Cold Sassy Tree (2 page)

Soon as Grandpa got out of sight it was as if somebody had wound Mama and Aunt Loma up and let go the spring. Mama wailed that she could never show her face in Cold Sassy again, she was so embarrassed. Aunt Loma was just plain mad. "Remember Ma's funeral headline, Sister?" She spat out the words.

Mama nodded into her handkerchief. "Y-yes, of course I do. It said, 'Grieving Husband Left to Walk Through Life Alone.'"

"I can just see the engagement notice: 'Grieving Widower Finds Woman to Walk With.'"

"You know Bubba wouldn't do that!" Mama cried. Bubba Reynolds was editor of the
Cold Sassy Weekly.

"He will if he thinks of it," said Loma. "Sister, that woman ought to be ashamed. And I'm go'n go tell her so."

Mama was alarmed. "Now, Loma, once you get started, you don't know when to hush." Then she added, "But it might do some good to tell her how stingy Pa is, and how hard he is to cook for. That might make her think twice."

There was a silence, except for Aunt Loma pounding her right fist into her left hand, bam, bam, bam, glaring at me as she did it. Finally she said my daddy might could talk Grandpa out of it.

Mama didn't think so. "Hoyt don't even dare ast Pa to raise his pay. Get your Camp onto him." She was being sarcastic. I'd heard her say that Grandpa thought Uncle Camp was still in knee britches. Aunt Loma didn't answer. She knew—they both knew—that nobody could stand up to their daddy.

Then Loma shook both fists in the direction of the store. "Dog bite your hide, Love Simpson!" she screamed. "And dog bite yours, Pa!"

"Loma, hush. The neighbors will—"

"How could he do it, and her a Yankee!"

Mama was always fair, even when flustrated to distraction. "Now, Loma, everybody calls Miss Love a Yankee and she does kind of talk like one. But Maryland is not a Northern state." Then, as another thought struck her, Mama collapsed onto the leather davenport there in the front hall. "Loma," she wailed, "Pa didn't have on his black armband!"

"Well, should he, Sister? When he's engaged?" Aunt Loma like to choked on the word
engaged.

"But they cain't marry for a year or more. I don't see why Pa couldn't wear an armband for Ma."

"While Love Simpson wears an engagement ring for Pa?"

"Surely he won't give her a ring! He just said he wanted us to know, not the whole world!" Mama jumped up and stuck her nose right in her young sister's face. "Now you listen to me." Loma backed off a little. "I want you to keep your mouth shut. It may all blow over, and nobody'll ever know. Maybe—maybe Pa just thought she said yes."

"Grandpa ain't hard of hearin'," said I, but they didn't seem to notice.

I was amazed at Mama. She was usually just the mildest sort of person. Ordinarily if anybody was saying hush up around here, it was Aunt Loma, despite she was fourteen years younger than my mother. No doubt Aunt Loma marveled, too, because she didn't say anything sassy back. Just jerked off her genteel black veil and threw it hard as she could towards the front door.

"Sister, I was fixin' to ast Pa for Ma's piano," she burst out. Tears of flustration wet her red face. "And I want the mirror that Cudn Pearl painted Saint Cecilia on. Just think, while I was waitin' a decent time to ast for a piano and a mirror, come to find out he was astin' for a wife!" Screaming the words out, she stomped her foot.

I knew Mama wanted the piano so Mary Toy could take music lessons. Mama always liked the Saint Cecilia mirror, too. Everybody in Cold Sassy except us had Saint Cecilia painted on something. And though Mama wasn't the kind to ask for things, I'd heard her tell Queenie she was go'n see if her Pa would let her swap our mismatched parlor furniture for Granny's nice parlor suit. She knew he wouldn't care one way or the other.

"I just cain't understand it," Mama fumed, getting up to pace the hall just the way Grandpa had. "I thought Love Simpson would marry Son Black. I know his mother don't approve, but he's not gettin' any younger, and they been courtin' a year or more."

"And Love deserves him," said Aunt Loma. She used to be sweet on Son Black herself, so I reckon she knew what she was talking about when she added, "Son's right nice-lookin' and smart, but his mouth sure isn't any prayer book. And he's meaner'n a snake."

"Yeah," I chimed in. "I heard he had him a pet snake one time that bit him and the next day the snake died."

They ignored that. Mama said, "Love is too used to town life and dressin' fashionable. Maybe she don't care to stay out there on the farm with Son's mama and raise chi'ren. Maybe she thinks she's too good to marry a farmer."

