The roping horse that my Grandma J. is keeping in her chicken yard for some cowboy― whose name I don’t know, but want to, because then maybe he will give me a ride―peers at us over the barbed wire, swatting at the buzzing flies with his unfortunate stub of a tail. Probably he is wondering what two sun-browned little girls are doing hunkered down behind the blackberry bushes, scratching their bare arms as they part a sea of brambles with their grubby hands to spy through the fence into the neighbor’s yard. The horse licks his dappled lips, stained with the juicy berries for which he’s developed a big taste since I’ve been around.

Not an animal person by any stretch of the imagination and seeing danger everywhere for as long as I can remember, Grandma swears the lanky varnish roan is full of ticks, chiggers, and all kinds of dangerous diseases. She advises us in no uncertain terms to leave him alone, for heaven’s sake, don’t touch that animal, honey. Wiping her hands on her calico apron, standing at the screen door we’ve left ajar as we go charging outside into her overgrown garden as fast as our legs will carry us, whooping like wild things―she hollers her warnings.

We lace our fingers through the garden fence, pretty sure Grandma can’t see us from the kitchen window through the tall corn she is so smug about, but disappointed that the adjacent back yard is as empty as ever. Why is the INside furniture OUTside?, my sister starts out whispering, but her voice gets shrill on the question mark. Hush, I tell her, as she points at the tattered reclining chair on the other side beneath a sycamore that looks worth climbing, no doubt thinking of the harvest-gold Lazy Boy in our carefully decorated house in Tulsa.

Just this morning on our way over to Mr. Moore’s, we pass the sad-looking clapboard house next door. With its sagging porch and broken windows, it looks like someone has kicked it’s hide, busted it’s jaw, knocked out a few teeth, and given it a shiner more than one time. No one could live there, I tell my sister, full of all the knowledge of the universe, pointing. But Grandma J. grabs my hand, tells me that pointing is rude, and that someone does. She sneaks a glance at the house. But that woman is as crazy as a jay bird. Tosses her chin in that direction. And I want you to stay away from there. She marches us right past all that peeling paint and the raggedy, lonesome-looking recliner standing its lopsided watch. She’s not saying anything more about that.

In the brass bed to which he’s confined every single time I lay eyes on him, Mr. Moore looks like some half-starved baby starling that has tumbled out of it’s nest, skin stretched taut over hollow bones where feathers would grow any day now if the cat wasn’t sure to get him first. But he does manage to prop himself up on a shabby pillow. The gleaming headboard fills up practically the entire house, which is really just a falling-down shack at the back of a garden gone hog wild. (Don’t say anything about it, Grandma J. hisses the first time we pick our way up the ivy-choked path to his door.) Mr. Moore beams from ear to ear and folds back the edge of his coverlet with purple-splotched claws for hands, flashing a couple of teeth the same gray as his grizzled beard, as Grandma lifts the tea towel from the still-warm dish. The room fills with a sweet aroma. He sniffs it as delicately and with as much pleasure as the roan gelding does each time I offer him a blackberry, murmuring, Oooooh, fresh cobbler. Then he leans forward, squints at me and my sister, now hanging back behind Grandma, and asks us if we know she is the finest cook in Maud, Oklahoma.

As Grandma J. perches on a stool next to the brass bed and spoons blackberry cobbler into Mr. Moore’s mouth, daubing at the corners with her handkerchief, I can almost taste the dense concoction of lard, white flour, fruit, and sugar myself, satisfied with the thought that there’s a second one she made just for us, cooling on the kitchen cabinet back at the house.

The appaloosa horse’s head pops up from where he’s been eyeballing us through the chicken wire, ears pricked forward like antennae. My sister stares at me wide-eyed, a look of half-fear, half-excitement playing across her freckles. This is exactly what we’ve been waiting for. I point to the other side of the fence, mouth the word, Listen.

Yes we'll gather at the river
The beautiful, beautiful river

A woman’s voice floats through the humid afternoon like the scent of Five & Dime talcum powder after a hot bath. I follow the gelding’s gaze to the swiveling, swirling, reclining chair. It is spinning around, and around, and around.

Gather with the saints at the river

We are afforded only fleeting glimpses of it’s singing, helmet-haired occupant in motion-blurred, floral house dress and pantyhose, tiny lace-up shoes barely reaching the ground, head lolled back, eyes rolled skyward, clasping the moth-eaten armrests

That flows by the Throne of God

just like I imagine the astronauts do when they blast off. She whirls like a dervish, like one of my baby cousin's wind-up toys. We inch closer, careful of blackberry stickers.

Shall we gather at the river
Where bright angel feet have trod
With it's crystal tide forever

The recliner scrEEEeeeeaks and scrEEEeeeches to a wobbling stop, as does the singing. And all of a sudden that ungrateful berry-eating-hawg of a horse snorts in alarm, and takes off at a trot. Leaving me and my now starting to bawl-like-a-baby little sister behind as the neighbor lady careens about in the chair and casts her hammered metal gaze upon us through the wire, the most colorless eyes I’ve ever seen, frizzy silver hair nearly standing on end. Thin lips drawn across toothless gums in a wicked smile, she leaps towards us like some kind of harpy up and out of her rockem’ sockem’ reclining chair, hands outstretched to grab us both and haul us into her house where kids probably disappear forever, shouting―

BOO! Little girls!

We run like hell, busting at the seams with high-pitched shrieks. Scratching our legs and arms, we spill blackberries all over the ground, trample them with our bare feet.

Her cackling winds along behind us through the cornrows like a garden snake with its tongue flicking.

That evening as we watch the Porter Wagoner TV Show in the living room with the box fan whirring, bedazzled by The King of Country Gospel’s rhinestone-studded suits, and finish up every last bit of re-heated cobbler, we’re not sure how we’re going to go about explaining to Grandma J. that we don’t want to pick any more blackberries from her garden.

Truth is, she probably knows already.

Check out these Flickr photos: Muffet; judithsviews; ipuzzled; xthylacine