Sunday Morning
I left my house a little before one in the morning and drove down the mountain and across the Piedmont with the radio off. I pulled into Lowell’s driveway at ten till five.
Grandma was sitting just inside the storm door in a kitchen chair, dressed, her pocketbook in her lap, her Bible on top of it. She had been sitting there, she told me later, since three.
She had on her navy dress with the white collar. It is the dress she has worn to Homecoming for as long as I can remember. She had put her earrings back in.
Lowell was standing in the kitchen in his undershirt with a cup of coffee he was not drinking. He did not come to the door. He just stood there by the counter where we could see him.
“Mama,” he said, “you’re not going.”
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My grandmother stood up. It took her a minute, with one hand on the door frame, but she did it without my help.
“I’m going home to church, son,” she said. “I’ll be back tonight.”
She did not raise her voice. She has never raised her voice in her life. She just said it the way you say the sun is coming up.
Then she took my arm and walked out the front door, past him, down the three porch steps, across the wet grass to my truck.
Lowell followed us as far as the porch. He stood there with his coffee while I helped her up into the seat.
When I came back around the truck, he said one thing to me.
“If she falls, that’s on you, Ivy.”
“Then I’ll be standing next to her when she does,” I said. “That’s all I’m asking for, Uncle Lowell. To be standing next to her.”
He did not answer. He went back in the house and shut the door.
The Mountain
My grandmother did not sleep one minute of that drive. I had brought a pillow for her and a quilt in case she got cold, and she never touched either one.
She told me about Granddaddy asking her to marry him at Homecoming in 1953, out behind the oaks, with a piece of chess pie in his hand because he was too nervous to put it down.
By the time we started up the Blue Ridge, the sun was full up and the morning was clear and bright. The hills went blue in layers behind each other.
“Look there,” she said, as we crossed the first creek. “That’s Brush Creek.” Then the next one, and the next. She named every creek on that road, and she did not miss a single one.
When we turned off the paved road onto the gravel, she put her hand flat on the dashboard like she was steadying herself, and I saw that her eyes were wet.
“I didn’t think I’d see it again,” she said.
“You were always going to see it again, Grandma.”
“No, honey,” she said. “I wasn’t. Not unless somebody brought me.”