I watched Fayrene's beady eyes glisten like a rat’s in the lamplight as she planted herself halfway out the screen door with her fists on her thick hips.

        "Come on, honey,” she said.  “You waited on her for all those years.  Now it's their job."

        Uncle Cecil touched the casket with the tips of his long fingers before following his new wife out of the parlor.  The screen door creaked shut behind them, and soon we could hear his old pickup chugging off toward the west field. 

        Uncle Cecil hadn't been any fun at all since he married Fayrene, because in her zeal to mend all his unfortunate habits, she had also cured him of poetry.  Maybe she did it on purpose, or maybe she just didn’t know the difference.

        Uncle Grover leaned back in his rocking chair and stroked his mustache. 

        "Fayrene's sure taught that old dog how to heel."

        "Wonder if ol' Cecil's learned to fetch yet," Uncle Pete replied.  He filled the oak Morris chair, the only seat in the room big enough for him.  He picked up his cup from the piano bench and grinned.

        I slipped into the parlor with my cup of hot coffee.  Mama moved over so I could sit by her on the end of the leather fainting couch.  Aunt Cassie and Aunt Vi ooched over when Mama did.  For the first time I felt like I belonged with the grownups.  My younger cousins had long since gone to bed.  Actually, they'd gone to pallets out under the stars. 

        Not that Grandma's house didn't have enough beds to go around.  I guess, growing up, I’d slept in almost every one of them. I liked the one with big brass posts in the south room best.
 
        The old house wasn't town-fancy like Grandma’s sister’s place in Thorn Grove.  It rested on piles of stones instead of a concrete foundation, so the dogs could find a cool place to sleep. But not high enough for me to crawl in with them, those summers I used to spend on the farm. 

        Bedrooms stuck out all around downstairs, and there were two more bedrooms upstairs, but I never slept upstairs.  One door opened onto the dark, spidery attic.  My cousins told me the Wampus Cat lived there, and I believed them.

        Even with the windows propped open, the house was close and warm.  In that August heat, most of us would have chosen the yard.  But Grandma was past choosing, so we sat with her in the parlor and stirred up what breeze we could with hand-held fans.

        "Maybe Fayrene's right."  Mama looked thoughtful.  "Maybe Cecil has earned a rest."  
 
        "I'll give Fayrene this," Aunt Cassie said.  "He does shave more often." 
 
        I still couldn't call her "Aunt Fayrene" like I did Aunt Vi and Aunt Cassie.  My real aunts had married Mama's brothers before I was born, and they were Mama's best friends and school pals before that.  Fayrene had only been in the family for a little over a year. 

        Before Fayrene, when Uncle Cecil lived mostly at Grandma's house, his khakis smelled of lye soap and sunshine.  Since Fayrene, he smelled more of cologne.  He laughed a lot when she sat in his lap, but the things they said to each other didn't sound funny to me.  I wondered what he found so appealing about her, what with that hairy wart on her cheek and those little black eyes.

        If Uncle Cecil hadn't fallen out of that apple tree and broken his arm, he might never have met Fayrene.  She was the only nurse at the clinic when they took him into town.  She must have liked fixing things, because as soon as she and Uncle Cecil had settled into the little house by the spring branch and his arm bone mended, that’s when she set about curing him of his old habits, too.

        Before Fayrene, he and I used to sit together on the back of his pickup and watch the night sky.  He'd dangle his grasshopper legs off the tailgate with me snugged up cross-legged beside him.  Those nights the sky loomed so close and full of stars it was like we had our own black-velvet-lined treasure chest loaded with diamonds. 

        Uncle Cecil would point his bony finger at the different constellations and tell me their names and the stories about them.  He said the ancients thought of the Milky Way as the milk from Hera's breast spilled across the sky.  In winter he showed me how to find the three bright stars in Orion's belt, and how Betelgeuse and Rigel formed the hunter's shoulder and knee.  In summer he pointed out the red star Antares, burning in the heart of the great Scorpion.  And in fall he helped me to see the winged horse Pegasus, who gave flight to the nine daughters of Memory -- the Muses.

        "Drink deep or taste not the Pierian Spring," he said one autumn night when he got to the winged horse. 

        "What's that?" I asked.

