Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns

who had lost more than any of us, but also for Grandpa, for Mama, and for myself. I didn't want to visit Granny at the cemetery like Grandpa was doing. That was just her empty shell over there, whereas here I could touch things she had touched, look out on the flowering plants she had looked at, and walk through her house. Of course, it never dawned on me then that another woman was about to come in and take over.
    This had been the Toy home place ever since it was built in 1837. Granny lived here till she got married. It was still a farmhouse in 1890, when her daddy died and her stepmother went to live with a grown son, Mr. French Gordy. Granny moved back there with Grandpa and Loma, who was four years old at the time. Mama had already married, so she never lived in this house.
    A long time later, when I was telling Miss Love about the home place, she asked me what happened to all the Toy farmland.
    "Grandpa chopped it to pieces," I said. "He'd always made his livin' sellin' things, so when all that land was left on his hands, why, the only thing he knew to do with it was sell it." The railroad was finished in 1877 or around then, I explained, and with new businesses starting and folks wanting house lots close to town, the Toy farm that used to yield cotton was soon sprouting homes, outhouses, gardens, stables, and small pastures.
    Granny never questioned Grandpa's selling her land or using the money to build the brick store. But as she once admitted to me, "I looked at him kinda hard one day and said, 'Cain't we use part a-that money to make the house modrun?'" She had been cooking in the dining room fireplace—that was easier than going outdoors to the old kitchen—and she wanted to join the old kitchen to the house. So it was placed on logs and rolled close to the dining room, and what they called a "butler's pantry" was built between. While he was at it, Grandpa also bought her a new walnut bedroom suit and a big iron coal-burning stove. He put in a nice new privy, and had a new well dug right by the back porch so you didn't have to go in the yard to draw water.
    But that was the last time he ever put a dime into improvements.

    Now that Granny was dead, you'd think he'd ask the Lord to forgive him for not letting her have plumbing, electricity, and a telephone. But I doubted he could repent of that. He had skimped so long to get ahead, he didn't even notice how stingy he was—something like the way my daddy had gotten everything wholesale through the store for so long that he didn't notice how much he spent anymore; just noticed how much he saved over retail. When Grandpa wouldn't even put in one bathroom, my daddy had put in two—one on the porch upstairs and another on the porch near the kitchen. The same year, Papa replaced our old-fashioned white picket fence with a fancy iron one and set up the iron stag between the pittosporum bush and the elaeagnus.
    Well, so Granny had died without ever getting much she wanted. But she had sixty varieties of roses, and most everybody in Cold Sassy was beholden to her for nursing a relative back to health or laying out the body for burial.
    If she'd been a man, Granny Blakeslee would of made a dandy doctor or undertaker, either one.

    One thing I got onto that morning, with the house full of Granny and empty of her at the same time, was the notion that she'd of hated dying so plain.
    Like doctors and undertakers, she really told good dying stories. There wasn't a grown person in Cold Sassy who couldn't pass away the time after Sunday dinner by recollecting who'd died of what when, but Granny was the only one I ever heard be interesting about it.
    Just for instance, her aunt Beppy—the one they say had the power of levitation—died with typhoid fever. That by itself wasn't enough to mention. Lots of folks died of the typhoid. But Beppy died at seventeen, on her wedding day. "They give her Bible to Mr. Billy," Granny would say.
    She used to tell about a Confederate soldier