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very hard somewhere in the house then, before the last word, the very last word, and maybe she didn’t even hear that part at all, or heard it wrong; the sounds too faint, housesifted, her grandmother sobbing, and one of them (Chance was never sure which, if either) said, “Dicranurus,” one word of Latin or Greek that meant nothing to her, repeated again and again like a litany or invocation, but not that unusual to hear Latin in the house, her grandfather still teaching geology at the university, her grandmother a retired paleontologist, so the word made strange only by circumstance, by context, that she was hearing it then. She found a pencil on her desk, schoolyellow No. 2 Ticonderoga nub, and scribbled a phonetic spelling inside the back cover of Dandelion Wine before she lay back down.
    And then she fell asleep and dreamed that the thunder was something more than simple sound, something dark and brooding far above the world, and the rain fell from it in hissing, acid streaks the color of old motor oil, greasy rain to steam on the grass and trees, to clot in the rain spouts and mud holes. The sound of her grandfather’s cries getting through faint at first, old man’s voice basketwoven between the grayblack rain, between the deafening movements of the thing in the sky. Chance would not remember waking up, coming awake by syrupslow degrees, and then she was standing in her underwear and a mostly white Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt on the back porch, and this rain was cold and blacker than in her dream. Her grandfather was hanging onto a ladder, halfway up a ladder and wrestling desperately with something dangling from a limb of the big oak tree.
    “Grandpa!” Chance yelled, shouting to be heard above the crash and wail of the thunderstorm. “Help me, Chance,” and her grandfather not looking away from the limp thing in the tree. “Jesus Christ, help me get her down. ” And by then Chance could see, her mind not yet ready to believe what she was seeing, but that didn’t make it any less so. The thing in the tree moved, turning in the wind or maybe from the force of her grandfather sawing at the rope with a kitchen knife. Chance stepped towards the ladder, bare feet in mud and wet grass and part of her still wandering in the nightmare, not wanting the oily rain to touch her, not wanting to look up. But the rope broke, snapped like a firecracker, and her grandmother’s body fell lifeless to the ground.
     
    A few hours after her grandmother’s funeral and the house filled with aunts and uncles and cousins, people Chance didn’t really know and didn’t want to see, at least no ministers this time, but everyone bringing food like your grandmother dying made you want to fucking eat. The house stinking of casseroles and hams and butter beans, apple pies and chocolate cake, and Joe Matthews drunk in the front parlor, drinking glass after glass of Jack Daniel’s whiskey like it was water, water to make him forget. Chance was hiding in the library, and she could hear the women pretending to be busy in the kitchen, her Great-uncle William telling her grandfather, “That ain’t gonna help, Joe. You’re just gonna make yourself sick, that’s all. You need to eat something. Let me have Patsy get you some coffee and something to eat.”
    Chance wanting to defend her grandfather, but not about to leave the library, dustysafe sanctuary of shelves and glass cases and the musty smell of all the books, the door locked from the inside against birdnervous aunts who thought maybe a few slabs of smoked ham and a spoonful of mashed potatoes would make anything better, would make anything right again. Chance was sitting at the big, walnut-burl table her grandparents had always used for looking over their topographic and geologic maps, their stratigraphic sections, big, unpolished chunks of powderwhite Sylacauga marble at each corner for paperweights, green felt glued to the bottom of the rocks so they wouldn’t scratch the wood;