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I knowed my cousin Ellie was gonna be mad when Macon Smith come around to the house. She didn’t have no use for Macon even when things was going right, and when Grandpa Jeremiah was fixing to die I just knowed she wasn’t gonna be liking him hanging around. Grandpa Jeremiah raised Ellie after her folks died and they used to be real close. Then she got to go on to college and when she come back the first year she was different. She didn’t want to hear all them stories he used to tell her anymore. Ellie said the stories wasn’t true, and that’s why she didn’t want to hear them.

I didn’t know if they was true or not. Tell the truth I didn’t think much on it either way, but I liked to hear them stories. Grandpa Jeremiah said they wasn’t stories anyway, they was songs.

“They the songs of my people,” he used to say.

I didn’t see how they was songs, not regular songs anyway. Every little thing we did down in Curry seemed to matter to Ellie that first summer she come home from college. You couldn’t do nothin’ that was gonna please her. She didn’t even come to church much. ’Course she come on Sunday or everybody would have had a regular fit, but she didn’t come on Thursday nights and she didn’t come on Saturday even though she used to sing in the gospel choir.

“I guess they teachin’ her somethin’ worthwhile up there at Greensboro,” Grandpa Jeremiah said to Sister Todd. “I sure don’t see what it is, though.”

“You ain’t never had no book learning, Jeremiah,” Sister Todd shot back. She wiped at where a trickle of sweat made a little path through the white dusting powder she put on her chest to keep cool. “Them old ways you got ain’t got nothing for these young folks.”

“I guess you right,” Grandpa Jeremiah said.

He said it but I could see he didn’t like it none. He was a big man with a big head and had most all his hair even if it was white. All that summer, instead of sitting on the porch telling stories like he used to when I was real little, he would sit out there by himself while Ellie stayed in the house and watched the television or read a book. Sometimes I would think about asking him to tell me one of them stories he used to tell but they was too scary now that I didn’t have nobody to sleep with but myself. I asked Ellie to sleep with me but she wouldn’t.

“You’re nine years old,” she said, sounding real proper. “You’re old enough to sleep alone.”

I knew that. I just wanted her to sleep with me because I liked sleeping with her. Before she went off to college she used to put cocoa butter on her arms and face and it would smell real nice. When she come back from college she put something else on, but that smelled nice too.

It was right after Ellie went back to school that Grandpa Jeremiah had him a stroke and Macon started coming around. I think his mama probably made him come at first, but you could see he liked it. Macon had always been around, sitting over near the stuck window at church or going on the blueberry truck when we went picking down at Mister Gregory’s place. For a long time he was just another kid, even though he was older’n me, but then, all of a sudden, he growed something fierce. I used to be up to his shoulder one time and then, before I could turn around good, I was only up to his shirt pocket. He changed too. When he used to just hang around with the other boys and play ball or shoot at birds he would laugh a lot. He didn’t laugh so much anymore and I figured he was just about grown. When Grandpa got sick he used to come around and help out with things around the house that was too hard for me to do. I mean, I could have done all the chores, but it would just take me longer.

When the work for the day was finished and the sows fed, Grandpa would kind of ease into one of his stories and Macon, he would sit and listen to them and be real interested. I didn’t mind listening to the stories when Grandpa told them to Macon because he would be telling them in the middle of the afternoon and they would be past my mind by the time I had to go to bed.

Macon had an old guitar he used to mess with, too. He wasn’t too bad on it, and sometimes Grandpa would tell him to play us a tune. He could play something he called “the Delta Blues” real good, but when Sister Todd or somebody from the church come around he’d play “Precious Lord” or “Just a Closer Walk With Thee.”

Grandpa Jeremiah had been feeling poorly from that stroke, and one of his legs got a little drag to it. Just about the time Ellie come from school the next summer he was real sick. He was breathing loud so you could hear it even in the next room and he would stay in bed a lot even when there was something that needed doing or fixing.

“I don’t think he’s going to make it much longer,” Dr. Crawford said. “The only thing I can do is to give him something for the pain.”

“Are you sure of your diagnosis?” Ellie asked. She was sitting around the table with Sister Todd, Deacon Turner, and his little skinny yellow wife.

Dr. Crawford looked at Ellie like he was surprised to hear her talking. “Yes, I’m sure,” he said. “He had tests a few weeks ago and his condition was bad then.”

“How much time he got?” Sister Todd asked.

“Maybe a week or two at best,” Dr. Crawford said.

When he said that, Deacon Turner’s wife started crying and goin’ on and I give her a hard look but she just went on. I was the one who loved Grandpa Jeremiah the most and she didn’t hardly even know him so I didn’t see why she was crying.

