Aunt Vic's lap robe was a lot prettier than ours. Hers had a long purple fringe. But Ginger didn't like the robe or the fringe. He squirmed and twisted and stood up on the seat, turning himself round and round. Aunt Vic had to sweet-talk him and rub his ears and sweet-talk him some more before he would ever curl himself up and put his head in her lap to go to sleep. We rode past Papa's new store, the cotton gin, Mister Goode's grist mill, and on toward Ash Branch. Speedy trotted along right pertly where the road was level, but at the foot of the first steep hill he slowed down. At the top of the hill was the falling-down church by the graveyard. As we came alongside the churchyard fence I was wishing Aunt Vic would stop so I could go see the little lamb on one of the tombstones. I liked that little gray lamb. Sometimes when Mama drove our buggy by the old church she let me get out and run inside the gate to pat the lamb for one quick minute. And every May, when we all gathered at the graveyard and stayed all day to chop down the weeds and nettles and to scrape away the briar vines and grass, Mama let me look at the little sheep as long as I pleased. He had about the best spot in the whole graveyard—just inside the fence, under the highest pine. There he could always rest in the shade. I glanced up at Aunt Vic and knew she wasn't going to stop. She didn't have any flowers with her, and she never walked among the tombstones unless she had a bouquet for Uncle Hugh's grave. Uncle Hugh didn't have a lamb on his headstone. Lambs are for children. His stone, and the one at the head of Grandpa Dave's grave, had both been made to look like trees turned to rocks and then chopped up and stacked up, one short log on top of another. Mama had said that showed both Uncle Hugh and Grandpa Dave were Woodmen of the World. I decided not to ever, ever be a woodman. I wanted a lamb, not logs, on my tombstone. The road became narrow and more and more crooked as we passed into the thick woods below the graveyard. The long shadows of so many tall pines made it seem like twilight, Aunt Vic said. Then, in a few minutes, we came out into a big clearing, and Aunt Vic turned the buggy onto a straight stretch of lane where there were cornfields on either side. She said they were Old Man Hawk's fields. The corn had been stripped of blades and ears so that there was nothing left but row after row of shriveled stalks leaning against each other, waiting to fall to the ground. The goldenrod in the fence corners, so lovely in September, was dried up, dead. But the persimmon bushes and the young sassafras trees looked quite lively as their half-green, half-red leaves shimmered in the late afternoon sun. "Their leaves will stay just that bright till killing frost comes," Aunt Vic told me. "And I think they're just beautiful!" I looked at the leaves again. They were pretty.