Morning Glory by Lavyrle Spencer Page B

to auction sales and traded stuff with anybody that came along. No reason to any of it, it seemed.” Abruptly, she inquired, “You ever tasted quince? Those there are quince.”
    “Sour as rhubarb.”
    “Make a luscious pie, though.”
    “I wouldn’t know about that, ma’am.”
    “Bet you’d like to try one, wouldn’t you?”
    He gave her a sideward glance. “Reckon I would.”
    “Could use a little fat on them bones, Mr. Parker.”
    He leveled his eyes on the quince trees and tugged his hat brim so low it cut off his view of the horizon. Thankfully, she changed the subject.
    “So where’d you eat ‘em, then?”
    “California.”
    “California?” She peered up at him with her head cocked. “You been there?”
    “Picked fruit there one summer when I was a kid.”
    “You see any movie stars?”
    “Movie stars?” He wouldn’t have guessed she’d know much about movie stars. “No.” He glanced at her. “You ever seen any?”
    She laughed. “Now where would I see movie stars when I never even seen a movie?”
    “Never?”
    She shook her head. “Heard about ‘em from the kids in school, though.”
    He wished he could promise to take her sometime, but where would he get the money for movies? And even if he had it, there was no theater in Whitney. Besides, she avoided the town.
    “In California, the movie stars are only in Hollywood, andit gets cold in parts where there are mountains. And the ocean’s dirty. It stinks.”
    She could see she had her work cut out for her if she was to get that pessimism out of him. “You always so jolly?”
    He would have tugged his hat brim lower, but if he did he’d be unable to see where he was walking. “Well, California isn’t like what you think.”
    “You know, I can’t say I’d mind if you’d smile a little more often.”
    He tossed her a sullen glance. “About what?”
    “Maybe, Mr. Parker, you got to find that out for yourself.” She let the baby slip from her hip. “Lord, Thomas, if you ain’t gettin’ heavier than a guilty conscience, I don’t know. Come on, take Mommy’s hand and I’ll show you somethin’.”
    She showed him things Will would have missed: a branch shaped like a dog’s paw—“A man could whittle forever and not make anything prettier,” she declared. A place where something tiny had nested in the grass and left a collection of empty seed pods—“If I was a mouse, I’d love livin’ right here in this pretty-smellin’ orchard, wouldn’t you?” A green katydid camouflaged upon a greener blade of grass—“Y’ got to look close to see he’s makin’ the sound with his wings.” And in the adjacent woods a magnolia tree with a deep bowl, head-high, where its branches met, and within that bowl, a second tree taken root: a sturdy little oak growing straight and healthy.
    “How’d it get there?” Donald Wade asked.
    “How d’ you think?”
    “I dunno.”
    She squatted beside the boys, gazing up at the piggyback trees. “Well, there was this wise old owl lived in these woods, and one evenin’ at dusk he came by and I ast him the same thing. I says to him, how’d that li’l old oak tree get t’ growin’ in that magnolia?” She grinned at Donald Wade. “Know what he told me?”
    “Uh-uh.” Donald Wade stared at his mother, mystified. She dropped to her rump and sat like an Indian, stripping bark from a stick with her thumbnail as she went on.
    “Well, he said there was two squirrels lived here, yearsago. One of ‘em was a hard worker, spent every day totin’ acorns into that little pocket in the tree up there.” She pointed with the stick. “The other squirrel, well, he was lazy. Laid on his back on that limb over there” —she pointed again, to a nearby pine—“and made a pillow out of his tail and crossed his legs and watched the busy squirrel gettin’ ready for winter. He waited until there was so many nuts they was about to start spillin’ over the edge. Then when the hardworking squirrel