The oldest residents of Cameron, Wisconsin, remember “Aunt” Lucy St. Louis, my grandparents’ next-door neighbor, who died at one hundred in the house where, in the prime of her womanhood, she’d raised her widowed brother’s eight children. Some unecumenical Lutherans in my family to this day begrudge Catholics a place in heaven, yet argue an exception was surely made for Lucy, single-handedly tending that motherless brood during the time when she might have borne her own.

I stood often with my cousins before a chicken-wire cage where Lucy’s talking crow, magnetic in its shiny blackness, tirelessly croaked its name, “Joe!  Joe!  Joe!”  When lectured by my righteous grandfather for cruelly imprisoning a wild creature, Lucy, furiously gumming her pipe, retorted, “Well, what about your goldfish?  They’re in jail too!” after which my grandfather emptied the fishbowl in the city pond.

Lucy, “Aunt” to everyone, including her neighbors’ grandchildren, claimed to have cured with herbs a cancer on her nose, God’s punishment to fit the crime of her “nosiness.”  She outlived not only the cancer but her reason, became herself a kind of crow fluttering madly against her earthly cage, one autumn night unnerving even my sturdy old German grandmother by pressing her divinely chastened nose flat against the bedroom window.

Like my cousins and siblings, I grew up not entirely sure that Lucy wasn’t the “aunt” I’d thought she was, so fundamentally did she share in the fierce, admirable, and foolish stubbornness of my mother’s people.

Thomas R. Smith lives in River Falls and teaches at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. He enjoyed an unhurried childhood in Cornell beside the Chippewa River and frequently returns to the area for material and inspiration. Visit him online at www.thomasrsmithpoet.com.