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over to leave to their children. In part he was another sort of person which accounted for a barely suppressed smile and definite laughter in his eyes in that photograph. As a child I simply thought he looked jolly. Fergus, five years older, knew better.
    â€œGrandpa was a rascal. He taught me to chew tobacco when I was seven.”
    â€œDidn’t you hate the taste of it?”
    â€œYes, but he convinced me it was something a man needed to know how to do. He taught me how to spit too. Put me up on a wagon seat with him, took me off to town to trade mules. On the way there and back he gave me cussing lessons. We had a wonderful time.”
    â€œWhat did Aunt Lucy say about that?”
    â€œMama didn’t know until too late. There was a whole side to Grandpa he didn’t show to women.”
    Fergus has Grandpa’s long nose and curly hair. He was working on the belly, said it came naturally since he had to stay up all night eating and drinking with his clients, country musicians who swept into Nashville to play at the Grand Old Opry or hoped to play there. Like so many bats out of a cave blinded by light, they weren’t really comfortable until dark, so Fergus kept his recording studio open till two or three in the morning. We were talking in his office, the single messiest place I’ve ever entered—this includes the slums of Naples and my children’s bedrooms. Over two desks a hanging basket of red plastic geraniums dangled from a set of longhorn steer horns partially hiding a five-foot print of a tiger serenely marching through his jungle. A round table pushed to one side held stacks of poker chips, cards, a cluster of dirty glasses and ashtrays. File boxes sat on all but one seat of a couch. Behind them plastic ferns caught dust in front of a window that was never opened.
    In the next room was a well-stocked bar equally in shambles. People, most of them wearing blue jeans, wandered through the office to the bar to replenish drinks. Fergus nodded or waved as they came and went. Grandpa’s gold watch, suspended under a glass globe, shone amid the chaos of papers, calculators, hunting knives and one villainous looking carved coconut rolling around between the phones on his desks. The coconut had on an eye patch, a bit of blue bandanna and an earring, all attempts to transform it into a pirate’s head. I counted three broken guitars in two corners; a busted drum took up one chair. In order to sit down, I had to prop my feet on a large carton of toilet paper, not that I minded. Fergus has always been like this, a collector and a keeper. The office was his version of Grandpa’s barn, a jumble of everything that ever was a piece of farm equipment. Strictly his territory. No one disturbs Fergus’ clutter but him. He lives in it like a bandit chief surrounded by his spoils.
    â€œYou know, Marianne, the only woman who ever caught sight of Grandpa’s carrying on was Miss Kate, and she didn’t know the half of it.”
    â€œHow did they stay together all those years? Of course there were three children. But he was almost ten years older than she was—”
    â€œPeople did then,” said Fergus. He’d been divorced once and seemed perpetually on the edge of marrying again though he could never quite make up his mind to it. Compared to Fergus, I’ve led a sedate life, married for twenty-five years to the same man, mother of three. My husband and I run a horse ranch, a place near Santa Fe where we breed and raise quarter horses.
    â€œOf course,” Fergus reminded me, “Miss Kate was his perfect opposite. He honored her quirks—built her that house in Franklin, paid for all kinds of help—and she put up with his … his good times.”

    And the bad times? Do we forget them too easily? “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Well, yes. We don’t like to think of our grandparents as pitiable. They were though. For all