the rolls, how’d you find out her name? And I wonder how come we’ve always called her Granny Hayes instead of Granny Mayer.”

“First of all, I found the record of that historical plaque, got her parents’ names from it, and then went digging for birth certificates,” Sally answered. “She was born in 1921, so she’s ninety-eight years old. Her mother was forty-four, and the youngest of her sons was eighteen years old when Granny Hayes came along. All of the boys were grown and had left home by then. I asked Drew to check the church rolls, and he found that Granny didn’t start attending until she was past sixty. But I don’t remember a time when she wasn’t there, or when folks didn’t call her Granny Hayes. I pried a little one afternoon when I took her an order of yarn and asked her why she didn’t go by Granny Mayer. She got real quiet and said that her father was a hard old German. Her mother’s maiden name had been Hayes, and she liked being Irish more than German. That’s all she’d say.”

“Holy smoke!” Lily gasped. “I thought she might be in her eighties, but ninety-eight? Man, she sure don’t act that old. You should have seen the way she got in and out of that pickup truck.”

“I want to grow up and have her kind of strength and energy. Can you imagine riding a mule five miles to church?” Sally asked.