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her bossiness, my grandmother loved men, yet for thirty years she was a widow. During her last years she was quite mad. In her senility she confused me with my mother. She wouldn’t fly. She had allergies, arthritis, her share of aches, fevers and anxiety attacks which she called “nerves.”
    As for Grandpa? I do know a mean old sow bit him in the calf of his leg, and he had to use a cane for six months. He was aware that his only son George hated farming. He was not fond of either one of his sons-in-law. Hail flattened entire alfalfa crops. Drought destroyed the cotton. Every kind of pest invaded his fields. To the forces of nature he remained a stoic. “The earth survives all weather,” he said. To the forces within he was, I think, largely a stranger. He often drank too much when he wasn’t supposed to drink at all. Diabetes made him melancholy. Some days he sat alone on the steps to the hayloft and cursed. I never saw him there, still I’m surehe must have done it, slumped there in the dark barn, fanned his face with his hat and cursed repetitively, dully.

    â€œWhy didn’t I ever hear Grandpa play the fiddle?” Aunt Lucy is the only one I can ask.
    â€œOh, you were too young. No, let me think. He quit playing for the family sometime in the thirties. He’d go to his room to play or sit out under a tree in the yard. I don’t know what made him do it, some argument he and Mother had. I guess … something to do with fiddling and drinking. They seemed to go together. But he used to play for us all on Saturday nights—when we’d stay home to listen. He was the only one in the family who knew how to play a musical instrument. Mother had a player piano. Remember?”
    I did. It stood in a corner of the living room out at the farm and was forbidden to children. Field mice had invaded it, eaten all the felt off the hammers, chewed through rolls of paper. My grandmother’s mute cultural pretension; it might as well have been a broken hay mower.
    â€œYour mother and father—before they married—Uncle Phillip and I used to dance on the front porch in the summers. No rugs were ever rolled up for dancing in Mother’s houses. George joined in when he was courting a girl. He was always the caller. It wasn’t the kind of music we wanted in the twenties. Papa only knew square dance tunes, things like
Cotton-Eyed-Joe, The Virginia Reel, Shoofly.
We wanted saxophones, drums, trumpets … jazz.”
    It was easy to see them. Grandpa in a vest and shirtsleeves, tapping his foot just outside the front screen door, light from the entryway falling on his fiddle under his chin, moths fluttering toward the light. Three young men, three young women dancing.
    â€œPromenade all,” George called, and they pranced all the way to the swing, heels clattering on the wooden porch floor. An owl hooted. The moon rose. At a distance the lawn’s familiar elms, maples, magnolias were outlined in black, and the tops of the cars shone in the driveway. Grandpa played while his children square danced before him wearing flapper clothes. That was the only kind of dancing Miss Kate allowed. The Charleston, the shimmy, the black bottom, even the foxtrot were as religiously banned as the hip flask.
    â€œYour father generally had some whisky with him. Or if he didn’t, your Uncle Phillip did. I suspect George did too only he couldn’t very well offer his papa a drink. When we were finished the men would go out to the cars and—”
    â€œWhere was Grandmother?”
    â€œIn the kitchen unpacking ice-cream. She had Minnie to make it and George to crank it. She made the cake … chocolate with a fudge icing or lemon with bits of shredded peel in a white seven minute icing.” She smiled. “Makes me hungry to think about them. Your father and Phillip and Papa sat on the porch steps chewing mints till she called them in.”
    Aunt Lucy is