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Show in my father's house/ 7 cottage, a one-room dwelling with windows on three sides and a single door facing north. It stood adjacent to the grey house; and sometimes when Grandmother needed help, she'd reach through her rear window with a cane and rap sharply on my mother's bedroom glass -- quick, impatient taps like the drumming of her fingers on the card table when she played pinochle. The door opened immediately. Grandmother stood like a tall, cool pine overlooking the compound, ignoring me. "Good morning!" my father called cheerily, and kissed her withered cheek. Still she did not smile. "How are you today, Mother? That kidney troubling you this morning?" "I'm fine, just fine," she retorted, and pressed her lips together as though irritated by his reminder of her infirmity. I waited as my father poured milk into a porcelain basin on Grandmother's bare table. On the old, dark bureau by the door was a double portrait of Grandmother and my grandfather, Byron Harvey Allred, Jr. She had been his second wife, his plural wife, married at the age of fourteen. The portrait showed she had been beautiful then, her face light and sweet and smooth as powdered sugar. My mother said we inherited our blond hair and fair skin from her. But now her hair was white and her face cragged with old hurts. Grandfather Harvey died long before I was born, and for years I tried to imagine him from that portrait on the bureau -- |