Everybody started tiptoeing around the house after that. They would go in and ask Grandpa Jeremiah if he was comfortable and stuff like that or take him some food or a cold glass of lemonade. Sister Todd come over and stayed with us. Mostly what she did is make supper and do a lot of praying, which was good because I figured that maybe God would do something to make Grandpa Jeremiah well. When she wasn’t doing that she was piecing on a fancy quilt she was making for some white people in Wilmington.

Ellie, she went around asking everybody how they felt about Dr. Crawford and then she went into town and asked about the tests and things. Sister Jenkins asked her if she thought she knowed more than Dr. Crawford, and Ellie rolled her eyes at her, but Sister Jenkins was reading out her Bible and didn’t make no notice of it.

Then Macon come over.

He had been away on what he called “a little piece of a job” and hadn’t heard how bad off Grandpa Jeremiah was. When he come over he talked to Ellie and she told him what was going on and then he got him a soft drink from the refrigerator and sat out on the porch and before you know it he was crying.

You could look at his face and tell the difference between him sweating and the tears. The sweat was close against his skin and shiny and the tears come down fatter and more sparkly.

Macon sat on the porch, without saying a word, until the sun went down and the crickets started chirping and carrying on. Then he went in to where Grandpa Jeremiah was and stayed in there for a long time.

Sister Todd was saying that Grandpa Jeremiah needed his rest and Ellie went in to see what Macon was doing. Then she come out real mad.

“He got Grandpa telling those old stories again,” Ellie said. “I told him Grandpa needed his rest and for him not to be staying all night.”

He did leave soon, but bright and early the next morning Macon was back again. This time he brought his guitar with him and he went on in to Grandpa Jeremiah’s room. I went in, too.

Grandpa Jeremiah’s room smelled terrible. It was all closed up so no drafts could get on him and the whole room was smelled down with disinfect and medicine. Grandpa Jeremiah lay propped up on the bed and he was so gray he looked scary. His hair wasn’t combed down and his head on the pillow with his white hair sticking out was enough to send me flying if Macon hadn’t been there. He was skinny, too. He looked like his skin got loose on his bones, and when he lifted his arms, it hung down like he was just wearing it instead of it being a part of him.

Macon sat slant-shouldered with his guitar across his lap. He was messin’ with the guitar, not making any music, but just going over the strings as Grandpa talked.

“Old Carrie went around out back to where they kept the pigs penned up and she felt a cold wind across her face. . . .” Grandpa Jeremiah was telling the story about how a old woman out-tricked the Devil and got her son back. I had heard the story before, and I knew it was pretty scary. “When she felt the cold breeze she didn’t blink nary an eye, but looked straight ahead. . . .”

All the time Grandpa Jeremiah was talking I could see Macon fingering his guitar. I tried to imagine what it would be like if he was actually plucking the strings. I tried to fix my mind on that because I didn’t like the way the story went with the old woman wrestling with the Devil.

We sat there for nearly all the afternoon until Ellie and Sister Todd come in and said that supper was ready. Me and Macon went out and ate some collard greens, ham hocks, and rice. Then Macon he went back in and listened to some more of Grandpa’s stories until it was time for him to go home. I wasn’t about to go in there and listen to no stories at night.

*  *  *  *  *

Dr. Crawford come around a few days later and said that Grandpa Jeremiah was doing a little better.

“You think the Good Lord gonna pull him through?” Sister Todd asked.

“I don’t tell the Good Lord what He should or should not be doing,” Dr. Crawford said, looking over at Sister Todd and at Ellie. “I just said that my patient seems to be doing okay for his condition.”

“He been telling Macon all his stories,” I said.

“Macon doesn’t seem to understand that Grandpa Jeremiah needs his strength,” Ellie said. “Now that he’s improving, we don’t want him to have a setback.”

“No use in stopping him from telling his stories,” Dr. Crawford said. “If it makes him feel good it’s as good as any medicine I can give him.”

I saw that this didn’t set with Ellie, and when Dr. Crawford had left I asked her why.

“Dr. Crawford means well,” she said, “but we have to get away from the kind of life that keeps us in the past.”

She didn’t say why we should be trying to get away from the stories and I really didn’t care too much. All I knew was that when Macon was sitting in the room with Grandpa Jeremiah I wasn’t nearly as scared as I used to be when it was just me and Ellie listening. I told that to Macon.

“You getting to be a big man, that’s all,” he said.

That was true. Me and Macon was getting to be good friends, too. I didn’t even mind so much when he started being friends with Ellie later. It seemed kind of natural, almost like Macon was supposed to be there with us instead of just visiting.

Grandpa wasn’t getting no better, but he wasn’t getting no worse, either.

“You liking Macon now?” I asked Ellie when we got to the middle of July. She was dishing out a plate of smothered chops for him and I hadn’t even heard him ask for anything to eat.

