Leaving Cold Sassy (9780547527291) (13 page)

I begged Miss Hyta to come talk to my class about George Washington, but she says everybody already knows about her and him. She offered to come talk about the women's suffrage movement or the Women's Christian Temperance Union, but warned me that certain men in Progressive City would want me fired if she did either one.

I was about to ask her about living in the Panama Canal Zone when one of the cooks rushed in and said, “Lawdy, Miss Hyta, come quick! Yo monkey loose in de kitchen! He done made a gran' mess wid my custard!”

You'd told me about the monkey, but I thought he stayed in a cage in the barn. It gives me the creeps just thinking about him. I can't even stand a dog in the house.

With best regards,
Sanna

***

I was crazy about Hyta Mae Brown. I think I halfway fell in love with her when she came to Cold Sassy in 1910. I was eighteen then, and I guess she was about ten years older. Not pretty or anything, but there was something quick and special about her, almost electric, and she had sad eyes.

I'd never known a lady before who said exactly what she thought about anything and everything, as if she had nothing to lose anymore. Her mouth was usually going ninety-to-nothing, but you never learned much about her except the George Washington stuff and her life in the Canal Zone. Her mother was dead, and she had gone to Panama to keep house for her daddy. That was in 1904. The French had given up on digging the canal because of yellow fever and malaria, and her daddy, a civil engineer, went there to help clear out the swamps where mosquitoes bred. There were no schools. Miss Hyta tutored a bunch of American children in the French cottage where they lived. She liked telling how termites ate up the floors every two or three years and government carpenters replaced them free.

Other than such as that you never heard Miss Hyta talk about herself. Nothing personal, I mean. Frolic Flournoy, the postmaster in P.C., said she mailed a letter every Monday to a man in the Canal Zone named Mr. G. Leeds Wildman, and letters came from him to her, sometimes two or three at a time, but nobody dared ask her who he was, and she never mentioned him.

As I explained to Sanna, Miss Hyta was still an outsider in Progressive City, her and the squirrel monkey both, despite they'd been here seven years. Miss Hyta's daddy had died of malaria and she came to P.C. to live with Miss Effie Belle Tate and Mr. Bubba, her mother's sister and brother. Mr. Bubba died the next year at age 105, and that's when Miss Effie Belle started renting out rooms.

One paying guest I remember was an old lady named Mrs. Merkle. If she was going somewhere, even for just an hour, she'd take a spool of black thread and run it from the knob of her hall door to the bedposts and through drawer pulls on the dresser, all around the room to her closet door. The thread was never broken. One time four old maids were rooming there, Miss Rachel, Miss Jessie, Miss Grace, and Miss Bessie. Miss Grace had stock in the Coca-Cola Company and lived on her dividends. When she got too old to go down for meals, Miss Hyta or Miss Effie Belle took her a tray upstairs three times a day with no extra pay for it. Miss Grace kept saying she'd leave Miss Effie Belle her Coca-Cola stock, but when she died her will said it was to go to the American Red Cross.

After she died and Miss Bessie went to live with her sister, Miss Hyta and Miss Effie Belle decided to fix up two apartments, meaning a tiny stove and sink were installed. Mrs. Eubanks lived in one of them. She put coffee grounds and water in a pan and hard-boiled an egg in it while the coffee brewed. We always hoped she washed the egg good first. She also sprinkled psilum seeds on her oatmeal. Psilum, which she called persilum, was for her colon. She's the only woman I ever heard talk about her colon. “The seeds swell up in the digestive track,” she said. “They keep me reg'lar.”

I once had to go get a dead rat out of the closet for Mrs. Eubanks.

A retired Baptist preacher and his wife lived in the other apartment, upstairs. The lady was crazy. One day she got tired of washing dishes and just threw the dishpan out the window, soapy water and dishes included. The dishes were English Wedgwood brought from the Canal Zone.

After that, Miss Effie Belle changed the apartments back to rooms and decided to start a boarding house. On account of Miss Hyta's monkey, it wasn't easy to hire help or get customers. But good food soon outweighed the zoo, and people from all over town got to coming there for dinner. When Miss Effie Belle died in 1914, Miss Hyta inherited the house and business.

Which is why she and Sanna were talking in the dining room that day after school.

