While my grandparents, she clutching the baby with one hand and the rattling egg basket with the other, jogged along on the spring seat, Winnie, Bea, and little Ned, the dead Agatha’s children, sitting along the tailgate with their legs dangling, were flung from side to side and bounced up and down like Mexican jumping beans. The Ordways were going into town, all except Ned, who at two going on three had never yet been taken, and all were dressed for the day, my grandmother in her good green calico, my grandfather in fresh faded overalls and a collarless shirt fastened at the throat with a bone stud and striped like the paper that a barber wipes his razor on, the girls in sunbonnets and full, ankle-length slate-gray dresses, high-button shoes, and coarse coffee-colored cotton stockings that gave them the look of a pair of miniature nuns. Ned, towheaded, whey-faced, solemn little Ned, also wore a dress, one similar to his sisters’; in fact it had been Bea’s, to whom in turn it had come down from Winnie.
