Fifteen Dollars

“Wilgus, when you were little, did anybody tell you much about your greatgranddaddy, old Electious Whitt?”

“I know he owned the whole head of Trace Fork at one time.”

“He surely did. Did anybody tell you much about his wife Opal that died?”

I actually knew a great deal about Opal and Electious. Most of what I knew about them had come from Aunt Jenny herself in my growing up years. But of course, when she asked me if I remembered much about them, I lied and said not much.

Jenny sipped from her plastic tumbler, then leaned back against the pillows on her bed.

“Well, I’ll tell you. That Opal was the dearest little woman that ever was. She was my grandmother, you see, my mother’s mother, which makes Opal and Electious your great-grandmother and father. I wish you could have known her, Wilgus. Everybody that knew Opal loved her. I was just a little girl in the last years of her life, but I loved her to pieces. She was a very sweet and dedicated Christian woman. She was saintly, so good-hearted and generous, and hard working too. She wasn’t big as a minute, but she could work from daylight till dark and never slow down. And it was real work, too. You’ve seen how my mother worked, what all she could do. Opal was just like that. If you want to know where your Grandma learned how to work, it was from her mother Opal. She was a wonderful mother. She bore Electious eight children that lived and every one of them turned out pretty good if I have to say so myself.”

“She sounds like a real strong person.”

“Yes. But the thing was, people thought Opal was so enduring, it didn’t occur to any of us that her health could go bad. But all of a sudden, in 1922, she came down with the heart dropsy and in just a few weeks she died. She was fifty-three years old.”

“That’s my age now,” I said.

“Honey, you’re young. Opal was young. It tore us all to pieces when she died. It about killed Granddaddy. For months after Opal’s funeral, it was like he didn’t care if he lived or died. He got so he wouldn’t do a thing for himself hardly. He wouldn’t even eat if somebody didn’t hand him a plate of food. All he wanted to do was sit on the porch of their old house and stare out at the world.”

“That’s a sad picture.”

“It was. It was like when Opal died, he wanted to die too and go be with her. It was all the family could do to keep him from going right on to glory. I was just a little thing when all this happened, eight or so years old, but I remember it well. I remember my mother being awful worried about her daddy. She and some of her sisters and brothers tried to look after him, help maintain the place, keep the weeds cut back and fix a few things. But they couldn’t keep the old home place up the way Opal had. That house and yard pert near went to seed. It got to be the most lonesome place in the world up there.”

Jenny paused to clear her throat. I picked up her water cup and offered it to her, but she waved it away. She pointed to the Kleenex box on the table by her bed, and I handed it to her. When she had wiped her lips with a tissue, she set the box on her lap and resumed talking.

“Since we lived the closest to Granddaddy, Mommy and us kids saw him every day. Every day Mommy would fix a dinner for Electious, and she or one of us young’uns would carry it up to him. There was a haul road up there, but we always took the path through the woods, it didn’t take but a few minutes to get there. I was...