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Perhaps they were not riding the train. Perhaps they met on some other occasion. He was an eligible bachelor, and she was a young woman in need of a husband. I’m certain they did not meet in church. Grandpa was a backslidden Methodist, one of those who attended Easter services if at all, while Grandmother was a Campbellite, a member of the Church of Christ, one of the fiercer fundamentalist groups. Drinking, smoking, dancing, gambling and card playing were forbidden. So were musical instruments in church. To tune the congregation for hymn singing, the minister blew on a pitch pipe. The only amusement during the service was reading the hymnal or lugubrious funeral parlor advertisements on one side of the cardboard fans.
    Invariably the picture on the other side was of a longhaired, extremely gentile Christ dressed in a white robe vaguely reminiscent of garments worn by the choir in other churches. He was standing in a highly idealized garden of Gethsemane alone except for a number of rose bushes in the foreground and cypress trees in the background. I used to wonder about those heavy, red, symmetrical roses. They were like no others I’d seen. Finally I decided they were supposed to be heavenly flowers. The message beneath ran:
Your Friend In Your Hour Of Need.
Then there was the name and phone number of the funeral parlor. As a child with a wide experience in visiting family churches—allkinds of Protestants plus Catholics were represented—I found Grandmother’s the most dour. However, it suited her astringent needs which were most apparent in her sense of decorum. To her the simplest act—such as meeting a man—could be dangerous. One had to have a proper introduction by some family member or, lacking that, by a trusted friend. Over-trained in social conventions, she had no training at all in being a farmer’s wife. How did she adapt? I wish I’d asked her during her lifetime, still the question isn’t difficult. So much is already known it’s easy for me to intuit her answers.
    â€œAt the farm the front porch was a good deal of trouble because children wanted to play out there. I would be in the kitchen and Mr. Moore would come in carrying George. He was about two then.”
    Both Grandpa’s and George’s faces were red, Grandpa’s from the sun, George’s from bawling.
    â€œMiss Kate, he’s fallen off the porch again. Why can’t you watch this child?” he shouted.
    She shouted back, “I can’t watch George and cook dinner at the same time. There are too many dangerous places around here. Watch him yourself.”
    â€œI’m hiring you a cook.”
    â€œHigh time!” Miss Kate turned her own reddened face back to the wood stove, a large black cast iron monster she despised every day all day every summer.
    She was expecting my mother then. 1908. Pregnant, hot, often exhausted, she was in no humor to accommodate. George did not fall off the porch again. She sat on the porch swing, fanned herself, and watched him while Minnie took over the kitchen.
    My grandmother and I never looked in the least alike. Our opinions seldom matched. Though I cry easily, perhaps our temperaments are somewhat the same. Children are easily influenced. I lived in the town house with her, UncleGeorge and my mother during part of World War II. I wished I’d had a cook.
    In his photograph Grandpa, curly-headed and long-nosed, looks like a sober, industrious squire. In many ways he was. A gold watch-chain stretched across a large belly. He had three hundred acres of rich Middle Tennessee land where he raised cotton, corn, alfalfa, tobacco, and the usual barnyard produce, hogs and chickens. He also had mules to trade and property in town to tend. Until Miss Kate made him take it down, he had a sign on his front gate reading
Trade in Your Old Mules for New.
After he died my grandmother lived for almost thirty years on his investments and had some money left