The Ponder Heart by Eudora Welty (Virago Modern Classics)

Edna Earle’s Uncle Daniel Ponder is quite a character in the town of Clay, Mississippi: he carries a Stetson, dresses fit to kill in a snow white suit and is as good as gold – everyone will admit that. But the trouble with Uncle Ponder is he’s as rich, as Croesus and a great deal too generous. He gave Edna Earle a hotel, and once he even tried to give away his own lot in a cemetery. But when his first marriage to Miss ‘Teacake’ Magee didn’t work out, he needed someone else to give things to. So he married seventeen -year-old Bonnie Dee Peacock from a poor backwoods family who ‘could cut hair and looked as though a good gust of wind might carry her off’. She was carried off, but not by the wind – and the result, related in Edna Earle’s rattling tongue, is a masterpiece of comic absurdity: