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yesterd'y—though Thou knowest if I had it to do over agin I'd hit him harder."
    Grandpa was a good shot with a pistol. He never went hunting, but he could prop a Winchester rifle on a fence and shoot into the mouth of a Coca-Cola bottle fifty feet away and not even chip the glass, except for the hole at the bottom where the bullet came out.
    I never could figure why Papa and Mama let him keep his quart jars of moonshine in the closet in our company room. At the time, Papa made and drank locust beer, and Mama made scuppernong and blackberry wines for church communion. After the Georgia legislature declared a prohibition against alcoholic beverages in 1907, Papa quit making or drinking beer—he believed in being law-abiding—and the churches started using fruit nectars instead of wine. But even before Prohibition, neither Papa nor Mama could stand whiskey-drinking.
    Yet there stood those jars of corn whiskey on our closet shelf.
    Why couldn't my daddy ask him to keep them down at the store? Or after Granny died and wasn't there anymore to disallow it, why didn't he take the stuff to his own house?
    My parents never once spoke of his drinking in front of me or Mary Toy. Acted like he just went in the company room to hitch up his suspenders or something. But I doubt they could of said anything even if he hadn't been Mama's papa and Papa's employer. Grandpa had the manner of a king or duke: when he said do or don't do something, you said yessir before you thought. And if he said he meant to do something—like keep his corn whiskey in your closet or marry Miss Love Simpson—if you couldn't say yessir, you sure-dog didn't say no sir. Not out loud.
    What I admired most was his flair for practical jokes. That was a way of life you could learn early, as I discovered when I was little bitty and Cudn Doodle told me to lick a frozen wagon wheel
and my tongue stuck to the ice. Playing jokes didn't have to stop because you got grown. Grandpa must of been twenty-five at least when he turned over the privy at the depot with a Yankee railroad bigwig in it.

    I didn't want to be like my grandfather in all ways. I thought I wanted to be like Papa, at least sometime in the distant future. But right now Grandpa was more fun than Papa and didn't worry near as much, if at all, about sin. And he was real proud of me. I was the son he never had.
    While I was still in dresses he put me to sorting nails at the store and getting out rotten apples and potatoes. By time I was seven, he let me make deliveries for him in my goat cart. It was his notion that when I got grown, he would give me an interest in the store and take me into partnership.
    It was my notion to be a farmer. Papa wanted to buy the old home place out in Banks County from his daddy and let me run it. But at the time Grandpa Blakeslee married Miss Love, I still hadn't got up the nerve to tell him my plans.
    Most folks thought, as Miss Effie Belle Tate put it, that Grandpa was "both rich and well-to-do." For sure he was one of Cold Sassy's leading merchants. Had him a big brick store with mahogany counters, beveled glass mirrors, and big colored signs for Coca-Cola, Mother's Friend (
Take to Make Childbirth Easier
), Fletcher's Castoria, Old Dutch Cleanser, McKesson and Robbins liniment, and all like that.
    I liked to look at the advertisements in the mail-order catalogues he kept by the cash register.
Manhood Restored
was my favorite:
Nerve Seeds guaranteed to cure all nervous diseases such as Weak Memory, Loss of Brain Power, Headaches, Wakefulness, Lost Manhood, Nightly Emissions, nervousness, all drain and loss of power in generative organs of either sex caused by over-exertion, youthful errors, excessive use of tobacco, opium or stimulants which lead to infirmity, consumption or Insanity. Can be carried in vest pocket. $1 per box address Nerve Seed Co., Masonic Temple, Chicago, 111.
    Grandpa had him a big sign out front over the entrance to the store. In fancy red letters outlined