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Daddy wanted to name me John Geddie McCain, but Momma wouldn’t let him, since it would insult the memory of her dead baby. Up to this point, she was in charge of middle names, and maybe to offset some of Daddy’s foolishness, she give every one of her children the same middle name: Geddie.
    “Besides,” she’s supposed to of told Daddy, “how are you going to explain to this baby how come there’s a tombstone out there in the graveyard with his name on it?”
    Daddy thought about it for a spell, and they say I didn’t have any name a-tall for several days. Finally, Daddy told the rest of the children that he had the perfect name. Considering his record to this point, I’m sure Momma was uneasy.
    “We’ll call him Littlejohn,” he told Momma and them.
    They said Momma only asked him one question: “One word or two?”
    I reckon after Lexington, Concord, Cerrogordo, Century and Marquis de Lafayette, she didn’t think Littlejohn Geddie McCain was all that bad a name.
    Aunt Mallie delivered me. She was ninety-seven years old, and she had delivered Daddy, too. She was living in the same old slave cabin her husband, Zebediah, and Captain McCain, who was my granddaddy, built over sixty years before, right after the captain married into the Geddies and got his land and slaves. She lived to be 104. Two days after her funeral, Daddy and them went down to the cabin, and all her family, nieces and nephews and what-all, had left. They never come back.
    Aunt Mallie read fortunes. Momma didn’t hold to such foolishness, but all us young-uns sneaked away at one time or another to have Aunt Mallie look at our palms and tell ourfutures. Century and Lafe sneaked me down to her place one day when I was five, so I reckon she was 102 years old.
    She still dipped snuff, and I can remember the whole cabin smelling like it. She took my palm in her big old wrinkled hand and studied it real hard. She shook her head while Century and Lafe giggled behind her. She was about deaf, so I don’t reckon she minded. I never forgot what she told me.
    “You got a hard road, boy,” she said. She spoke so low I couldn’t hardly hear her. “I see real bad times, but then I see a whole lot of happy times. Don’t be giving up on the good times. They be coming. The Lord Jesus is got some surprises in store for you, to be sure.”
    I don’t reckon anybody ever give Aunt Mallie enough credit.

CHAPTER FIVE
June 27
    G randdaddy is praying. I can hear him right through the wall between his room and mine. I can’t tell what he’s saying, but the sound of his voice wakes me up every morning at 7:30. If I ever live to be that old, I’m going to sleep until noon every day.
    I’ve been here three weeks now, and this part never changes. Next, he’ll go to the bathroom, wash and shave,then he’ll start fixing breakfast. He sings while he cooks, and he cooks the same thing every day, almost. There’s fried sausage and scrambled eggs, along with the biscuits he takes out of the freezer for us every night and heats up in the oven the next morning. We have apple jelly and peach preserves—or we did until we ran out this week—and milk. For some reason, Granddaddy puts ice in his milk, and it forms a little skim at the top. I’ve finally gotten him to serve me mine without ice.
    He and I clean up the dishes. I watched him wash them the first two mornings I was here, and then he handed me a cloth and said, “Here. Time you earned your keep.”
    He finishes getting dressed, then goes out on the back porch, where the overhang keeps out the morning sun, and he reads the local paper. It’s called the
Port Campbell Post
, and it has about the worst sports pages I’ve ever seen. Nothing about anything out of North Carolina except for the major-league baseball box scores and a couple of paragraphs on every game, and they don’t even have the West Coast night games. But he reads every word. He’s a Minnesota Twins fan, because the Twins used to play in