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and a laugh. He had no use for spiritual matters. To him, if you couldn't smoke it, drink it, or stick part of yourself in it, then it didn't add a damned bit to the day.
    As Kelly watched from the window, the thing bobbed closer. Eight months old. But that wasn't right. Ghosts couldn't age, could they?
    Her belly buddy squirmed. She began singing. “Hush, little baby, don't say a—”
    She left the melody suspended, the creaking house adding useless percussion. Because the next line started with “Daddy.” Chet. He wouldn't buy anybody a mockingbird, even if their lives depended on it.
    She could always change the gender, make it “Momma's gonna” do thus and such. But she'd lost the mood, and the baby had settled. Outside, the ghost also settled, a sodden sack of spirit.
    Kelly climbed into the cold bed. She rolled into the cup of mattress where she and Chet had once cuddled, played, made a baby. She wondered if she would dream of her baby's gender. Some women did that.
    The quilts were nearly warm by the time she fell asleep.
     
    Kelly walked the frosted morning on her way to feed the chickens. She tugged up her oversize sweat pants as she went. Her breath hung in front of her, a silver miracle that died away to make room for the next. Breath like a ghost.
    The chickens gathered around her feet, pecking the kernels she thumbed from hardened corn cobs. There might be a couple of eggs. The baby would like that. He always gave a kick of joy when that food energy flowed through the cord.
    Kelly wondered if the ghost kicked each time she ate. Or did it feed from somewhere else? An umbilical cord for the dead, with energy flowing to them from the living. Invisible, with soul juice pumping into the amniotic sac of the afterlife to keep them from fading into nonexistence. Were they connected to one another?
    The cemetery was only a couple of hundred feet farther. If she were careful, she could manage the frozen-dirt trail without slipping. Being pregnant helped her keep her balance, for some strange reason. Hard on the feet, though.
    She was swelling today. The health department had told her swelling might be a sign of pre-something-or-other. High blood pressure. Bad news.
    She made it to the white stumps of stone, old rain-worn markers. Granite. One of them just a piece of bleached quartz about the size of a baby's head. Little flecks of mica sparkled on the skin of the quartz.
    Twenty-seven Stameys. She counted again just to make sure.
    Susan Eleanor, Donna Faye, Laney Grace, Melville Martin, Timothy Mark, Simon Martin. Her father John Randolph Stamey, the ten-dollar letters chiseled neat and final.
    More. Many without names, all connected by the dirt.
    Some older ones, the name spelled S-T-A-M-Y.
    Off by itself, where the dust and dead bones were cuddled by the roots of an old apple tree, stood a lonely grave. It bore the only marble marker in the lot. A fine hand had etched a lamb near the top, amidst some Biblical-style scrollwork.
    The name, Lewis, engraved in the marble.
    Her father's twin, who died so quickly after birth that he never got a middle name.
    The grass in the shade of the apple tree was brown. One lone apple clung to a branch, shriveled and spotted. The baby squirmed as Kelly approached the grave.
    She knelt before the marker. How sad that this child had never danced across the yard, napped in the hayloft, chased leaves in the October sundown. This child had never tasted the April air, a corn bloom, the cold mist of the creek. This child had never known his mother’s arms.
    This child never connected.
    At least Lewis had been buried with love. Paying for such a fancy monument must have been a strain on a mountain farm family. But the Stameys had always taken care of their own. From the cradle to the grave.
    “Since I'm the last, who will bury me if I die?” Kelly whispered to the morning.
    Chet. He would come back to bury her. Chet wasn't all bad. Once, when Kelly had a deep cut across her hand, Chet