Leaving Cold Sassy (9780547527291) (11 page)

I got the thorn out and soaked Pup's foot in Epsom salts water, but there was no balm for the anger that was festering in Sanna.

I didn't blame her. Responsibility for the children was a heavy weight to bear alone. They had always gone to school and church in P.C., so they already had friends there. But my losing the farm and our new house had broken Sanna's heart and my pride. Change of any kind was hard on Sanna, but she always said she was never happier than out there in the country having babies— four born in less than five years—with me coming in for meals, helping any way I could. It was hard on her when I had to quit farming and start traveling. It was a lot worse when she was looking after four rowdy children by herself—trying to sound brave but worrying by herself, sleeping by herself, trying to make my little salary last till the end of the month and feeling disliked by my mama.

But good Lord, it wasn't easy on me either. I was really by myself. The first time I had to leave her for south Georgia, neither Sanna nor I slept the night before, and at four
A.M
. I said, “There's no point waitin' for the clock to ring. I'm gettin' up.” Sanna had packed my bags the night before. She fixed me a good breakfast, and by first light I was raring to be off.

“Do you want to look in on the children?” Sanna asked.

“I'll never leave if I do,” I said. We went hand in hand down the stairs, tiptoeing so as not to wake anybody.

I kissed Sanna good-bye, but we kept clinging to each other. Leaving her and the children was like having my arms and legs torn off. My heart ached. I held her head to my chest and stroked her hair. Then with a deep sigh, trying to make my voice cheerful, I said, “I'll be back this weekend, hon. Or at least by the next weekend. It won't seem so long.”

“It will to me,” she said. “Will, I hate living in P.C. when we owe everybody in town. What if something happens to one of the children? What if...”

“Mama and Papa are just three blocks away, and Miss Love says she'll help you. All you got to do is ask.”

Taking her hands in mine, I kissed them. I got past the screen door then, but couldn't walk away. Her on one side of the screen, me on the other, and we were both crying. We both knew things would never be the same again.

They haven't been.

But by the time the Model-A hit the city limits of Progressive City, my spirits rose like a balloon. Ahead lay new places, new people, new challenges. I had a job, by gosh, and it had a future. “God help me, I'm go'n make a livin' for my fam'ly! Dear God, I got to get my self-respect back.”

With my foot heavy on the gas pedal, the car picked up speed and I let out a yell. “Boy howdy, God!” I hadn't said boy howdy in years. I hadn't
felt
like saying boy howdy in years.

I had quit farming in 1928, when the banks foreclosed. Before we knew what hit us, we'd lost the farm and were renting rooms in town. When I first went to work for a former county agent who organized a Georgia cotton cooperative, I had to travel, but I could make it home most nights. That venture failed, but Mr. Downes formed a new cooperative, and I agreed to take south Georgia as my territory. Sanna said I should have insisted on the northeast territory. I told her I'd never get ahead if I made demands, but I guess I was wrong. The northeast went to a man whose wife refused ever to move. Sanna always resented that.

Long before the end of the cotton season in south Georgia, I'd stopped trying to get home every single weekend. I was working eighteen hours a day and sometimes couldn't get off before two o'clock Saturday afternoon. Heading for home, I'd be so excited about seeing Sanna I wouldn't stop for supper, just maybe get a Co-Cola and a moon pie when I stopped for gas. If I didn't have a blow-out and the roads weren't slick, I'd get in around ten at night, worn out and hungry for supper. I did try for every other weekend, but the longer we lived apart, the more my life in south Georgia seemed to be the real thing, and my family in Progressive City a little remote. When I'd let myself worry about home, I couldn't do my job. When I did go home, after a night with Sanna and seeing that she and the children were all right, and how the money was holding out, then it seemed like I might as well just go on back. I'd leave right after Sunday dinner, which we always had at Mama and Papa's house. That made Sanna anxious, because she knew they didn't approve of the way she was raising the children. On Monday I'd start the week already worn out.

