Read The Dead Don't Dance for Free Online

cypress plank, the ceilings in four-inch tongue-and-groove oak, and the roof in corrugated tin. I have no memory of the house ever being any other color but white with green trim and shutters. Why? Because that’s the way Nanny liked it, and Papa never objected.
    One summer, standing on a ladder and painting the underside of a soffit for the umpteenth time, he looked down and said with a smile, “Never argue with a woman about her house. Remember that. It’s hers, not yours.” He waved his paintbrush toward the kitchen and whispered, “I may have built it, but in truth, we’re just lucky she lets us sleep here.”
    Whenever I think of Nanny’s home, I remember it glistening white and green under a fresh coat of springtime paint, landscaped with whatever was blooming, and cool from the whispering breeze ushering through the front and back doors, which she propped open with two retired irons.
    Papa had several eccentricities. The top three were overalls, pocketknives, and Rice Krispies. The first two fit most farmers, but the third did not. He’d pull a saucepan from the cupboard, fill it to the brim with cereal, cover it in peaches, douse it with half a pint of cream, and polish off an entire box in one sitting. Not surprisingly, the first few words I learned to read were snap, crackle, and pop.
    Born poor country folk, Nanny and Papa didn’t make it too far in school. Born before the Depression and raised when a dollar was worth one, they were too busy working to pursue higher education. But please don’t think they were uneducated. Both were studious, just in a nonacademic way. Papa studied farming, and he was good at it. For the sixty years that he turned this earth, it stayed green more often than not. His reputation spread, and people drove for miles just to rub shoulders at the hardware store and ask his opinion in between the feed and seed.
    While Papa plowed, Nanny cooked and sewed. And late at night, after she had untied her apron and hung it over the back screen door, she read. We owned a TV, but if given my choice, I preferred Nanny’s voice. After Walter Cronkite told us everything was all right with the world, Papa clicked the television off and Nanny opened her book.
    After school, I’d spot Papa on the tractor, run across the back pasture, climb into his lap, and listen to him talk about the need for terraced drainage, the sight of early-morning sunshine, the smell of an afternoon rain, the taste of sweet corn, and Nanny. When our necks were caked in dust and burnt red from a low-hanging sun, Papa and I would lift our noses and follow the smell of Nanny’s cooking back to the house like two hounds on a scent.
    One morning when I was about twelve, I was standing in the bathroom, getting ready for school, listening to a loud rock ‘n’ roll station hosted by an obnoxious DJ that all my friends listened to.
    Papa walked in with a raised brow, turned down the volume, and said, “Son, I rarely tell you what to do, but today I am. You can listen to this”—he pointed to the radio, which, thanks to his tuning, was now spewing country music—“or this.” He turned the dial, and hymns from the local gospel station filled the air.
    It was one of the best things my grandfather ever did for me. Listen to Willie singing “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys,” and you’ll understand what I mean. About the same time I was flipping through the three channels we received on our dusty Zenith and came across a show called The Dukes of Hazzard. I heard the same voices from the radio singing their theme song and put two and two together.
    Before long, I planned my week by what I was doing at eight o’clock on Friday nights. Nanny and Papa watched with me because Dallas followed, and they had to know who had shot J.R. But from eight to nine, the TV was mine. I fell in love with Bo and Luke Duke and amused myself by mimicking