T
HE
W
EDNESDAY
before Thanksgiving turned out rainy and cold, which meant driving to Mitchellville was out of the question. However, by then it had been decided that, rain or shine, I would be eating my turkey with the Jolleys. Sanna was to leave P.C. Wednesday afternoon and I would join her at the station in Athens, where she had to change trains.

The Athens depot was an anthill of goings and comings. University students, old folks, and families were all trying to get somewhere for Thanksgiving. I watched one tattered poor-white family running single file across the tracks, scared they'd missed their train. The daddy was first, followed by the mama and a string of stairstep younguns. The littlest one, struggling to keep up, kept yelling, “Wait for baby, dod-dammit! Wait for baby!”

Sanna and I managed to get seats together in the passenger car. “Just think,” I said, “I've got you all to myself!”

She laughed. “Look around, Will. We aren't exactly alone.”

The seats were all full. The conductor was taking up tickets. “Don't see a soul,” I said, and touched her cheek.

Moments later, a stout farm woman wearing a big toothless smile and a man's old wool overcoat lumbered down the aisle, aimed right at us. Above the
whoosh
of steam and grinding of wheels as the train pulled out of the station, she shouted, “Lawd, if it ain't li'l Sanna Maria Klein!”

“Why, it's Mrs. Herndon!” Sanna exclaimed. She rose quickly, held out her arms. They hugged like long-lost relatives. “Oh, I'm so glad to see you! It's been years!”

I stood up too, of course.

“Lemme look at you, Sanna Maria!” Holding on to a seat, Mrs. Herndon stepped back a little. “Lawd, if you ain't done growed up and got ladyfied! But I'd know you for one a-them Klein girls anywheres. All y'all got yore mama's looks—black-headed, and that brunette skin and them black eyes. Who's your mister?”

“Oh, I'm sorry.” Sanna put her hand on my arm and introduced me. “Mrs. Herndon, this is Mr. Tweedy.”

“Hidy-do, sir.”

“Mrs. Herndon lives down the road a piece from Mama,” Sanna explained. To Mrs. Herndon she said, “We're, uh, on our way to...to Mitchellville. For Thanksgiving.”

“You ought to be a-goin' home for Thanksgivin', Sanna Maria.”

“How's Mama?”

“Good as common, I reckon. But she complains she don't see you much since yore daddy died.”

“Well, it's hard to get there and—I mean, I stay so busy...”

“Hit grieves her, Sanna Maria. She thinks you done got shamed of the fam'ly.”

I could tell that Sanna was flustered. She said, “You know that's not so.”

“I know it and you know it. But she don't.”

It was an awkward moment. I said, “Take my seat, Miz Herndon, so y'all can visit.”

“Thank you, sir, but I got a seat of my own, and it looks like I better go on back to it.” The passenger car started rocking. She turned and staggered up the aisle.

Sanna called after her, “Tell Mama you saw me, hear? And give my best to Li'l George and them when you get home.”

Without looking back she shouted, “Yes'm, I'll do that.”

As we settled into our seats again, I wondered about Sanna and her mama. Had Sanna thought about going to the farm for Thanksgiving? “You're twitching your shoulders, Will. What's bothering you?”

“Nothin'. Just thinkin' about Miz Herndon.” I smiled at her. “You know, right now you remind me of a chicken that just got its head pecked by a brood hen.”

She didn't like that. There was a long silence between us, underlaid by train sounds and sprinkled with coughs and chatter from other passengers. Somebody going to the next car opened the end door, letting in a blast of cold damp air and loud clickety-clacks.

“Hey, Sanna Maria Klein.” I leaned my head close to hers. “You never did tell me how your mama picked that name out of the air.”

She didn't answer. Just sat watching trees move backwards past the train window. Then, rifling through her handbag, she pulled out a little mirror, surveyed her face, tucked a loose strand of black hair under her red hat. I tried again. “I don't know why, but Sanna Maria sounds kind of familiar.”

She had gone back to staring out the window. Still not looking at me, she said, “Do you remember the names of Columbus's ships?”

“What's that got to do with it?”

“Just tell me the names of Columbus's ships.”

“Okay, they were the
Nina,
the
Pinta,
and the
Sanna Maria.
” I pronounced the last one without the
t,
the way I'd always said and heard it. Light dawned as the train car rocked in a sudden buffet of rain and wind. “You mean...?”