Part of my job was to buy cotton, but the most important part was to try to sell the farmers on the advantages of belonging to a cooperative, instead of selling to middlemen who tried to buy cheap and could hold the bales in warehouses till the price went up and then sell high to the mills. It cost an individual farmer a lot to warehouse his cotton crop. “You go with the co-ops,” I told them, “and whatever profit gets made will come back to you, according to how much cotton you sell through us. And when spring comes we'll sell you seed and fertilizer, and whatever else you need, at a discount, and at the end of the year whatever we've made above expenses goes back to you.” To show how we kept down operating expenses, I always managed to get in how much the wives of us field men fussed about how low our salaries were. And that was the truth. Sanna couldn't see that we'd lose the farmers' trust if we drove big cars or stayed in high-priced hotels. I kept reminding her I'd have more time at home when the fall cotton session wound down.

 

I found the letters just before I left on Sunday, when I was looking through drawers for a screwdriver to tighten a doorknob for Sanna, but I didn't try to read any till I got to Shellman the next night. The only light in the little room was a bulb hanging from the ceiling on a long cord. I turned the pillows to the foot of the bed and untied the faded blue ribbon. I think what I was hoping for was some understanding of the difference between what Sanna and I had in the beginning and this mixed-up mess we were in now. Part of it, of course, was being separated, but that wasn't all.

Sanna had them sorted according to postmark date. Her letters and mine. I reckon she kept every letter I ever wrote her, which is not exactly surprising. She can't throw away an old grocery list, much less the dentist bill from 1929 that we still haven't paid and may never be able to.

Before Sanna, the only letters I ever tried to keep were from Trulu Philpot. A week after our engagement was announced in the newspaper, I called it off. That great love affair ended at a house party in the mountains. We all went out to pick blackberries and were scattered along the roadside when a thunderstorm came up. I ran under a bridge to get out of the rain, and there was Trulu, kissing one of my fraternity brothers. Right then and there I demanded my ring back. It like to killed me.

There's nobody quite as mad as an old flame when she gives you back your letters and your picture and demands hers, and you have to admit you never saved them. When Trulu asked me for her letters, I got some satisfaction out of telling her I'd been using them to get fires going in my fireplace. It wasn't so, but I said it. Then for spite I passed them around the Sigma Chi house for the boys to read and laugh at. It was a mean thing to do, but I did it.

That happened a year before I met Sanna. I'd be excited, opening a letter from Trulu, but I don't remember ever reading one twice. From the beginning I knew it was different, how I felt about Sanna, because I'd keep reading her words over and over till the next letter came.

They haven't lost any of their magic, but not many are here in the collection. I know I tried to keep all Sanna's letters, but I'm sure many got left behind in hotel rooms—lost from pure carelessness.

Now, holding Sanna's packet of letters, I grieve for all those she wrote that aren't here.

My second letter to Sanna was written after our first “date”—the evening service at church.

***

Wednesday, September 19, 1917

Dear Sanna,

I hope you don't mind if I call you Sanna. I've known you a long time now—two whole weeks and three days.

This is circus day in Athens. Everybody from everywhere is in the big tent, including the people I'm supposed to work with, so I'm sitting at my desk with nothing to do but write up reports. It was like a light came on in here when I decided to write to you instead.

I certainly did enjoy that long-drawn-out sermon Sunday night, and our chat after we carried the others home.

I hope you don't mind the way I filled up Papa's car with friends. The more people, see, the closer I can sit to you. Too bad our number keeps diminishing. If this war keeps up and everybody but me gets to go, I'll be looking after all you girls by myself. Call it a slacker's paradise. I'm equal to it and I'd take pleasure in doing my duty. But I wouldn't take pride in it.

This is some busy week. I've already been everywhere except Mitchellville and would have gone there if you could have gone with me.

Had a telegram yesterday from my Aunt Loma in New York (you met her at the watermelon cutting) saying she had tied the knot. Her new husband is rich and old and a Yankee, and most likely a Republican. Mama is real upset about it. Miss Alice Ann Boozer (have you met her?) says, “Anythang that's outlandish, Loma has did it.” I think marrying a Yankee takes the cake when it comes to outlandish.

I like the way “Dear Sanna” looks on paper. I've been practicing the way it sounds. I never heard the name Sanna before. Were you named for a grandmother or somebody?

May I impose on you for a date Saturday night?
Please write that it's OK. Sincerely,
Will T.

