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3 My daddy had them little strokes before he died. One night he come in from the field and wasn't himself, come to the table with his shirt off—the same man that always liked to wash up good before supper and might even put on a clean shirt ifhe had one. That evening when he sat down, he just started to eat right off, never said the blessing. That's what scared Mama sobad. Daddy didn't remember none of it the next day, even laughed about what a fool he must have looked like, sitting there barechested at the table. But you could tell it got off with him. He grabbed Mama and wrestled her into a hug, said she knew he was a crazy man when she married him, now didn't she? They held onto each other for a little bit, standing like that, like a couple between dances waiting for another slow tune to start up. But then when Daddy walked on ahead of me out towards the field I seen how his right foot was lazy, and I yelled out and asked him what was wrong with his leg, but he didn't answer. My daddy was a quiet man all his life. He used to say if a man talked a lot you just listen to him long enough and most likely you'll find out he don't know which end of the mule to feed sugar to. What words my daddy did use, he was big on using right. He didn't use no blue language, not unless it was called for, but then he knew how to turn it loose. And I remember one time I said I hated rutabagas, and he said well maybe I didn't like them much, but I didn't hate them. He said you don't go around hating vegetables like you had a grudge against them and was going to get even. Daddy couldn't read or write, and he was ashamed of it. He never tried to use a word he didn't know, and the ones he did 8 know, he thought about them a lot, trying to make sure he was right. Sometimes he asked me to look up a word for him in the big dictionary they had at school, but he made me promise not to tell nobody about it. Usually it was a word he'd heard somebody use, maybe in town or over at the store, and that it looked like everybody knew but him. I'd write down what the dictionarysaid,every bit of it, and when I brung it home, Mama would read it out loud, and sometimes it cleared things up, and sometimes it didn't. I wish I could remember some of the words now, but I can't. The early morning was my daddy's favorite part of the day. That's when he liked to sit on the front steps with a cup of black coffee, and I remember him drinking that coffee and pointing things out to me, like one time when he nodded toward the fence where a crow had lighted. "Ellis, look yonder," I remember him saying, "the sun on them wings." Then one morning he woke up and couldn't move. Had his eyes open, and he was breathing but couldn't move, and there was this awful scared look in his eyes, and that night we lost him. The day we buried him it hadn't rained in a long time and the red clay was packed hard. I went over to where they'd opened the grave, and I looked down into the hole, and I looked over at the pile of dirt beside it, and that dirt got to me. They planned to put my daddy down in the hole, and then throw dirt on top of him —all that red dirt I could see piled up—pack it down on top of him, and that's where he'd be from then on. They'd dressed him up, and they'd laid him out in a fancy box, but they planned to put him in a hole like he was a dog, so he wouldn't stink. Mama come and took me by the hand and led me away. They'd said the prayers and was fixing to lower him down, and we wasn't supposed to watch that, but they...
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