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day might bring down upon his head.
    Ordinarily, following a commonplace delivery, from the sanctity of the pick-up hidden in the pines, Luke and Jolly watched the dumb show enacted darkly time after time, the one nervously tapping his fingers on the wheel, anxious to be gone, the other silently intent, his eyes roving from the crowd to the grave to the barren area far beyond, to the mausoleum, and back again to the ceremony. Invariably, the shudder returned to quicken Jolly’s spine, and invariably his mind turned back.
    It had been seven years since his abortive child-visit to this cemetery, the only visit he had ever made in the private sense of the word. With Luke and the girls at night or with Luke and the flowers by day, going there was what might be called purposeful, not the same as private.
     
    His private excursion to the cemetery had taken place long before Luke was known or girls were more than a bother, good, so far as anyone could tell, for throwing watermelon rinds at. Seven years ago, give a few months, when he was only nine, Jolly had formed the simple plot in his mind—a plot that he had dogged through to its end, even after the chances for its success had waned, because one does such things for one’s father no matter how great a stranger that person is.
    Jolly had wandered in from warming his plan in the morning air to ask his mother again. Maybe, he reasoned, if he asked her often enough, and directly, she would one day answer him directly before it was too late. He found her in the kitchen of the tiny house where he and she still lived, but now without Nell Ann, who that day sat cross-legged on a kitchen stool chattering and watching their mother work.
    He had approached the kitchen door, silently forming the question he must have an answer to.
    “Mama?” The word rose at the end like a question mark. “When’s Memor’l Day coming?”
    “Jolly-Bo, I told you before, it won’t be long. Mercy, Nell Ann,” she clucked to Jolly’s sister, “I never saw a child so taken by Memorial Day.”
    “I know, Mother. He’s more looking forward to that than his birthday. And them both not two weeks apart.”
    Jolly leaned, one bare foot atop the other, against the doorway of the kitchen. His attention alternated between listening to his mother and Nell Ann visit and the purply-white, fat turnip he had been frugally chewing since breakfast. He had learned some time long ago—or had been born with the knowledge—that if you used just your front teeth and scraped on a turnip or an apple it would last pretty nearly till the next meal. Only mostly his mother made him throw it away before he had finished, because he had used it for a number of other things, like ballast for his dump truck. It was a mystery to him why Mama wouldn’t allow anybody to eat anything that she figured to be dirty, even if it had only just been dropped accidentally on the floor and then picked up right quick.
    Nell Ann uncrossed her plump silk legs. She said, “Can’t you think of nothing you want for your birthday, Jolly?”
    Jolly thought wildly and squinted at the turnip. He screwed up his eyes so they would know he was really trying. But he could not think of anything. “No’m,” he said.
    Mama detoured enough from her path between the four-legged electric stove and the kitchen table to rough her hand over Jolly’s forehead and sweep back the sheaf of straw that hung there above his eyes. “Laws, I’ll hafta cut your hair today if I can find time. Tomorra sure,” she said and then passed on, her attention on the pot of turnips that sat among the faded yellow flowers of the oilcloth-topped table.
    “You sure, Jolly?”
    He watched the smoke from his sister’s cigarette coil up until it spread out flat on the yellow ceiling and writhed among the electric cords that fed from the multiple outlets in the center—from which hung a bare bulb operated by a knotted string—and then looped away in several directions like