Cold Sassy Tree (44 page)

"You cain't make me do that!" Mr. Clem was sputtering. "It's my ho-tel!"

"But it's my name!" Grandpa put his forefinger on Mr. Crummy's big chest. "Yore ad said you'd use whatever name got drawed. Ifn you don't carry out the drawin', I'll sue for breach a-promise. You can put 'Clem Crummy, Proprietor' on yore sign if you got a mind to, but what it's go'n be called is the Rucker Blakeslee Ho-tel."

Everybody thought Grandpa would take back the name after he'd had his fun. I knew he wouldn't. Like I said, he was not one to let go of a grudge, and several years back Mr. Clem had cheated him in a land deal. Well, now he'd got even—got even and then some. But that didn't mean he wasn't still mad about it.

The next evening, Grandpa came down sick. In a day or two he was coughing and said he thought it was a relapse of lung disease from war deprivation. He said his symptoms were just like what went through the 6th Georgia one winter, and sent word to the family that nobody was to come up there.

"Rucker says it's ketchin' as sin," Doc said. "I told Miss Love she better be careful. Boil his plate and fork and all. I don't want no epidemic gittin' started in this town."

Mama was real worried. Not being sure Miss Love knew how to tend the sick, she took some chicken soup up there for him. Grandpa liked the soup but wouldn't let her in the house. She might ketch what he had. Miss Love said he coughed and groaned a lot, but was eating well. "I just don't understand it," she told Mama.

Something seemed fishy to me, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Maybe he was really sick. On the other hand, if Miss Love had started packing to leave, he might just be playing sick to keep her there. If she'd decided to stay but still refused to be his wife, maybe he was pouting. Or maybe he was heartsick, hating her for what her daddy did to her but still not willing to give her up.

What I thought was that he loved her as much as ever and had decided to stay home till she gave in. I recalled him telling me one time, "When you don't know which way to turn, son, try something. Don't jest do nothin'."

The one time I saw Miss Love during his confinement, she said, "He groans all the time, but he eats enough for a regiment. I don't know whether to laugh or cry, ignore him or worry."

She must of decided to ignore him, because after about ten days she got the idea of training Mr. Beautiful to old Jack's buggy. She'd hitch up and go off for hours. Grandpa soon let everybody know that the contagious period was over and insisted on going to ride with her. Said he was still weak, but the cold fresh air would be good for his lungs. After that, they were behind the horse every day, bundled up together under the automobile lap robes, her holding the reins and the whip, him sitting stiff and straight beside her. They would speak a greeting if they passed you, but as Miss Effie Belle said, it was like they didn't know each other or anybody else, either.

Before long, though, they were laughing and talking on their rides, and Grandpa was howdying and joking with everybody he saw.

He had become the grand duke of Cold Sassy again.

Like everybody else, Aunt Loma was relieved that her daddy was better. But, tell the truth, she'd been too busy directing the school's Christmas play to worry much about him.

Mama went over there one morning and found Loma sitting at the kitchen table writing in a tablet. She didn't seem to care that there were dust devils under the beds or that it was time for Uncle Camp to come to dinner. She said she had to work on the play. I expect it was the first time she'd been happy since she got married. Just before school let out every day, she'd bring Campbell Junior down to our house, hand him over to Queenie, and prance off to direct rehearsals like she'd got a call to do it from God Almighty Himself.

Aunt Loma didn't make me be in the play. But anything she needed she called on me and got so bossy I couldn't stand it hardly. Two weeks before play night, she told me to catch her a live mouse for Claude Wiggins to drop out of a shoebox in the third act.

The mouse was supposed to create pandemonium at a Christmas party on stage.

I think now that if Aunt Loma hadn't wanted the live mouse, it never would of dawned on me to mess up the play. The way it happened, my cousin Doodle and Uncle Skinny came in from their farm in Banks County about three o'clock one Sunday evening to spend the night with us and pick up a wagonload of feed corn next morning at the store. Doodle and I had just gone out to the barn to pitch down hay for his mules when in strolled Pink Predmore, Lee Roy Sleep, and Smiley Snodgrass.

After a hard cold spell in late November, there's nothing like a nice warm day to make you restless. You just want to do something, for gosh sake!