        He spat on the ground and turned to look at me, his eyes alight with pleasure. 

        "In the mountains of Pieria where the Muses lived," he said, "Pegasus touched the ground with his hoof one day and fresh water gushed out.  After that, anyone who drank from the waters of that Pierian spring became inspired with poetry."

        Uncle Cecil must have drunk real deep of that spring, because he quoted reams of poetry to anyone who would listen.  And I loved to listen. 

        I remember my favorite day.  We were picking beans in his truck patch down in the river bottoms.  Grandma's farm had over eleven hundred acres and stretched from above the bluffs, where the big house sat, all the way down to the river where rich black soil could grow anything, including oil.  I turned fifteen that summer, and out there among the bean rows that day Uncle Cecil recited the whole of "The Lotos-Eaters" just for me. 

        Every so often a truck roared by, loaded with German prisoners of war, their yellow hair flying, on their way to clear out trees to make way for the new lake.  For each truck, Uncle Cecil paused, took a sip from his thermos, and watched.  Then he plunged back into Tennyson's saga of Odysseus and his men bewitched and imprisoned on Circe's island.

        By the time he got to "Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel," we had abandoned the rows of Kentucky Wonders and were sitting under the old pear tree in the middle of the garden.  I came back to the big house that evening with a wicked sunburn and my tin bucket only half-filled with beans. 

        When I told Grandma about the Pierian Spring, she said without looking up from her darning that Cecil drank deep of much stronger stuff than spring water.  I think Fayrene won Grandma's approval when she weaned Uncle Cecil from his thermos.  Grandma said she appreciated Fayrene's practical nature.

        A large-boned woman, Fayrene was strong enough to nurse Grandma through her final illness, and practical enough to know when the rest of the family should be notified.  We had all arrived in time to tell Grandma goodbye.  And Fayrene knew how to tie Grandma's jaw shut so her mouth wouldn't fall open in a death grin.  Aunt Cassie said there was something insensitive about the way Fayrene handled Grandma's body.
 
        "Hard to believe that was just yesterday," she said. 

        Aunt Vi said, "You know what she has Cecil doing over there, don't you."

        Uncle Grover tamped the tobacco down in his pipe.  "Yeah.  She has him helping her in her new enterprise.  Last time I came out here, she wanted to show me how she grows worms."  He shook his head. "I never saw anybody get so excited about worms."

        Aunt Vi wrinkled her nose. "Why on earth would anyone want to raise worms?"

        Uncle Grover struck a match on the sole of his shoe and sucked the flame into the tobacco till the pipe's bowl glowed.  "Our new sister-in-law figures that some day soon folks'll want to buy lots all along the bluffs for fishing camps.  And then she'll make a killing selling bait." 

        Yawning, Aunt Vi said that just showed how coarse Fayrene was.  Then she patted Uncle Pete on the shoulder and left for bed.  Soon Aunt Cassie followed her. 

        I fought back sleep, determined to see the vigil through to the end. 

        When their wives were gone, Uncle Pete tapped Uncle Grover on the arm and said, "Wonder if Cecil has belly-ached to Fayrene yet about that snipe hunt we took him on when we were kids."  Tears of laughter pushed up in Uncle Pete's eyes, and his hand shook as he pulled a sack of Bull Durham from his shirt pocket and arranged a cigarette paper between his pudgy fingers.  "Ol' Cecil sat all night up in that tree with a bag in his hand, calling, 'Here, snipe, snipe, sni-i-ipe!'  He didn't realize it was a joke."  
 
        Uncle Grover nodded, grinning.  "That was kind of mean of us.  But we'd all been through it ourselves.  Mother didn't see the humor in it though.  Fixed her baby a special breakfast when he dragged himself home sniveling and shivering."

        "Did you get a whipping?" Mama asked.

        Uncle Grover glanced over at the casket. "If she didn't punish us, she probably should have."

        Whenever Uncle Cecil brought up grudges he'd nursed since childhood, like that snipe hunt, or the time Pete pushed him out of the swing, or when Grover swiped his harmonica -- and while I was there he mentioned those times more than once -- Grandma would say, "Oh, Cecil, it's high time you put all that away.  Everyone else has grown up since then."  Would Fayrene listen to those complaints now that Grandma was gone?

