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everything they did. With Papa’s help I bought a guitar, learned to play “Mommas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” and began wearing boots. All the time.
    Papa worked hard six days a week, but like most Bible-Belters, never on Sundays. Sundays were reserved solely for the Lord, Nanny, and me. We’d spend the morning in church, then gorge ourselves on Nanny’s fried chicken or pork chops. After a lazy afternoon nap we would walk down to the river, where we would feed hooked earthworms to the bream or listen to the wood ducks sing through the air just after dark.
    Papa was never real vocal about his faith, but for some reason, he loved putting up church steeples. In the fifteen years I lived with Nanny and Papa, I saw him organize twelve steeple-raising parties for nearby churches. Pastors from all around would call and ask his help, and as far as I know he never told one no. The denomination of the church mattered little, but the height of the steeple did. The taller, the better. The closest stands a mile from our house, atop Pastor John Lovett’s church—a rowdy AME where the sign out front reads, “Pentecost was not a onetime event.”
    After attending my fourth or fifth raising, I asked him, “Papa, why steeples?”
    He smiled, pulled out his pocketknife, began scraping it under each fingernail, and looked out over the pasture. “Some people need pointing in the right direction,” he said. “Myself included.”
    Nanny grew sick my junior year of college. When we knew it was serious, I broke every posted speed limit on the drive home. I bounded up the back steps just in time to hear Papa hit his knees and say, “Lord, I’m begging You. Please give me one more day with this woman.”
    After sixty-two years, the music stopped, the lights dimmed, and their dance atop the magnolia planks ended. The loneliness broke Papa, and he followed three weeks later. The doctor said his heart simply quit working, but there’s no medical terminology for a broken heart. Papa just died. That’s all.
    Growing up, I had always wanted to travel out west. When Nanny and Papa died, I found my excuse, so I dropped out of school and drove toward the setting sun. I had grown up watching Westerns with Papa, so all that wide-open space held some attraction. Besides, that’s where the Rockies were. I spent weeks driving through mountain after mountain. Saw the Grand Canyon; even sank my toes in the Pacific Ocean. I’m pretty low maintenance, so I ate a lot of peanut butter and slept in the back of the truck with Blue. We kept each other warm.
    When I got to New Mexico, I came pretty close to running out of money, so we loaded up and came home. When I finally made it back to Digger, almost a year after Papa’s death, the vines and weeds had almost covered the house, a few shutters had blown off, the paint had flaked, and a fence post or two had fallen, pulling the barbed wire with it. But the well water still tasted sweet, the house was dry, and Nanny’s breeze blew cool even on stagnant August afternoons. Papa knew what he was doing when he built the place.
    I spent six weeks cleaning, painting, sanding floors, repairing the plumbing, oiling doorknobs and hinges, and fixing fence posts and barbed wire. I also spent a lot of time on the tractor, just trying to get it working again. The sound reminded me of Papa, but it had sat up too long and a few of the hoses had rotted. I drained the fluids and changed the plugs, distributor, and hoses. After some careful cussing and a few phone calls to Amos, she cranked right up.
    On a trip to the hardware store, I bumped into Maggie. We had known each other in high school but never dated. In hindsight, that was really dumb. But I was too busy hunting, fishing, or playing football. At any rate, I wasn’t dating, or studying, for that matter. That came later.
    Papa once told me that before he met Nanny,