Lying in the warm sunshine in the hayloft, we tried to think up something, but didn't have any luck. We were all kind of irritable. Doodle, who had his head resting on a horse collar, raised up to spit a stream of tobacco juice over Smiley's head, and Smiley got mad as heck. "You better be glad none a-that landed on me," he said, growling.

Doodle leaned over in the other direction and spat through the hay hole. Looking down below, he aimed next at the big barrel down there. "Damn," he muttered. "I missed it. Hey, Will, ain't thet the barrel with them drownded rats yore daddy said to bury?"

"Gosh, yeah." I had forgotten about it. Climbing down from the loft, we all went and looked at the three big stinking rats, floating in the barrel amongst the ears of corn that had been the bait.

Everybody knows that when a barn rat looks down into a barrel that seems half full of shucked corn, he never suspicions that it's really half full of water. By time he finds out, he's trapped. He can't climb up the rounded sides.

"Gosh, look how white they are," said Pink, poking one with a corn cob. "How come brown rats bleach out in the water?"

Lee Roy had a thought that made him shudder. "You reckon colored folks turn white like that if they drown?"

"Where you s'pose the color goes?" asked Smiley.

"I reckon it just dissolves," said I, gathering up the rats on a pitchfork. "Doodle, get that shovel over yonder, hear, and hep me dig a hole."

Pink was suddenly inspired. "Whoa!" he yelled, catching my arm. "Let's save the rats for Miss Loma! For the school play!"

"Haw, yeah!" echoed fat Lee Roy, clapping Pink on the back. "Cain't you just see them rats droppin' out of Claude's shoebox?"

"Be mighty rank by then," said I. "School play's not till two weeks, you know." But they knew by my wide grin that in my mind I was seeing stinking dead rats on Aunt Loma's stage.

We hawed and guffawed, and then—I think because I'd taken off my shoes and it felt so warm and good and free with my bare toes twiddling in the dirt—it came to me that we should get Aunt Loma some live rats to keep her live mouse company. "We'll put shucked corn down in the barrel without any water," I explained as we went out to bury the dead. "We ought to be able to catch us a few by the night of the play."

What we got was nineteen, collecting sometimes two or three a night. One looked big as a cat. Smiley found a large metal cage in his attic and brought it over. We padded it with hay and put it in an empty stall in our barn, hidden under some dirty old croker sacks.

On the day of the play, Lee Roy and Smiley backed out. Put their tails down and slunk right out from under the best practical joke ever thought up by man or boy in Cold Sassy, Georgia. It really made me mad.

Pink said maybe backing out was a good idea.

"Well, you can back out, but I ain't." I was furious. If Pink didn't help me, there was no way I could get that heavy cage into the auditorium.

"I'll stick with you, Will," he said, miserable.

That night about first dark, he and I lifted the cage onto a wheelbarrow, covered it good with the croker sacks, and wheeled it around the house through the pecan grove. Mary Toy was playing hopscotch in the yard and like to had a fit to know what we had. "Something Aunt Loma wants for the play," I said. "But we cain't tell anybody. It would spoil the surprise."

As we humped the wheelbarrow over the railroad tracks, I looked back. Mary Toy was in the porch swing, watching us.

At the schoolhouse we had a time toting the cage up the outside steps that led backstage. Dern. Lee Roy and Smiley could of at least stayed with it this far.

There wasn't any real shortage of time, since Aunt Loma and everybody in the cast had gone home for early supper. We pushed the cage into a dark corner and tried to make it look like a natural part of the junk stored back there. Set an old globe on top of the croker sacks, and some cracked slates they kept for mill children to use, and two or three old windowshade maps of Europe that wouldn't let up and down anymore. In front of it all, we put two scuttles of dusty coal and a faded half-furled Confederate flag, saved last year when Cold Sassy's old wooden schoolhouse burned down.

We had a brand-new brick school now, and a brand-new Confederate flag out there on the stage. Aunt Loma's Christmas play was sure to have a packed crowd, because it would be the first entertainment held there at night, and everybody was anxious to see the electric lighting. Carbon bulbs were so dim that nobody thought you could light a stage that way.

Aunt Loma had told Chap Cheney she'd kill him if he didn't get the stage wired in time for the play. With her telling him exactly how she wanted it, he had wired for dozens of bulbs to be screwed into the floor at what she called stage front, and other bulbs dangled from the ceiling. Aunt Loma had put up a lot of mirrors on the walls of the set, which gave her twice as much light for the same number of bulbs.