        I got up and walked over to the screen door.  In the warm night I could hear crickets, but still felt no breath of air.  The windmill stood sentinel, hushed of its creaks and clangs.  Restless, I wandered around the parlor.  The casket sat propped between two ladder-back chairs by the Victrola.  That Victrola had filled many an idle afternoon for me.  I ran my hand over its dark wood lid. 

        I loved to crank up that machine and play "Big Rock Candy Mountain" and "Barnacle Bill the Sailor."  The records were thick and heavy and tinny-sounding.  A whole collection of them lay on shelves below the turntable.  I wondered if Grandma might prefer a little music to all the talk.  Knowing her peace-loving nature, I figured she probably didn't appreciate their bad-mouthing Fayrene.  Or anybody else, for that matter. 
 
        "I wonder why this isn't called the music room instead of the parlor," I said.  "Her piano and Victrola are both in here."

        The Baldwin upright stood silent by the screen door with Grandma's pewter lamp burning on top of it.  Grandma had decided not to have electricity run to the farmhouse when Rural Electrification came through.  Her lamps gave off the familiar and comforting odor of burning kerosene.  Uncle Pete hefted himself up from his chair and turned the wick down low.  We couldn't see each other so clearly then as we sat in the soft shadows.

        Mama recalled how Grandma used to play that piano with her apron spread across the keys to amuse her children.  When she said that, I thought of Uncle Cecil reciting from "The Lotos-Eaters” -- There is sweet music here that softer falls/ Than petals from blown roses on the grass.
 
        It was hard to believe Grandma wouldn't sit down to her piano ever again, or get up in the morning to make biscuits on her wood range.  Earlier that evening Aunt Cassie had brewed up a pot of coffee on that range.  Every now and then one of us would go to the kitchen for a refill, or get a flashlight and make a run to the privy.  Mainly they just talked about their childhood and I listened.  I like to think that Grandma was listening, too.

          Uncle Pete leaned back in his chair.  "Remember what we used to get for birthdays?" he asked.

        "I don't remember getting much of anything," Mama said.

        "Me neither."  Uncle Grover stared at the bowl of his pipe.

        "Well, we did," Uncle Pete said.  "It was a potato horse with toothpick legs.  She used to fold a brand new handkerchief so it made a saddle blanket with pockets for a nickel, a dime, and a penny.  And when it was your birthday, that's what you found by your plate at the table.  Never anything different.  She treated us all the same."

        "Now I remember," Mama said.

    Uncle Grover struck another match and slipped the stem of his pipe in under his mustache, then pulled it out and stared at Mama while the match burned.  "You mean you never got anything special?  I always thought she loved you best." 

        "No," Mama said.  "Just like the rest of you -- a potato and a hankie."

        They fell silent for a few moments.

        Uncle Pete broke the silence. "I wish Mother had let us take her to the hospital. Maybe something could have been done."

        Uncle Grover said, "Old Doc Collins was all she'd permit on the place."

        Mama looked up.  Her eyes were round and blue like Grandma's.  And her short dark bob was streaked with white.  "Doc Collins?  Is he still around?"

        "It took two of us to help the old codger up the steps," Uncle Grover said.  "He's had a stroke.  He was almost as bad off as Mother.  He sat on the end of her bed, and they talked about how to make lettuce head in January."

        Uncle Pete shook his head.  "Cecil said the old doc had learned all his medicine from The Reader's Digest."

        Mama dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, blew her nose, then took a long sip of coffee.  "I think Mother was a closet Christian Scientist.  I caught her once, sitting on the edge of her cot reading the Monitor."

        I remembered the times Grandma had told me to "hold a good thought."  Did she find that in the Monitor?  I remembered how distressed she was when her children bickered and fought.  As I listened, I began to see why Mama always looked for the good in people. 

        I had always liked Uncle Cecil best, because he was there on the farm, and he paid attention to me.  But sitting up with Grandma's body I got closer to these other uncles than ever before.  I could understand then why Mama, their only sister, loved them, flaws and all. Not that she didn’t love Uncle Cecil, too.  He was her baby brother. These guys were sweet and warm and funny.  I liked the clean male smell of my uncles that night in their starched shirts, and the fragrance of Uncle Grover's Prince Albert pipe tobacco.
 
