On Agate Hill by Lee Smith Page B

can both stand up and walk around.
    We can come here, I said, if we ever really run away.
    We moved around in the woody dark.
    I can still smell him, Mary White said, all of a sudden.
    Who? I asked.
    That man who lived here! she said, which scared us to death so we ran down the road as fast as we could go.
    Now we walked between fences through the Big Field which is almost a hundred acres including the old orchard and the special meadow where Fannie used to have us gather sweet grass for the bureau drawers. Here the public road comes in from another direction, yet still we saw no one as we walked along to the privet hedge and Mama Maries stone gate which always stands wide open. Mama Maries house is very old and rambling, it has been added on to many times. Four huge oak trees in the front of the house have roots so high that all you have to do is lay some sticks across them for a roof, then make a carpet with moss, and then you will have a doll house. One time last summer when Mary White and me got to spend the night out there, we made five houses so our dolls could visit to and fro, and get married and die and go to church, and have a Social Life.
    We climbed up the steps and stomped on the porch, hallooing so they would hear us.
    Mama Marie is very sweet but Aunt Mitty is mean as a snake. She is not actually related to any of us, being merely Mama Maries old friend who came to visit one time about a million years ago and stayed on to help run the place after Big Papa died of a heart attack at the dinner table, falling forward into the gravy. Big Papa was a high roller. He raised trotting horses and made his own brandy and went to Congress and held parties that lasted for days. Mama Marie was just a young girl who got into a lot more than she had bargained for. But she got good at running things while he was off at Congress, and raised her children mostly by herself and with Aunt Mitty, and is beloved by all in the countryside.
    Hello , we called, stamping our boots on the porch.
    The door opened and there stood Susie, their only servant, a white woman from a good family in Raleigh which has cast her off. Mary White and I would love to know why.
    Yall come on in. Susie smiled as she took the boiled custard from us. Oh she will like that, she said. Didnt you get cold on that long walk? Lets put your coats back here to_warm up. We followed her back to the kitchen which is part of the house itself, and very old fashioned. Susie does all the cooking on the hearth, with cranes in the fireplace to hang pots and kettles on. She gave us a potato apiece, right out of the ashes. I ate mine all up plus most of Mary Whites, she eats like a little bird.
    Well now you will want to visit them, Susie said, leading us up the stairs into Mama Maries big sunny room where she has been confined forever. Mama Marie lay propped up in her lacy cap on the four-poster bed, she looks like Blanches apple doll. She is smaller every time I see her.
    You sweet girls, she said, Come sit right here and talk to me, which we did, both of us in the stuffed blue chair at the head of her bed. Her Bible sat on the table next to her knitting. Susie put a cup of boiled custard down on the table. Now what have you been doing? Mama Marie asked, and we told her all about Robert E. Lee and his weddings and the Tableaux Vivants and Uncle Junius bad health and the walk over there. Mama Marie laughed and laughed, her face all crinkled up. I swear, you girls are a tonic, she said.
    Pictures of animals, fruit, flowers and old dead people hang all around the room including one I like particularly, actually it is an embroidered picture of Mama Marie and her six sisters grouped around a table in their parlor doing various things— needlepoint, reading, playing the harp. Where are your sisters now? I asked, and she said, Gone, all gone, my darling, off into the world of light.
    She smiled peacefully, to my amazement, for my family is dead too and I am NOT peaceful. I hate it