In the Traces

Today Mr. Hylton will bring his truck Aunt Minerva’sto haul Guernsey milk cows away. She sits in an oak chair at her kitchen window, hulling peas. In her lap she’s placed a newspaper and a white enamel bowl. A breeze from the open window lifts the gauze curtains against her cheek. She snaps the pods and the peas whisper into the bowl. She drops the hulls on the newspaper.

My mother stands at the kitchen sink. She has drawn water, and now she empties a pail of new potatoes into the sink. They are round and pallid with pale eyes. She’s preparing the new potatoes and peas as a treat for me, home from my first year at college. She runs more water over the potatoes.

When the water stops I no longer hear the whisper of the peas. Aunt Minerva is looking out the window, her hands limp in the white bowl. A lock of silver hair has come free from the combs of her bun. On the breeze is the fragrance of mown hay.

Aunt Minerva begins to keen. Her moans rise from her chest, hardly audible over the sound of the breeze. When the moaning grows louder, my mother turns and says, “Aunt Minnie, don’t you believe Minitree sleeps with the angels?”

Aunt Minerva nods and wipes the back of her hand on her face. Her fingers are gnarled with arthritis.

“I know he does,” Aunt Minerva says. “Hit’s a better place. I just miss him so.” She sighs and closes her eyes.

Two weeks ago my cousin Minitree was killed in an accident. We were helping my uncles put up hay on shares on a creek-bottom farm a few miles away. As we returned with a truckload of hay, we stopped in Willis for soft drinks and salted peanuts. The space for parking in front of the general store on the highway is narrow. Minitree had been hunkered down atop the load, since there wasn’t room in the cab of the truck. When he clambered down the back, he swung from the truck gate onto the highway right in the path of a passing car.

From the porch of the store I heard screeching tires and the sound of glass shattering. I turned to see Minitree’s straw hat sailing and followed the awkward arc of his body catapulting into a heap on the asphalt. There was nothing to be done.

After the sheriff came and his body was loaded in the funeral-home ambulance, my uncles and I drove together in my cousin Minitree’s pickup to Aunt Minerva’s. On the rock road we pulled up at the garage just below the house, where Minitree parked his 1951 Plymouth, a spotless cream-colored sedan he drove Aunt Minerva to church in on Sundays. He kept old quilts draped over the fenders so the chickens wouldn’t peck at their reflections.

Two hens squawked and flushed from dust holes they’d scratched under the Plymouth as my uncles opened the pickup doors and got out. They took off their caps and held them in front of their chests, motioning for me to go on ahead.

Aunt Minerva was shucking sweet corn on the front porch. She was wearing her big sun bonnet. Ears of corn were stacked on the porch floorboards. She had the silks and shucks tucked in her apron, saved for her cows at the evening milking. She smiled, seeing me walk towards the porch, and raised her hand.

“Bedford!” she called. When I didn’t respond she looked beyond me to my bareheaded uncles standing in front of Minitree’s pickup.

“Where’s?” she began, and knew. Her raised hand settled into her lap, and her chin drooped to her breast. Her face was hidden by the bonnet. She had fainted away.

Family members will say that by nature I’m reflective because my youth was lonely and uprooted. My father was a drunkard filled with wanderlust. He never held a job for long nor saw fit to remain in one place. He towed my...