"Grandma," said everyone. "Great-grandma."
Now it was as if a huge sum in arithmetic were finally drawing to an end. She had stuffed turkeys, chickens, squabs, gentlemen, and boys. She had washed ceilings, walls, invalids, and children. She had laid linoleum, repaired bicycles, wound clocks, stoked furnaces, swabbed iodine on ten thousand grievous wounds. Her hands had flown all around about and down, gentling this, holding that, throwing baseballs, swinging bright croquet mallets, seeding black earth, or fixing covers over dumplings, ragouts, and children wildly strewn by slumber. She had pulled down shades, pinched out candles, turned switches, and--grown old. Looking back on thirty billions of things started, carried, finished and done, it all summed up, totaled out; the last decimal was placed, the final zero swung slowly into line. Now, chalk in hand, she stood back from life a silent hour before reaching for the eraser.
"Let me see now," said Great-grandma. "Let me see ..."
With no fuss or further ado, she traveled the house in an ever-circling inventory, reached the stairs at last, and, making no special announcement, she took herself up three flights to her room where, silently, she laid herself out like a fossil imprint under the snowing cool sheets of her bed and began to die.
Again the voices:
"Grandma! Great-grandma!"
The rumor of what she was doing dropped down the stairwell, hit, and s
pread ripples through the rooms, out doors and windows and along the street of elms to the edge of the green ravine.
"Here now, here!"
The family surrounded her bed.
"Just let me lie," she whispered.
Her ailment could not be seen in any microscope; it was a mild but ever-deepening tiredness, a dim weighing of her sparrow body; sleepy, sleepier, sleepiest.
As for her children and her children's children--it seemed impossible that with such a simple act, the most leisurely act in the world, she could cause such apprehension.
"Great-grandma, now listen--what you're doing is no better than breaking a lease. This house will fall down without you. You must give us at least a year's notice!"
Great-grandma opened one eye. Ninety years gazed calmly out at her physicians like a dust-ghost from a high cupola window in a fast-emptying house. "Tom ...? "
The boy was sent, alone, to her whispering bed.
"Tom," she said, faintly, far away, "in the Southern Seas there's a day in each man's life when he knows it's time to shake hands with all his friends and say good-bye and sail away, and he does, and it's natural--it's just his time. That's how it is today. I'm so like you sometimes, sitting through Saturday matinees until nine at night when we send your dad to bring you home. Tom, when the time comes that the same cowboys are shooting the same Indians on the same mountaintop, then it's best to fold back the seat and head for the door, with no regrets and no walking backward up the aisle. So, I'm leaving while I'm still happy and still entertained."
Douglas was summoned next to her side.
"Grandma, who'll shingle the roof next spring?"
Every April for as far back as there were calendars, you thought you heard woodpeckers tapping the housetop. But no, it was Great-grandma somehow transported, singing, pounding nails, replacing shingles, high in the sky!
"Douglas," she whispered, "don't ever let anyone do the shingles unless it's fun for them."
"Yes'm."
"Look around come April, and say, 'Who'd like to fix the roof?' And whichever face lights up is the face you want, Douglas. Because up there on that roof you can see the whole town going toward the country and the country going toward the edge of the earth and the river shining, and the morning lake, and birds on the trees down under you, and the best of the wind all around above. Any one of those should be enough to make a person climb a weather vane some spring sunrise. It's a powerful hour, if you give it half a chance...."
Her voice sank to a soft flutter.
Douglas was crying.
She roused herself again. "Now, why are you doing that?"
"Because," he said, "you won't be here tomorrow."
She turned a small hand mirror from herself to the boy. He looked at her face and himself in the mirror and then at her face again as she said, "Tomorrow morning I'll get up at seven and wash behind my ears; I'll run to church with Charlie Woodman; I'll picnic at Electric Park; I'll swim, run barefoot, fall out of trees, chew spearmint gum.... Douglas, Douglas, for shame! You cut your fingernails, don't you?"
"Yes'm."
"And you don't yell when your body makes itself over every seven years or so, old cells dead and new ones added to your fingers and your heart. You don't mind that, do you?"