She says she can’t predict when a thing like that will happen. She says sometimes she will meet a person and know then and there how and when that person will die. She knows these things for facts, but she says she would never say as much out loud.

I have heard Warren try to get information out of her, saying, “You see any reason I shouldn’t get a Harley?” I have done it, too—watched her closely as I unveil plans for next year.

I know her insights are back because of last week in Little Egypt. It was the two of us in there, Chatty dozing in the rocking chair, me reading a book about—what else?—dogs. Then Chatty sat up straight; she opened her eyes and said in a firm voice, “Get back in your body right now!”

Who are you talking to? I said.

She had a letter from a cousin days later. The cousin’s husband had had a heart attack. He had flat-lined in the CCU, until to everyone’s amazement he had suddenly come to life, conscious. He told the medical team that he had left his body and gone to visit his wife’s cousin. The day, the time, corresponded. “I was talking to my cousin’s husband,” Chatty had told me that night.

Without faith or courage, I hope she would do the same for me.

I told her about the dream I had the night my last dog died. I was out of town that night, asleep in a small hotel. My dog came to me in the dream, and he said aloud, “It’s time.”

I didn’t tell her about the night my mother died, a night I dreamlessly slept through the night in the room right next to hers. But then, my mother never slept with her head on my stomach, or licked my face awake.

“Tell you about my neighbor,” Chatty said. “We all of us despised him, the way he cheated us out of water when he tapped into our lines to fill his swimming pool in summer. When he sent his children over to collect for a cause, it seemed to us unlikely that the money his children collected ever left his house. He ran for the school board to keep blacks out of the schools, and sold faulty garden equipment to a young couple new in the community.

“So when he was taken to the hospital by ambulance one night, the only flowers that followed came from his immediate family. He lay in a coma for weeks. Then he was back, seen leaning on the arm of a nurse, walking the shaded paths through the woods wearing a surgical mask—an affectation, most of us thought—waving at his neighbors along the way.

“One who didn’t hold a grudge had a conversation with him, and passed along the news that since the coma he often couldn’t think of the word he meant to say, and the word that came out in its place was government. He was not aware that he said it, according to the neighbor who had heard him say that he would like to put his boat in the government and do some fishing.