"Shoot," retorted Aunt Loma, "what about that rancher out in Texas she was engaged to before she came here? A rancher has
lots of land and money but he's a farmer just the same. Lord, I wish to heaven she'd married him. If only he hadn'—"

"Sh-h!" Mama nodded toward me.

I knew Loma was fixing to say "If only he hadn't got Miss Love's best friend in trouble and had to marry her." Everybody in town knew that story. I don't know why Mama thought I didn't.

Nobody asked my opinion, but I had always admired Miss Love, with all that wavy brown hair piled atop her head, and that smiley, freckledy face and those friendly gray-blue eyes. She was a merry person, like Grandpa. Always wore big flowered hats and bright-colored dresses, never "quiet" clothes like nice ladies were supposed to wear on the street. I could see how Miss Love could cheer up a man whose wife was short of breath for four years, dying for ten days, and dead for three weeks.

Aunt Loma's face suddenly went redder than ever. Clearly she'd had a new thought. "Sister, with Love bein' Pa's milliner, and them seein' each other down at the store every day, people are go'n say—"

"Will, I thought I told you to go get the eggs," Mama interrupted with a mad sound in her voice. "Now go on, right now. Mind me."

I minded her. But she needn't think I didn't know what Aunt Loma was driving at. Well, there couldn't have been any carrying-on down at the store or we'd have heard about it long time ago. Anyhow, Miss Love wasn't that kind and neither was my grandfather. And heck, he loved Granny. Even now I couldn't hardly imagine him kissing another lady, or slapping her playful on the backside like he used to do Granny when he was in a teasing mood. I guess what I really couldn't imagine was Miss Love kissing him, much less marrying him. It was easy to see he needed looking after, but what did she need that an old man could give when she already had a beau her own age who was anxious to marry her?

I
SAT DOWN
on the back steps to think. I didn't see why Mama and Aunt Loma weren't glad Grandpa Blakeslee had found him a lady to marry. The sooner the better, if you asked me. The wedding couldn't be for a year or more, of course, but after that he wouldn't have to keep coming to our house for dinner or to Aunt Loma's every night for supper, which he'd been doing ever since Granny passed away. And Miss Love wouldn't have to bring a quart Mason jar full of hot coffee down to the store for him every morning like she'd been doing.

Papa kept trying to get Grandpa to eat breakfast with us, being as he came by home anyhow for his snort. It wouldn't of been much trouble for Mama; all Grandpa ever wanted in the morning was four cups of coffee and some yeast bread, toasted hard and dipped in boiling water and then buttered. But when Papa said, "Sit down and have a bite with us, Mr. Blakeslee," Grandpa would say he just et. I reckon he thought if he took dinner and breakfast both at our house, it wouldn't be any time before Papa would be after him to move in with us.

Well, this time next year Grandpa would be married, and if he didn't like what was put before him it would be Miss Love's little red wagon, not Mama's or Aunt Loma's. Also, they wouldn't have to see after him if he got sick. He was hard to take care of when he was ailing. Liked to groan and carry on. He'd lie down before supper on the daybed, moaning, "Oh, me, me.... Oh, me, me," and Granny just about went crazy listening to it, knowing that next morning he'd go on to the store anyway. The last year or two, no matter how bad he felt you couldn't make him stay home.
He could have a cold so bad it sounded like pneumonia rattling around in there but he wouldn't stay home.

That really used to worry my grandmother. She'd beg him not to go to work. "Mr. Blakeslee, I nurse everybody in town but my own husband. Please stay in bed t'morrer. Hear?"

But he'd say, "I ain't thet big of a fool, Miss Mattie Lou. Ain't you ever noticed? Folks die in bed."

Anyhow, now there wouldn't be any more worrying about Grandpa living by himself.

Aunt Loma had already declared he couldn't live with her. Said she didn't have room. I don't know how she could say such as that when her daddy had given her husband a job and provided them a house to live in. Mama couldn't have said it—even if he didn't own our house, too, and even if Papa didn't work for him. Papa had been keeping the store ledgers since he was sixteen.

Grandpa wouldn't of lived with Aunt Loma, of course, on account of her cats. The first time he went there for supper after Granny was buried, the next morning he started fussing about her cats the minute he got to our house for his snort. "I swanny to God, I seen one a-them cats jump up on Loma's kitchen stove last night! Tiptoed across thet red-hot stove on his dang claws and et right out of the pot!"

