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the old jelly jars my mother had used for glasses, this one painted with bright red cherries. She’d called it her “collection,” and pretended it had value, when, in fact, it had served only to demonstrate how little we’d had, “collections” of plates, twine, tinfoil, paper bags, a bounty of want and scarcity.
    Most of what she’d gathered together had been lost since her death, so that now the old wooden cabinet contained only a few glasses and a short stack of chipped plates. Drawers that had once overflowed with match-books, buttons, rubber bands, were now very nearly empty. As for her clothes, my father had burned them in a ragged pile the day after her funeral, poking it idly with a stick as the stinking smoke curled upward into a washed-out sky.
    I took the old pitcher my grandmother had given her as a wedding gift, mixed water, sugar, bottled lemon juice, then plucked an ice tray from the refrigerator, held it under running water, tapped the cubes into the pitcher.
    My father now sat Indian-style, staring out the window, spidery blue veins on naked legs so white they seemed never to have been touched by sun.
    “Here’s your lemonade,” I told him.
    “You put in plenty of sugar?”
    “Until the water wouldn’t dissolve any more.”
    He took the glass, raised it above his head, studied the layer of white granules that rested at its bottom, then took a long swig, tucked the glass between his legs, and glanced toward the window again. “You sure you want to stay till the end, Roy? Till I’m dead.”
    “I told you I would.”
    He took another swig of lemonade, his eyes following the flight of a crow over the pasture. “You don’t have to.”
    “I know I don’t.”
    He took another sip, lowered the glass into his lap. “Sometime before fall, then. That ain’t long, is it?”
    “No, it’s not.”
    “I heard somewhere that a bug lives about a month.” He laughed, his yellow teeth showing briefly, several chipped and crooked, treated with the same indifference with which he’d treated everything else. “I got about the same time as a bug, right, Roy?”
    “I wouldn’t know.”
    He looked at me irritably. “That the way you answer them schoolkids you teach? Can’t just say ‘I don’t know.’ Got to say it fancy. ‘I wouldn’t know.’”
    “It’s just a way of speaking, Dad.”
    “Teacher talk, that’s what it is.”
    He’d always been contemptuous of my work, considered it fit only for old maids, my being a teacher offering yet more evidence that there was something missing in me, the main part of a man. He’d never encouraged my early ambition to go to college, nor taken any pride in the fact that I’d finally gotten a degree. But now he seemed at war with everything I had become since leaving Waylord, not only my choice of career, the fact that Ilived on the other side of the country, but with my grammar, my vocabulary, everything.
    But I also knew that something else was going on in him, old demons clawing at his mind, my “fancy” language merely the grappling hook that had dragged something more unsettling from the swamp.
    He drained the last of the lemonade and shoved the empty glass toward me. “Anyway, when it comes to dying, I’d rather go like a bug. Not thinking about it.” His eyes drifted toward the old ball bat that rested at a slant against his bed and which he’d begun to use to lift himself from the bed. “One thing’s for damn sure,” he said, now fingering its handle, “you won’t see me go out like Archie done.”
    So that was it, I thought. He was thinking about Archie, his life and death pressing like a red-hot iron against his flesh.
    “Crack like Archie done. Pissing and moaning.”
    In an instant, I recalled my brother during the only time my father had gone to see him in the county jail. He’d been taken completely unaware by the seizure that had left Archie balled up and whimpering on the concrete floor of his cell, my father nudging him with