May was gardening when she died. That’s the word she always used: gardening. Everybody else in Fayette County would say they were going out to work in the garden, and that’s the picture you’d get in your mind — people out there laboring and sweating and grunting in the dirt. But Aunt May gardened, and when she said it your mind would see some lovely person in a yellow-flowered hat snipping soft pink roses, little robins landing on her shoulders.

Of course May never owned a flowered hat in her life, and her garden was as practical as anyone else’s. In place of roses it was full of thick pole beans and hard green cabbages and strong carrots. It was a reliable garden, and friendly, and both Ob and me finally thought it right that May should have flown up out of her body right there in that friendly garden, among all those cheerful vegetables, before she waved good-bye to us and went on to be that bright white Spirit Ob had known all along she was.

Only this part of her death seemed right. The garden. All the rest of it seemed so wrong, and it has been nearly six months — we have gone through two seasons — without her, and still I don’t know what kind of life Ob and I are going to come up with for ourselves. We have not done much of anything since, except to miss May and hurt. I never would have thought us to be so lost. We used to be tougher than this.

Winter’s not helping. February’s a grim time in these mountains. It is pitch black in the morning when I set off down the mountain for the school bus, leaving Ob behind, watching me out the picture window. I feel adrift. When I was younger, either Ob or May would walk me out to the road and stand there freezing with me in the dark, making me stomp my feet to keep the blood circulating till the lights of the bus would finally bounce off the trees up the ridge and somebody could hand me over to the roaring heater of Number 56.

But now I am twelve, and expected to go it alone out to the stop. It isn’t fear that this bitter February darkness starts working up in my stomach. I never have been afraid of anything since I came to live on this mountain. It’s just lonesomeness. Ob behind me all alone in that old trailer full of sleeping whirligigs, and me on this black road, and both of us needing May so much. It’s worse needing somebody in the dark, in winter, of an early cold morning.

But most amazingly, most miraculously, now Ob is insisting that May was, is, right here with us. That she came back a few days ago and is truly right here with us.

It was on Sunday, and we were outside cutting open some milk jugs to make into bird feeders when suddenly Ob straightened up, put down his knife, and like a dog who thinks he’s heard something move, pricked up his ears and listened.

“Ob?” I said.

Ob drew up his nose and got this foolish look on him, like he was about to sneeze.

“Ob?” I said again and beginning to get a little nervous.

Then his head snapped up straight like a soldier at attention and he said, “Hotdamn!”

My heart was beating fast.

“What is it, Ob?”

Ob ran his bony fingers through that last bit of hair on his head and looked down to the ground in stupefaction. He pulled a gray handkerchief from his back pocket and blew into it. Then he folded the cloth up neatly, gave his nose one more confident swipe, and jammed the hanky back in his pocket. He looked hard at me. I’d seen that look on his face before. It was the look that always announced he’d gotten some kind of revelation. Ob was a deep thinker and he was often getting revelations.

“May was with us,” he said, with the same certainty he might have used telling me it was February.

“Huh?” I put down my knife beside me.

“May was right here with us, just now. I swear to God. I felt her, Summer, all up and down me like I’d just poured her in a glass and drunk her.”

He stared off in the distance, shaking his head again. Ob didn’t look so good. Well, he’s never looked real good. Ob is one of those Ichabod Crane types in looks. May’s passing had just made him look more scarecrow than ever.

But it didn’t cross my mind to doubt him.

“Well, how’d she feel?” I asked him.

He looked back over at me.

“What’s that?”

“How’d she feel?” I repeated. “Did she feel, like, light, like an angel? Did she tell you anything?”

Ob’s eyes moved off to the bag of birdseed beside him as he thought. Finally he answered.

“She felt like she did when we was packing up to go to Ohio,” he said.

“Like she was going to Ohio?” I couldn’t fathom May taking the trouble of dying just so she could go to Ohio.

He slowly shook his head.

“All those years,” he said, “every time we’d be packing up to go see the folks in Ohio, half of May would want to go and half of her would want to stay here. Couldn’t make up her blame mind. She used to be afraid she’d lose this place if she left it for very long. Afraid it and the ’gigs would burn up or be washed away. She just didn’t want to let this trailer out of her sight.

“But it kept her in a pickle because she always feared losing her Ohio kin, too. Feared one of them would up and die, unexpected, like her mommy and daddy in the flash flood, if she let them out of her sight for too long. So every so often she’d have to leave this place and go check on them.”

He gave a big long sigh.

“She felt like she did when we was packing up to go to Ohio,” he said simply, figuring I’d understand.

Well, I did understand, and it didn’t set well with me at all. I never expected May to be back with us, and now that she’d stopped by, the least I expected of her was that she’d be able to make up her mind. I needed that from her. I needed to know that dying and going to heaven didn’t involve any regrets or sorrows or worries. I wanted May to shine down on us and tell us she was having the most wonderful time, better than anything we could ever dream of. I sure didn’t want her stopping by wondering if she’d done the right thing after all, and was everything unplugged and the stove turned off.

I believe in ghosts. Maybe angels would be a better word for them. But ghosts seems more to the point. So if Ob says May was here, I figure she was.

Anyway, I know May herself believed in spirits from the next world. She used to talk about her mommy and daddy watching over her after they died in the flash flood. Poor May. She was only nine when it hit. The rain came all day and all night and all the next day till finally the mountain couldn’t soak up the water anymore and down it washed, down the creek bed, a solid wall of water twenty feet high, down into the valley where May and her people lay fast asleep. It hit that little valley like a tidal wave, and whole houses broke in pieces. Big trucks turned over, floated away. Trees cracked in half.

May said that her mother — May always called her Mommy — heard that awful water coming and jumped out of bed, running for May’s room. She lifted little May out of her dreaming and ran and put her in the old metal washtub.

That’s all May ever remembered. The next memory she had was of waking up in that tub six miles from home and pulling a tired old cat from the water she was floating in. Her mommy and daddy were gone, lost forever.

But May says they watched over her anyway. And all the rest of the time she was growing up, she’d get these strong feelings whether or not to do something, feelings that told her which way to go. These feelings kept her out of a boy’s car which that night wrapped itself around a tree. They told her not to trust her weird neighbor, Mr. Rice, who the police carted off to jail. And one day they told her to stick with Ob.

May always said that once she got with Ob, her mommy and daddy could rest easy, and they finally flew off to that big church picnic in the sky. She said her daddy would be cleaning God out of his potato salad.

May was the best person I ever knew. Even better than Ob. She was a big barrel of nothing but love, and while Ob and me were off in our dreamy heads, May was here in this trailer seeing to it there was a good home for us when we were ready to land. She understood people and she let them be whatever way they needed to be. She had faith in every single person she ever met, and this never failed her, for nobody ever disappointed May. Seems people knew she saw the very best of them, and they’d turn that side to her to give her a better look.

Ob was never embarrassed about being a disabled navy man who fiddled with whirligigs all day long, and I never was embarrassed about being a kid who’d been passed around for years. We had May to brag on us both. And we felt strong.

But we’re not strong anymore. And I think Ob’s going to die, truly die, if I can’t figure a way to mend his sorry broken heart. And if Ob does go, goes off to be with May, then it’ll be just me and the whirligigs left. And all of us still as night, praying for wings, real wings, so we can fly away.