Cold Sassy Tree (44 page)

It must of been an hour or more before he came to bed. I don't think he slept at all. I know I didn't.

Soon as I heard Miss Gussie in the kitchen, I bounced out of bed. "Better get up, Grandpa! Man from Athens might be here early. Boy howdy, I slept like a log! Hope I didn't root you, sir."

"I wouldn't know, son." He looked like he'd been beat up, but he said he slept like the dead.

"Reckon we better get Miss Love up?" I asked. Without waiting for his answer, I called through the door. "Miss Love? Hate to wake you up, but that mechanic could be here any time now. We slept like the dead in here. We rarin' to go!"

It was a nice breakfast with Miss Gussie and Mr. Nolly. Nobody would have guessed how mad Grandpa and Miss Love were at each other.

The mechanic came at seven o'clock. Soon as he fixed the radiator and cleaned the oil and grime off the engine, we took the Jamisons for a quick ride and then left Cushie Springs.

If Grandpa had ridden home in the back seat with his arm around Miss Love, I'd of thought everything I heard was just a bad dream.

But he rode up front with me.

M
ISS
L
OVE
did a lot of horseback riding the next few weeks, and if she ever stopped to talk to anybody, I didn't hear about it. Whenever I went up there to clean the stable, I walked around the house, not through it. I didn't know what to say to her.

Grandpa? Hearing him joke and tease and tell tales down at the store, you wouldn't of known he had a care in the world, unless you studied his eyes. Since That Night, they were never merry. And he started to look bushy again, and older, and you could see his mean streak better.

For instance, there was the matter of Mr. Clem Crummy having a drawing to get a new name for the Cold Sassy Hotel, recently bought from old Mr. Boop. After sprucing it up a little, Mr. Clem advertised a drawing in the paper "for a name more befitting this fine, refurbished, modern establishment." The Crummys put a big shoebox on the hotel desk, and Cold Sassy filled it up with names like the Waldorf and the Savoy. Mama's entry was the Hotel Prince Edward. Mine was the Hotel Bedbug. Grandpa entered a name, but wouldn't say what it was.

At four o'clock on Sunday, less than two weeks before Thanksgiving, Mr. Clem held his drawing on the hotel piazza. Nobody but him took it serious, but it was somewhere to go, so Cold Sassy went. Well, Miss Love didn't go. I remember that.

When Mr. Clem pulled his fat hand out of the shoebox and looked at the piece of paper, seemed like he couldn't believe what he saw. I was just sure he'd drawn the Hotel Bedbug! But he hadn't. "For pity sake, Rucker," he exploded, "if I'd a-wanted a name like that, I'd a-used my own!" Then he commenced to laugh. "Folks, Rucker here done named my place after hisself. The Rucker Blakeslee Ho-tel. Ain't he a card, though! I swanny, Rucker, you shore do know how to make a joke. Well, Miss Pauline, bring back the shoebox. I'll try agin."

While everybody laughed, Grandpa walked up so close to Mr. Clem they just about touched stomachs. "You done got you a name, Mr. Crummy. The Rucker Blakeslee Ho-tel."

The crowd got silent and uneasy. Mr. Clem looked like he didn't know what to say. "But ... ain't it just a joke?"

"Hit was when I put it in the box," said Grandpa. "Hit was jest go'n be something to tell and laugh about, same as if'n you'd named it the Crummy Hotel. I never thought to git drawed." Though a smile was playing around under his mustache, his eyes were hard. "But now thet it's the one, I kind a-like the sound of it. You wanted a fine fancy name for yore establish-ment? A symbol of success and ca-racter? Well, sir, seems to me like you got one." Looking back at me, Grandpa grinned.

"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.