Fielder

I’d been planning to visit Aunt Polly for months.                                    

But you know how it is. I was buying a house and selling a house and moving, and there was always something I needed to do.

Probably there is someone like this in your life.

So you understand how it was.

Her real name was Wanda, but she was Polly to her two brothers and three sisters and all her nieces and nephews. I looked at her still form in the casket on Thursday and thought that she should be laughing.

She was always laughing. When she and my mom and Mom’s twin, Fannie, and their sister Jo Ann got together, no one really listened to the others. They all talked at once, and everybody laughed.

My cousins Nancy and Sandra and I used to sit around a big table with all of them and play a card game called Spoon. I don’t remember much about the card game, but the object was that when you found a certain combination of cards in your hand, you tried to sneak a tablespoon off the table.

It was easy for us cousins to win because all those sisters just got to talking and forgot about the spoon.

Polly worked at Camp Howze in Gainesville during the war and she met a soldier, a Yankee, named Sherwood. He called her Wanda.

He was a bit stuffy for us Texas kids. He worked in a newspaper advertising office and wore a suit to work. Our dads were county road hands and farmers. But he was nice in his Yankee way.

They hadn’t been married too many years when my grandmother, Flossie, came to live with them. All the grandkids called her Bossie, and the name fit her quite well.

Bossie and Sherwood didn’t get along. Bossie didn’t think much of most men, having been left with six small children by a philandering husband before child support was mandatory. And she didn’t think much of Yankees, either.

So Polly lived in a continuing feud between the two, who constantly sniped at each other. Polly just laughed and pretended they were joking.

They had one son, Jimmy, who was my age and who loved to torment me as a child. We laugh about that now.

Mom, younger even than her twin by a few minutes, was the first sister to die, and then my Aunt Jo Ann. Polly and Fannie remained in Sherman, both of them widows, and they got together often and chatted and laughed. Last year we surprised Polly with a birthday party, and all the cousins were there.

And I swore I’d visit her often. I really did love her, you know. And I meant to. But it didn’t happen. And when I heard that she’d died, I was so sorry that it was too late. Our excuses, in time, catch up with us.

After the service, standing in the cemetery with all my cousins, we talked about how we’d grown older and we were now the elder generation. My cousin Nancy looked down at my high heels.

“You have a tissue stuck to the bottom of your shoe,” she said.

“At least it’s not hanging out of my underpants,” I shot back, and we all giggled, unmindful of the casket standing a few feet away.

“I just can’t take you anywhere,” my brother said, shaking his head.

The casket was still and quiet sitting there, waiting to be lowered into the grave.

But somewhere, I swear, I could hear Aunt Polly laughing.