With a little sigh, she said, “I'm afraid so. I was born on Columbus Day, and Mama was still trying to decide on a name when Lily Maude came home from school, singsonging, ‘The-Nina-the-Pinta-and-the-Sanna-Maria.' She went on like that all afternoon—'the-Nina-the-Pinta-the-Sanna-Maria'—and Mama started thinking that Nina or Sanna Maria, either one, would make a pretty name for the baby. Me.”

Sanna still wasn't looking at me. She was staring through the rain that now sheeted the train windows. “I've hated my name ever since Columbus Day in the first grade.”

“I don't see...”

“The teacher wrote the names of the ships on the blackboard and made us recite them out loud over and over, just the way Lily Maude had done. ‘The-Nina-the-Pinta-and-the-Sanna-Maria.' I remember Miss Dot slapping out the beat with a yardstick.”

Trees kept sailing backwards, followed by more trees and cotton fields and an occasional lonely unpainted farmhouse, but Sanna didn't see them. She was looking inside herself. “You may not believe it, Will, but I was a very shy child. It took a lot of nerve, but that day I halfway raised my hand, and Miss Dot nodded. I stood up and proudly announced, ‘Today is my birthday. I'm six years old. I was named for Columbus's ship!' I thought Miss Dot would say how nice. What she said was, ‘In that case, your name's not spelled right.' She turned to the blackboard and underlined the
Santa
part of
Santa Maria
and told me to copy it thirty times. All the children laughed. This was a one-room school, Will—first through seventh grades—and everybody laughed. Even my brother, Joe Pye. Even Lily Maude.”

The train slowed as we passed a small community of wood frame houses, then screeched and hissed to a stop across the road from a little store and a small church named Hard Creek Baptist. When the door opened to let an old man get off, cold air swept through the car and set us shivering. We were moving again before Sanna said, “From that day, I never opened my mouth in class unless I got called on. If I didn't speak, I couldn't say anything stupid and get laughed at. Will, there's a little girl in my class now, shyest child you ever saw. She makes perfect grades on her papers, but if I call on her, she can't say a word. I've quit calling on her.”

She looked up at me with a little smile that turned off as quickly as it had turned on. “I copied
Santa Maria
thirty times, but that night I got out the family Bible and found the names. Of course the only one I could read was mine: Sanna Maria Klein. That's how Mama had written it, so that was my name—no matter what Miss Dot said.”

I ached for the shy little girl she'd been. I longed to take her in my arms, soothe her with tender kisses, stroke her hair. But we were on a train, and she wouldn't have let me touch her anyhow. So I just asked what did her mother say about it.

“I didn't tell Mama,” said Sanna. “None of us ever went to Mama about anything. We went to Papa. That night he wrote a note for me to take Miss Dot, saying he wanted the spelling to stay the way it was. That didn't stop the children, though. For weeks they taunted me. I hated them and I hated my name. When I went to live with Sister Maggie, I asked her to please just call me Sanna, and that's been my name ever since. I guess I'll always be Sanna Maria to Mama and Mrs. Herndon and everybody else in Mount Sinai Community—the same way Progressive City is still Cold Sassy to Miss Love and Doc Slaughter—and you.”

“Not to me. Not anymore. Anyway, at least you've got one thing to be thankful for, Sanna.”

She looked up at me, puzzled.

“What if you'd been born on Christmas Day? You might have been named Santa Claus and called Sannie Claus.”

“Don't make fun of me, Will.”

“I love you, Sanna. If your name was Issie or Pocahontas or King George, I'd still love you.” I put my hand on hers and she let it stay—for about two seconds.

“You want to hear my mother's name, Will? Mama had a great-uncle, Wilhelm Barnhart, and when she was born he declared her a special child. ‘Like one born with a caul over her face,' he said, and claimed the right to name her. What he came up with was Flora Plantena Lemma Sadai Zetta Susannah Greta Margarethe Utilly Meety Keesy Barnhart. It's all there in the Barnhart family Bible. When Mama was little she'd have to recite all her names for preachers and visiting relatives, and she enjoyed the attention. She was just called Flora. Being Flora was why she got so interested in flower names...” She sighed again.