        I had my own special memories.  My own feelings about Grandma.  I loved watching her work and helping when she'd let me -- waving the flies away while she churned, or cutting the biscuits on the floured board, or turning the crank on the clothes ringer.  And when the chores were done, I'd work jigsaw puzzles with her and Uncle Cecil by lamplight. 
 
        That big house and the land around it had been heaven for me every time Mama brought me there.  I'd step out of her car onto a patch of stickers and would have spent the rest of my summer happily standing on one bare foot picking stickers out of the other just to be there. 

        I loved the sunset when Grandma sat on her stoop and recorded in her journal the events of the day -- who went where, who visited, how many pieces she washed or ironed, how many Mason jars filled and put in the cellar.  Sort of an evensong. 

        After Grandma died, Mama sat on that stoop and wrote the last entry.  It shook her pretty hard to do it, but it seemed proper to record Grandma's passing and write "Finis."  The men didn't understand how important that was, but Aunt Vi and Aunt Cassie approved.  They all had another good cry.    
                
        In the morning the hearse came and led the funeral parade to the old cemetery west of town.  Grandma had been very private about her religious beliefs.  She had requested no service.    There had been no time for flowers except a few scraggly sprays and a big juice can of cornflowers and daisies brought by a neighbor.  Something about the smell of dead grass roots in country dust will always remind me of Grandma's gravesite.

        When we drove back to the house, we found the dining table loaded with food.  People from all around, some from as far as Thorn Grove and McKinney, followed us back from the cemetery to offer condolences. 

        Fayrene smiled and visited for a few minutes, then looked edgy.  I heard her whisper to Uncle Cecil, "Who are these people? I'm ready for all of them to go home so we can get down to family business."

        Uncle Cecil said, "Now, honey, they've come a long way.  They'll be gone soon enough."

        After that, Fayrene stood grimly by till they had all talked a bit and eaten a bite and left.

        But the moment the screen door touched the heel of the last departing guest Fayrene insisted that the grownups gather in Grandma's bedroom just off the kitchen.  It was a tight squeeze.  Grandma had not chosen one of the big well-furnished bedrooms.  She slept on a cot by a south window with no curtain.  She had long since taken down all the lace curtains in the house.  Dust catchers, she called them.  She had rested her head on a salt pillow.  Said it kept her cooler than a feather one.  
        A mahogany wardrobe stood at one end of the narrow room.  Uncle Cecil opened the mirrored door.  There, neatly arranged, hung her calico housedresses ordered from the Sears catalogs.  Long sleeves for winter, short for summer.  And on a shelf beside them, her simple blue-checked aprons with short-brimmed bonnets that she made on her treadle sewing machine.  

        Along the long wall opposite the cot her keepsake trunk waited like a sleeping turtle.  I had always wondered just what she might keep in it, given how practical she was.  Extra long-handle underwear maybe?
 
        "What are you all waiting for?" Fayrene asked.  She pushed past the others and undid the clasps on the metal-banded humpback trunk.  "She kept all her crap in here.  That's probably where she put her will -- and the lease for that well down by the river."

        Uncle Grover stepped forward to raise the lid.  Uncle Pete took the other side.  They pulled the trunk out from the wall so the top could be opened fully.  Smell of old cedar mixed with a faint perfume rose up when the lid creaked open. 

        Mama hung back, clutching a damp handkerchief in her fist, while her brothers and their wives crowded around the trunk.

        "I don't understand you all," she said, the circles under her eyes darker than usual.  "We left her at the cemetery only an hour or so ago.  I feel like —- like we're invading her privacy."

        "Don't be silly, Nan.  Dead's dead."  Fayrene didn't even look up when she said it.

        Aunt Cassie peered into the trunk. "Isn't that just like your mother?  Look what neat bundles she's made."

        "And look," Aunt Vi said, picking up one item.  "She's tied them with little satin ribbons.  Here, this one's for you, Grover.  That's her handwriting on the tag."

        Fayrene stepped in and scooped up the rest of the bundles.  "The sooner we get this taken care of, the sooner we can find the will," she said, handing a package to each of us.