I had been hoping Grandpa would come live with us. But even though she never said so, I knew Mama dreaded that possibility. Tell the truth, she was scared of her daddy, as if she wasn't sure he'd got over her not being a boy and her marrying a Presbyterian—though the way I heard it from Cudn Temp, Grandpa was all for her marrying my daddy, and had a fit when the Baptist deacons tried her for heresy.

Heresy was his word for their word for her marrying a Presbyterian.

According to Temp, the deacons voted to put it in the church records that "Mary Willis Blakeslee has swapped her religious birthright for a mess of matrimonial pottage." It made Grandpa mad as holy heck. "Anybody calls Hoyt Tweedy a mess of matrimonial pottage," he roared, "thet man is a-go'n answer to me." The deacons struck the pottage part from the record. But they turned Mama out of the Baptist communion just the same, and her only seventeen.

That was one reason I didn't like the way Mama was carrying on so about Grandpa getting engaged. He had stuck up for her when she wanted to marry Papa. Why wouldn't she stick up for him now?

I wasn't surprised at Aunt Loma, of course. She was the only child of Granny and Grandpa's to live more than a few years, besides my mother, and she'd been spoiled all her life. I reckon they thought they had to keep rewarding her for not dying. Anyhow, Loma never could think about much else for thinking about how to get her own way. Despite she was married now, and a mother, she hadn't grown up any that I could see. If it didn't suit her for her daddy to marry again, why, he just wasn't going to.

Miss Love having worked for Grandpa at his store for two years or more, she must already know he was stingy and set in his ways. She also knew that, because of his having just the one hand, he needed special looking after. He bit off his fingernails, so keeping them short was no problem. But tough meat had to be cut up for him, and he needed help with his high-top shoes. Timmy Hopkins had been coming by to tie Grandpa's shoelaces ever since Granny took sick.

But though Miss Love might not be a good cook after boarding so long, and probably couldn't of outworked Granny in a vegetable garden or rose garden or sickroom, most anybody could outdo Granny with a broom and a feather duster. She used to say, "A house will keep, whether you weed it or not, but that-air yard will git away from you in the bat of a eye." The only thing she liked to do indoors was cook and tend the sick. I remember one time she pulled off her apron after two days and nights nursing a neighbor lady and said, "They ain't no feelin' in the world like takin' on somebody wilted and near bout gone, and you do what you can, and then all a-sudden the pore thang starts to put out new growth and git well."

I hadn't ever heard of Miss Love nursing the sick. But that wasn't any reason for Grandpa not to marry her. I just couldn't see why Mama and Aunt Loma were having a fit about it. The fact that I liked Miss Love didn't mean I hadn't loved Granny, and I figured it was the same with him.

I was just fixing to get up off the back steps and go gather the eggs when Campbell Junior started squalling in the kitchen. I
heard Aunt Loma go in there. "I got to get on home," she told our cook.

"Yas'm," said Queenie. "B'ess his li'l heart, he be's hongry."

"And I be's full as a Jersey cow," said Aunt Loma, mocking her. "Seems like all I do is nurse this bloomin' baby."

"Shame on you, Miss Loma, talkin' lak dat. Some peoples cain' nuss dey baby, and some ain' got nary baby to nuss. You be's lucky."

"Humph," said Loma, and left.

Before I had a chance to move, Mama came out and lit into me for sitting there doing nothing. Said I was no-count and shiftless and why hadn't I gathered the eggs and I was supposed to have weeded the lower garden two days ago and to go do that "but first you gather the eggs like you been told to. You go'n let the rats get'm. Or that no-count egg-sucker dog of yours."

I resented that. T.R. didn't suck eggs. But I said yes'm.

Mama went inside, and I was hardly down the three back steps before she stuck her head out of her bedroom window upstairs and hollered to me to watch for Papa and my grandpa when it was time for them to come to dinner.

"Yes'm."

"I got a sick headache," she said, like it was my fault, and put her hand up to her forehead as she faded back into the room. The window slammed shut and the shade came down to keep it cool in there.

In a kind of furious daze, forgetting the eggs, I got a big old gray peach basket off the porch and dragged it down the path. The garden was to the left of the barn and the pasture, hidden from the house by the smokehouse and a pecan grove and a row of little peach trees that because of the drought had dropped hard knotty fruit not even fit to make spiced pickle with.