is standing outside King’s bedroom. I gasp. I don’t mean to but I didn’t expect to see her there; not only that, her hair is never down the way it is now, and I see for the first time that it reaches her stomach. She has changed already, and her nightgown is pale and translucent; dark and light flashes of her naked body shine through. I look away.
“What happened?” I ask, my eyes darting behind her.
“Oh, this lamp just fell down. I swear I didn’t even touch it, just passed next to it, and it leapt to the floor.”
“Oh,” I say. It’s my mother’s great-great-grandmother’s lamp, the only thing of Josephine’s that we own. I don’t need to examine it to see the brass is chipped.
“I’m so sorry,” Grandma says. “I can have Juanita run out tomorrow and get you another one. I’ve seen this very thing in Nordstrom.”
“No, Grandma, that’s all right. Don’t worry about it. You just surprised me is all. I’ll walk you back to bed.”
Along the way to her room, she wants to discuss each picture we pass.
“That one is my wedding day,” she says, pointing to a black-and-white eight-by-ten. “He got the jewel. All the boys in the county would wait for us by the farm entrance.”
“Oh, and I see why,” I say back, not unlike the way I might respond to a toddler.
We keep walking. When we reach the room, I watch her navigate to her bed, wait to hear her mattress creak under her. She must know I’m still there because she talks the whole while, her back to me, first about the weather and then as the bed shifts, so does the topic.
“I hope you’re not thinking about leaving,” she says in a near whisper. I almost think I’ve misheard her.
“Oh? Of course not, Grandma. We just got here. Where would I go?”
She sighs. “People have their places. Their dreams. That I know. It always seems more pleasant in somebody else’s fields. But we’re good to you here, right?”
It is an odd question, but I am still thinking about that lamp.
“The very best, Grandma,” I say.
“Good. I love you, Ava.”
“I love you too, Grandma.”
THERE WAS NO QUESTION I WOULD CHOOSE THE HAMPSHIRE—he was already seven hundred pounds, fat off sweet potatoes, milk, beets, and turnips. This last week though I’d cleaned him out with corn because it wasn’t every day your only son got married. There would have to be enough pork to feed the parish.
At Wildwood, babies weren’t swaddled in white and dipped in water as soon as their color came in, and a man and his woman didn’t jump over a broom with their mother’s blessing. Once, an aunt who wasn’t really my mother’s sister fell hard for a man across the swamps. Tom, who didn’t like to be called Master, said yes, of course, and they slept in the same cabin that night. Besides that, no attention was paid, and though we settled Resurrection in the West Alexander Parish of Southeast Louisiana over thirty years ago, I still wake up every morning in disbelief. My gratitude is not close to wringing itself out, and out of thanksgiving, I make sure to do everything Tom, who made sure we called him by his first name, wouldn’t have done. I bore and raised three children but only one of them is with me now, a son, and for him to choose a bride. Don’t get me started.
And the Hampshire is the richest swine. My husband and I started out as sharecroppers on the edge of a bluff that toed the line between Mr. Dennis’s farm and the Mississippi River marshes. At first we didn’t fare much better here than Wildwood. We’d wake every morning before the sun rose to ride the mule to work on a dirt road straight along the water’s edge. But Mr. Dennis was a gambling man, a man who swallowed whiskey straight, and it was only so long before what he had was ours, three hundred acres of cotton, corn, cane, hogs, and cattle. His workers became our workers but we didn’t think of them that way. We divided the acres into tracts and parceled them out. We became a community together: we built a church, inside that a school, then a gristmill, a cane mill, a cotton gin that ground corn too. And if we had shingles, everybody had shingles; the same went for our milk cows, and fields to garden. Now that I’m old, my people’s hands are my hands. I say that to say things have changed, and it won’t fall on me to aim the rifle right between the pig’s eyes; to hang it, slit its throat, wash it, skin it, gut it clean. I have someone to do that for me now but I’ll still make the decision, point to the black boar with the white belt around the middle, because it has to be the finest.
The door swings open, and I know it is Jericho. With his long stride he runs the way other folk walk, the way I have started to hobble, hunchbacked, but I steady myself to receive him in my arms. He is a red boy, just like his daddy, and just like my husband, and his head, hair cut tight to his scalp, reaches my waist.
“You smell like outside,” I say, examining his dusty blue overalls. There’s a hole in the knee I would have to patch up that evening.
“I’ve been playing, Grandma.”
“Hmph. Well, it’s a bath for you tonight.”
He doesn’t say a word.
“You know what I mean, don’t you?”
He still doesn’t speak. Then, “What if I don’t want them to marry?”
I tap him more than slap him, right on his shoulder.
“Lord, deliver me. We’re grateful for Eliza,” I say like I’m reciting my morning psalm. “She’s kind to you, she knows her letters, she could probably learn you some better than that teacher we pay. She’ll take good care of Major and you too.”
He pauses, sits down, takes off his wide-brimmed hat, and taps his fingers against the hickory table. I can smell the lilies in a jar in the center. I get up on instinct and I pour him some cool lemonade. I still find new mercy in the fact this house belongs to me; that the pine boards overlap to keep the rodents out; the windows swing all the way open. There’s three bedrooms, one so large I can fit two beds side by side; I have an icebox instead of ceramic barrels, and I won’t ever run out of sacks of flour or my shelves of preserved raspberries and canned tomatoes, not if I live for ten more years, which I won’t. I watch Jericho drinking like his lips are a miracle to behold. Surely my own children drank lemonade. Surely they ran in and called for me over any other, but I don’t remember it. I don’t.
“Will she take care of me?” he sets his glass down. “I ain’t her child. Pretty soon she’ll start having her own and I’ll start smelling like fried skunk.”
“What do you know about fried skunk?” I shake my head but I understand his meaning.
“It’s from one of your stories,” he says, “the one about you escaping, when you were hiding in the swamps.”
“Nah, we didn’t eat no skunks;