        My box contained the remains of my old doll.  I had forgotten it till I saw what Grandma had written on the tag -- "Rapunzel."  The cord that had held Rapunzel's parts together had long since disintegrated and her painted hair had rubbed off.  Underneath the torso lay a book Grandma had read to me years before -- Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. 

        I sat by the window on her cot and found the verse she always read aloud when time came for me to go home to Mama.  I could hear Grandma's voice from far in the past saying, To house and garden, field and lawn,/The meadow-gates we swung upon,/To pump and stable, tree and swing,/Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

        For each of her children there was a memento of childhood -- a school program, a theme, a poem, a certificate of merit, a handwriting certificate.
 
        "She was as sentimental as the rest of you Tates," Fayrene said.  "Now I know where you all got it.  It's high time this family learned how to live in the real world."  When she bent over the trunk, the navy-blue rayon of her funeral dress stretched taut over her behind, exposing the tops of her stockings where the garter-belt fastened.  She dug around in the bottom of the trunk like she was searching for a fat worm.  "Now where did she hide that will?"

        Mama put out her hand to stop Fayrene from disarranging Grandma's things, but Fayrene brushed it aside as if it were a pesky fly.  She found the will and the lease under a layer of Grandma's personal items -- long pale blue gloves that Grandma had worn at her wedding, the certificate from the music conservatory where she learned to play the piano, her valedictory speech from the academy in Thorn Grove.
 
        I picked up a sepia photo that Fayrene had thrown out onto the cot.  A young woman in a Gibson Girl dress and jaunty little hat, her cheek resting against a fake Greek pillar, looked out at the camera with familiar eyes -- like Mama's.  I had not realized until then that Grandma had been a town girl before her marriage.
  
        With Mama's memento came a list and a letter asking her to distribute the rest of Grandma's personal things and house furnishings.  The piano would go to Uncle Pete's girl who showed some musical promise.  The Victrola and records to me.  The brass bed to Aunt Cassie.  The list was so long Mama didn't read all the way through it, but stood with eyes brimming, watching Fayrene.

        Fayrene scanned Grandma's will, with Uncle Cecil studying it over her shoulder. 

        "She's named Cecil executor and says he's to get the big house in payment for his trouble."  Fayrene had a triumphant gleam in her eye.  She turned to Mama and said, "Nan, you'd better get started with that list."

        Mama looked up, her face full of anger.  "I couldn't possibly do that now," she said.  "I'll come back in a couple of months and take care of that.  I've just lost my mother."

        The hair in the wart on Fayrene's cheek twitched like a rat's whisker.  She grabbed the list out of Mama's hand and said, "Cecil and I will be moving up here right away.  If he's to handle the estate, we need to clear out all this junk.  Don't you worry.  I'll take care of this.  First thing I'm going to do is get electricity in here.  You can't run a business without power."
 
        And that was that.  Fayrene closed the trunk, and everyone went toward their rooms to pack for home.  They did pause in the empty parlor to look at each other, too stunned to speak.

        I had to get out of that house.  I changed my ankle-strap sandals for loafers, whispered goodbye to Mama, and hiked over to the bluffs.  Looking down, I could see a field of hay bales waiting to be loaded onto trucks and hauled to higher ground.  I thought of Odysseus's men who saw the gleaming river seaward flow . . . and in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep.

        I watched the river slide past the oil derrick and make a red streak into the maw of the new lake.  The lake's waters would soon swallow up not only the river but half the farm.  Before long its searching fingers would creep up into all the little creeks and valleys and blot out their fresh springs in an indifferent flood.

        I looked up, and for a moment in a wisp of cloud I thought I saw a horse's wings.  But the illusion soon dissolved into the relentless sky.

*     *     *

Biographical Note: Barbara Fryrear’s work has been published in Windhover, Duck Soup, CCWriter, several issues of New Texas, The Texas Poetry Calendar and the first issue of Wild Plum. She received the Carl Award for poetry, and is looking for an agent for her novel about ancient Crete. She graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with honors in history from the University of Texas in Austin in 1949.  Now a Life Member of the Trinity Writers’ Workshop, Barbara lives on an acre in Irving, Texas, occasionally getting up from the computer to feed the feral cats and birds, trying to keep them sorted out, and looking for her glasses. Some day she will find time to go through her grandmother’s journals and old family letters to which she has fallen heir.