“Macon’s funny,” Ellie said, not answering my question. “He’s in there listening to all of those old stories like he’s really interested in them. It’s almost as if he and Grandpa Jeremiah are talking about something more than the stories, a secret language.”

I didn’t think I was supposed to say anything about that to Macon, but once, when Ellie, Sister Todd, and Macon were out on the porch shelling butter beans after Grandpa got tired and was resting, I went into his room and told him what Ellie had said.

“She said that?” Grandpa Jeremiah’s face was skinny and old looking but his eyes looked like a baby’s, they was so bright.

“Right there in the kitchen is where she said it,” I said. “And I don’t know what it mean but I was wondering about it.”

“I didn’t think she had any feeling for them stories,” Grandpa Jeremiah said. “If she think we talking secrets, maybe she don’t.”

“I think she getting a feeling for Macon,” I said.

“That’s okay, too,” Grandpa Jeremiah said. “They both young.”

“Yeah, but them stories you be telling, Grandpa, they about old people who lived a long time ago,” I said.

“Well, those the folks you got to know about,” Grandpa Jeremiah said. “You think on what those folks been through, and what they was feeling, and you add it up with what you been through and what you been feeling, then you got you something.”

“What you got Grandpa?”

“You got you a bridge,” Grandpa said. “And a meaning. Then when things get so hard you about to break, you can sneak across that bridge and see some folks who went before you and see how they didn’t break. Some got bent and some got twisted and a few fell along the way, but they didn’t break.”

“Am I going to break, Grandpa?”

“You? As strong as you is?” Grandpa Jeremiah pushed himself up on his elbow and give me a look. “No way you going to break, boy. You gonna be strong as they come. One day you gonna tell all them stories I told you to your young’uns and they’ll be as strong as you.”

“Suppose I ain’t got no stories, can I make some up?”

“Sure you can, boy. You make ’em up and twist ’em around. Don’t make no mind. Long as you got ’em.”

“Is that what Macon is doing?” I asked. “Making up stories to play on his guitar?”

“He’ll do with ’em what he see fit, I suppose,” Grandpa Jeremiah said. “Can’t ask more than that from a man.”

*  *  *  *  *

It rained the first three days of August. It wasn’t a hard rain but it rained anyway. The mailman said it was good for the crops over East but I didn’t care about that so I didn’t pay him no mind. What I did mind was when it rain like that the field mice come in and get in things like the flour bin and I always got the blame for leaving it open.

When the rain stopped I was pretty glad. Macon come over and sat with Grandpa and had something to eat with us. Sister Todd come over, too.

“How Grandpa doing?” Sister Todd asked. “They been asking about him in the church.”

“He’s doing all right,” Ellie said.

“He’s kind of quiet today,” Macon said. “He was just talking about how the hogs needed breeding.”

“He must have run out of stories to tell,” Sister Todd said. “He’ll be repeating on himself like my father used to do. That’s the way I hear old folks get.”

Everybody laughed at that because Sister Todd was pretty old, too. Maybe we was all happy because the sun was out after so much rain. When Sister Todd went in to take Grandpa Jeremiah a plate of potato salad with no mayonnaise like he liked it, she told him about how people was asking for him and he told her to tell them he was doing okay and to remember him in their prayers.

Sister Todd came over the next afternoon, too, with some rhubarb pie with cheese on it, which is my favorite pie. When she took a piece into Grandpa Jeremiah’s room she come right out again and told Ellie to go fetch the Bible.

It was a hot day when they had the funeral. Mostly everybody was there. The church was hot as anything, even though they had the window open. Some yellowjacks flew in and buzzed around Sister Todd’s niece and then around Deacon Turner’s wife and settled right on her hat and stayed there until we all stood and sang “Soon-a Will Be Done.”

At the graveyard Macon played “Precious Lord” and I cried hard even though I told myself that I wasn’t going to cry the way Ellie and Sister Todd was, but it was such a sad thing when we left and Grandpa Jeremiah was still out to the grave that I couldn’t help it.

During the funeral and all, Macon kind of told everybody where to go and where to sit and which of the three cars to ride in. After it was over he come by the house and sat on the front porch and played on his guitar. Ellie was standing leaning against the rail and she was crying but it wasn’t a hard crying. It was a soft crying, the kind that last inside of you for a long time. Macon was playing a tune I hadn’t heard before. I thought it might have been what he was working at when Grandpa Jeremiah was telling him those stories and I watched his fingers but I couldn’t tell if it was or not. It wasn’t nothing special, that tune Macon was playing, maybe halfway between them Delta blues he would do when Sister Todd wasn’t around and something you would play at church. It was something different and something the same at the same time. I watched his fingers go over that guitar and figured I could learn that tune one day if I had a mind to.