Free My Old True Love by Sheila Kay Adams Page B

overflow.
And I’ll think of my darlin’ wherever I go.
    Well, I strove through the mountings, I strove through the main,
I strove to forget her but it was all in vain,
From the banks of old Cowhee to the mount of said brow,
Where I once’t loved her dearly, and I don’t hate her now.
    Well, I wish’t I was a turtle dove had wings and could fly.
Right now to my love’yer’s lodgings tonight I’d draw nigh,
And there in her lily-white arms I would lay there all night.
And I’d watch them little windows fer the dawning of day.
    “Sounded so much like my Pappy,” Granny said, and I could not help it, I started to cry. “Hush up,” she said, and her voice sounded light as the air. “You ain’t never been one to cry and carry on any such a-way.” I straightened right up at that. Then she said, “Drop the quilts, Larkin. I want to feel the wind on my arms and legs.”
    “Granny, it’s cold out here. Keep the quilts on.” I don’t know why I was so worried about them quilts but it was all I could think about.
    The quiet got awfully big in the long time it took her to gather up to answer. “Let them fall, Arty. Hit don’t matter no more. I feel warm as I did when I was a girl.”
    And the quilts slid off and I pulled them away from his feet and stood there with them balled up in my arms. The wind come up then and lifted her hair, worried at the hem of her nightgown, and she smiled at us. “My mammy used to tell me that they was no such thing as dying. Said we really was just born twice’t. Once to this place, then again into the t’other. Said we entered both like newborn babies. And she said just like we waited for a baby to be born in this world, they’s folks waiting fer us to be born over yonder.” And her breath kept coming out and coming out, but it was only when Larkin called her name that it rose back up and her eyes opened and she stared right at me.
    “You see to everything, Arty,” she said.
    I had such a knot of tears in my throat that I could barely say to her, “Yes, I will.”
    “Ye’ll be all right, son? Tell me.”
    “I’ll be all right, Granny. I swear.”
    And I said in a strangled voice, “No, oh, no.”
    Her eyes moved from his face and got all dreamy as they found the moon. Suddenly her eyes got big and wide and she said, “Oh, they are all here now! Pappy!”
    And with them words Sarah Elizabeth Gentry Shelton was born again.
    I T WAS FULL DAYLIGHT when Mommie stepped up on the porch of the cabin and saw the open door. She come pounding across the porch, calling “Mama? Arty? Oh, God.”
    I got up from the fireplace where I was laying a fire. “She’s gone. She went last night, or I reckon it was really this morning.”
    “Oh, Lord, have mercy on her soul,” Mommie said, then she went to crying like her heart was broke. I let her cry. Sometimes that’s the best we can do for somebody, to just let them cry.
    I had already sent Larkin to Greenberry’s to tell him and Sol to start charring out the coffin and on to tell Hattie to bring her corpse herbs. While we was waiting for him to get back, I told Mommie what had happened out there in the yard.
    “She was looking up at the moon, but her eyes weren’t seeing no moon. They was looking far off. And then I got the feeling that the yard was full of people. They was swirling all around us just for a thought, petting her and easing her somehow. And then they was just gone. Her too.”
    We just set there for a while drinking our coffee and then I said, “Well, I ain’t sure what to do next, Mommie.”
    Mommie looked at me and her eyes was as dry as dust and blue as the sky and she said, “That’s all right, honey.
I
know what to do. We’ll get through it together.”
    And she sounded so much like Granny I could not help it then, I started to cry.
    G RANNY HAD BURIED P AP on the high ridge that looked out on the whole valley of Sodom. Mommie had fussed that it was too hard a climb and Granny had said to her, “Why,