That night when the heavy curtains parted to show the lit stage, the crowd yelled and clapped till Chap Cheney stood up, grinning, and took a bow.

The stage lights reflected on faces in the auditorium all the way to the back row, where I could see Papa and Mama and Mary Toy sitting with Uncle Camp, him holding the baby. I had a front row aisle seat, Pink right behind me.

Smiley and Lee Roy sat primly with their folks, acting like they didn't even know us.

Among the latecomers hurrying in were Grandpa and Miss Love. She was dolled up like a Christmas tree in a red velvet skirt, a red and white striped waist, and a red velvet hat trimmed in real holly. She seemed a little subdued, but Grandpa was greeting everybody. This was their first time at a public function since he took sick. He still hadn't gone back to work, but I thought he never looked haler or heartier, or neater or spiffier. I sure was glad he got his health back in time for my rat joke.

Just after the curtains opened, Aunt Loma marched in from backstage, dressed fit to kill in black silk and importance, and sat down in the aisle seat that the Tuttles had saved for her.

I sat calm enough through the first act. But when Act II started, my mind floated up to the stage and, like a ghost, went through the painted set into the dark corner where we'd hidden the rats. I sure hoped they hadn't got to fighting or squealing back there.

Just like I planned it, when the auditorium went dark for Act III, Pink and I slipped through a door by the stage and tiptoed back where the rats were. During the Christmas party scene, with all the actors singing carols at the top of their lungs, we dragged the cage to the wings and waited till Claude Wiggins created pandemonium by dropping the live mouse out of the shoebox. Soon as the mouse hit the floor we opened the cage and shoved it onto the stage. Those big rats poured out of there like a house afire!

Talk about pandemonium, we had it on stage and behind stage and all over that school auditorium!

You never heard such screaming and hollering. When the rats started leaping off into the audience, men were hitting out with their hats and walking canes, women were jumping this way and that or standing on their seats, some of which were breaking, and good gosh everybody was trying to get out of there!

I saw the rat that looked big as a cat dive off the stage right into Aunt Loma's lap. She knocked him off, but then just sat there, too shocked to move.

I looked at Miss Love. Perched up on the back of her seat, she was shrieking with laughter, her red skirt bunched up nearly to her garters. Grandpa was laughing so hard he hurt—rocking back and forth in his seat, grabbing his stomach, slapping his leg, flopping his arms, and shouting like somebody getting religion at a camp meeting. When his left arm went up, it looked like the knotted empty sleeve was dancing. A rat must of jumped over Grandpa's foot, because he kicked out suddenly, but I expect he was laughing too hard to make contact.

To say we broke up the play was putting it mildly.

The lights came on just as I peeped farther around the curtain and saw Aunt Loma trying to push through the crowd to get to our folks. She stumbled along, crying, her hands over her face like somebody had beat her.

When I glanced toward the back of the auditorium, that brought me down some. I knew Mama and Papa hadn't a doubt who'd done it. They sat there just stunned—till all of a sudden Mama grabbed Mary Toy and they jumped up on their seats. By then, the audience was crowding all the exits, shoving to get out. A lady screamed, and Pink and I bolted for the backstage door. The live mouse and a rat or two scrambled out into the cold night with us as Pink flew off in his direction and me in mine.

I beat the folks home easy. Felt my way upstairs, groped for the light cord hanging near the foot of my bed, jerked the light on, put on my old long pants under my new ones, jerked the light off, and waited.

I couldn't help it; in a few minutes I was rolling on the floor with laughter. Every little bit, I'd stop to listen for the front door to open and Papa to roar out, "Will, you come 'ere!" Then I'd think about Aunt Loma with that lapful of rat or my mother jumping up on the seat, and it was like I was a gun fired off. Laughter exploded out of me and couldn't any more be stopped than a bullet.

But laughing dies off pretty quick when you're by yourself, especially if it's way past your whipping and your folks still aren't home yet.

I was kind of sorry I'd messed up Aunt Loma's Christmas play. Oh, well, heck, if it weren't for my rats, Cold Sassy wouldn't remember that dern play past New Year's. As it was, everybody in town would be talking about it for years to come.