And... I was the seventh of 13 children. Seven is God's number, you know. Sometimes I think I got love. You know the Bible says 'Out of all the fruits of the Spirit...' But I never understood them tongues. Never could speak 'em either, and when I met your Gramps and he said he was Baptist, I said, 'I reckon that'll do.'"
Sophie
I sat at the kitchen table across from her. She eats her cheese toast bird-like, picking off the bread into miniscule crumbs she feeds herself slowly, so as not to interrupt our conversation. I chug my coffee and eat my toast more duck-like, greedy.
Her house sat on a pine hill: a four-room, ivy-coated home with a concrete slab for a porch. My granny had lived there for the last 65 years, ever since she married a Baptist electrician (my Gramps) at 16.
"That night he knew he was going to die. He had been staying in that recliner for all those months he was sick. And that night he got up out of that chair, holding onto the corner of the wall—he was weak, you know—and went on to bed. And I went in there, and he started talking. And, you know, he was never a talking man, but you wouldn't know it from being there that night. He told me how to write a check, what bills we had and when they came due, where he hid his money. Then we got on to talking about old things from years ago. I fell asleep, and when I woke up, I knew he was with the Lord, which he was."
It was the only home he ever owned. Rust-encrusted license plates, the souvenirs of so many ancient automobiles, hung lopsided on tetanus-red nails from the carport's dank, mildewed walls. The carport seemed out of place: a linear, concrete, mammoth husk encased by thick woods on all sides. Ivy crept its way into the mortar. A red wooden shack, it was structurally mutated, slanted by humidity and ivy. The rotted door looked strange—a natural organism held hostage by concrete.
The shack was a graveyard of televisions and my dead sister's record player, never repaired, "Property of Scarlette Corley" labeled in blue. We were never allowed to go inside. Even after Gramps died it was an unspoken understanding that the adults and the children alike honored.
But with Scarlette dead, it's different. We find new artifacts and must mummify them immediately (most often these items are found in areas prone to inclement weather). So I was not surprised, but slightly taken aback, when Granny asked me to fetch Scarlette's record player from Gramps's work shack.
GRANNY YODELING
© 2013 Works & Days Quarterly and Jodi Page Corley