***

Sanna's answer is the next letter in the stack. Reading my name on the envelope, I feel again the same rush of excitement I always did when an envelope came addressed in her handwriting. Now as then, I can picture her sitting down to write at the oak table in her upstairs room at Miss Love's house. Her long black hair is braided for the night. The drapey silk shade on the lamp casts a soft glow on her dark skin, and her small lovely hand is graceful as she dips the pen into the ink bottle.

***

Dear Will T.,

Your letter was in the mail basket when I got in from school today. I'm pleased to say I have no plans for Saturday night.

No, I didn't mind “the crowd.” They were all so nice to me. I'm a rather shy person, but they were easy to be with, and you saw to it that I and everybody else had a good time.

This was a hard day. I had to paddle two boys. With fifty-five fourth-graders I don't have an easy job, but I am not discouraged. The main problem is the animosity between town children and mill children. We didn't have that in Mitchellville, though poor farm children are looked down on there—people say they're “from over the river.”

Your Uncle Sampson is trying very hard to be good, but he still talks instead of listening, and he distracts the class. He's always plotting mischief. But he is bright and charming and at home we. are good friends. Little Precious Roach is a delight. I hope she doesn't come to hate her name the way I used to hate mine.

You asked how I happen to be called Sanna.

My mother, named Flora, gave flower names to all six children ahead of me. The first three were grown and married before I was born—Blossom, Lily Maude, and Magnolia. Magnolia, called Maggie, raised me from the time I was ten years old. After them came Zinnia, Violet, and Joe Pye. (I'm sure you know the big dusky-pink Joe Pye weed that grows by the roadside. When Joe Pye was a boy, everybody called him “Weed” and he never minded. I'd have hated it.)

There was another boy, born before me. He died of pneumonia at six months so I never knew him. His name was Welcome Peter George Klein. Mrs. Herndon, our neighbor across the road, says that when he was born she asked Mama, “Miss Flora, how come you named him Welcome Peter George? You ain't near run out of flowers yet. Not even boy flowers.” She says Mama told her, “One name sounds good as another when you get to be forty years old. I reckon I'm just tired of gardenin'. From here on out I'll just reach up and pick me one out of the air.”

Mama was forty-three when I was born. She picked my name out of the air. It made me feel different in the family, and at school, too.

Little Sophronia came four years later, and Mama named her for a childhood friend at Brick Store Community in Newton County where she grew up. Poor Sophie was what the country people speak of as “illy formed.” Her head was too big, and she never sat up by herself or talked. I have only one memory of her, lying on a blue blanket near the hearth like a limp doll, watching the logs flicker. Sophie lived only eighteen months.

When Mama was forty-seven, she had Carrie, called Tattie, and made a pet out of her. Mrs. Herndon says Tattie was the first child Mama had time to spoil.

Ever since my papa died, when I was thirteen and I went to live with Sister Maggie and Brother Hen in Mitchellville, their house has seemed more like home than the farm does.

I have papers to grade so I will close by saying I look forward to Saturday night. You forgot to tell me what time.

Sincerely,
Sanna K.

***

A
T THE
time, all
I
really knew about Sister Maggie and her husband, Mr. Henry Jolley, was the gossip I'd heard from Mr. Charlie in Mitchellville. But Sanna had told me how much they had done for her. Mayor Jolley had sent her through Shorter, a Baptist college for girls in Rome, Georgia, from which she graduated in 1915 with a degree in mathematics. Then she'd lived with them and taught fourth grade for two years in Mitchellville before coming to P.C.

“But I got so restless,” she'd told me as we sat on Miss Love's porch swing after church Sunday night. “Most of my friends were married and gone, and I wanted to make a new life for myself. One Sunday a missionary who was home from Africa talked at our church, hoping to recruit young people to the mission field, and I wanted to go. A college friend of mine had married a missionary and they went to China. Every time I had a letter from her, I'd say I'm going to be a missionary someday. Imagine, teaching heathen people about the love of Jesus Christ, and teaching them to read! All the time the man was talking about Africa, I felt God was calling me, telling me to go there. Even showing me the way. How to apply, where to get training.”