Leaving Cold Sassy (9780547527291) (7 page)

“Maybe so. But not her brains,” said Miss Alice Ann.

“You know what she's come home for? To git Campbell Junior and—”

The big clock in the hall struck. Mrs. Jones said, “I wonder what's helt Miss Love up. I got to git on home.”

Miss Alice Ann said she needed to get on, too. I heard the chairs rock free, knew the ladies had stood up, and decided to go out there and say howdy.

Just as I was about to open the screen door, I heard the preacher's wife say, “I didn't get to the watermelon cuttin'. Did you? Did you meet the new teachers?” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “They say one of'm is real foreign-lookin'.”

“That's Miss Klein,” Miss Alice Ann whispered back.

“C-L-I-N-E?” Miss Jones whispered. “That's an Irish name. We don't need any Irish Catholics in Progressive City.”

“Hit ain't spelt C-L-I-N-E. Hit's spelt K-L-E-I-N.”

I heard them sink back down into the rockers.

“Must be she's a Jew girl.”

“Sh-h-h, Miz Jones. Might be she's to home.”

“Only Jew we ever had here was Mr. Izzie Lieberman, who had the furniture store,” Mrs. Jones whispered. “They say he drank hot tea out of a tall glass. But everybody liked him.”

“Miss Klein ain't no Jewess. She went to the Methodist church with Miss Love Sunday.”

“Well, she must be some kind of hyphenated American,” said the preacher's wife.

“What you mean, hyph'nated?”

“Oh, there's Irish-Americans and German-Americans, and British-Americans, and I-talian-Americans and—well, hyphenated is what the politicians call all those.”

The chairs commenced rocking.

“Wonder why we don't say Indian-Americans instead of American Indians,” Miss Alice Ann mused. “Maybe because they got here first. What are we, Miz Jones? American-Americans?”

“Think, Miss Alice Ann. The hyphenateds aren't us. They're the immigrants. Like those Irish Catholics. They came over to this country starvin'. A potato famine drove'm here, and they ought to be thankin' the hands that fed them. But no, they're sidin' with the Kaiser in the war.”

“Why come?”

“Cause Ireland hates England. Always has. I read how up North a Irish-American will get yellow paint slapped on their house if they don't buy Liberty Bonds. German-Americans too, of course. I can see why German-Americans are pro-testin' us gettin' in the war—after all, we're fightin' their brothers and cousins. Still, if Miss Klein's got kinfolks in the German Army, it don't make sense to pay her forty dollars a month to teach school in Progressive City. Not with our boys over there in France gettin' gassed by the Kaiser and dyin' and all.”

For a minute or two neither lady spoke. Then Miss Alice Ann said, “I'm thinkin' on Mr. Izzie. Wonderin' why he went back to Germany.”

“They say he went back to get marrit.”

“Wonder is he fightin' in the Kaiser's army?”

“I doubt it. The Kaiser don't like Jews.”

“You know, Miz Jones, ever since Mr. Izzie left to go back to Germany, they ain't been any dark-skinned white folks in this town—not less'n you count that Armenian in the graveyard. Remember him? Come here sellin' per-fume soap and died on us, and weren't nothin' to do but bury him?”

“Law, I'd clean forgot about him!” exclaimed Mrs. Jones. “Remember the big fuss about whether he ought to be buried in the cemetery? Somebody had heard that Armenians are Christians, but nobody knew for certain.”

Miss Alice Ann sighed. “LeGrand Tribble donated his extra lot, remember? Said weren't nobody left in his fam'ly to put there, or to get mad at him for invitin' a stranger in, either one. And Brother Jones sure give that man a nice graveside ceremony, Miz Jones.”

“He thought it was the right thing. I mean in case he was a Christian.”

“Mr. Boozer said the reason all us ladies insisted on it, we liked his soap and he had them foreign good looks.” A moment of silence for the dead, and she added, “I don't see as he'll ever git a marker, though. Who'd pay for it?”

They stood up again, and I was halfway to the door when Mrs. Jones said, “Oh, I meant to ast you. What about Will Tweedy?” I drew back as they moved towards the steps. “Did he join the Army while I was gone?”

“Not as I know of.”

“I just don't see how he's managed to stay out. Nothin's wrong with him.”

Miss Alice Ann said the trouble was my daddy. “Mr. Hoyt just goes to pieces when anybody asts has Will joined up. Claims Will is a heap more use to the war on the home front than if he was a-totin' a gun.”

Mrs. Jones had just one question. “What could be more use to the war than him doin' his patriotic duty?”

I wanted to stalk out there and take up for myself and Papa too, but what could I say? “I've always been crazy about that boy,” added the preacher's wife, “but even before I left to go see about Sister, folks were sayin' looks like Will's a slacker. I don't think Mr. Hoyt ought to carry on so. He ain't the only daddy that cain't bear to think of his boy in foreign trenches.”

I retreated. Sneaked down the hall, out the back door and down the steps, and wandered into what used to be Granny Blakeslee's rose garden.

For the first time in my life I hated Cold Sassy and all it stood for. Call it Progressive City or Branch Water, I didn't care. “I don't belong here anymore,” I muttered to the rose bushes among the tangled expanse of jimson weed, honeysuckle, trumpet vine, and Johnson grass. I took a cigar and a match out of my shirt pocket, scratched the match across a rock, lit up, and stood there puffing smoke and staring—at nothing. I was suddenly overwhelmed by a great homesickness for Granny Blakeslee and Grandpa.

Granny had died when I was fourteen. Grandpa and I were out here cutting roses at daybreak on the morning of her funeral. I remembered how he had straightened up, indicating the dewy splendor of color around us with the stub of his left arm, and said, “Miss Mattie Lou shore was a fool about roses. Did you know, boy, she's got over sixty different kinds?” Later, as he was lining the open grave pit with roses, tears had spilled down on his cheeks.

That was June the fourteenth, 1906. Three weeks later, Grandpa Blakeslee told my mother and Aunt Loma he aimed to marry Miss Love Simpson, the young milliner at his store. He said Miss Mattie Lou was dead as she'd ever be and he needed him a housekeeper, and a wife would just be cheaper than hiring a colored woman. That afternoon he took Miss Love over to Jefferson in his mule-drawn buggy. They got married at the courthouse.

When Grandpa died the next May, I overheard Miss Alice Ann Boozer say, “It serves him right, after the way he done Miss Mattie Lou. Married that Yankee woman and didn't live a year,” Cold Sassy eventually accepted the fact of the marriage. But even now, ten years later, nobody ever let anybody forget it.

Her first summer as a widow, Miss Love told me she intended to keep up Miss Mattie Lou's rose garden. But her talent was making hats and money, not growing roses. After Sampson was born, in February 1908, the sixty varieties were on their own—or, as we say in the South, “own their own.”

I could have waited for Miss Sanna Klein another fifteen minutes and still made the train, but could I really compete with a Harvard lawyer named Blankenship who could quote Shakespeare? I didn't even like Shakespeare. I might have if the teachers hadn't made us read all those footnotes. I could do a pretty good job quoting “To a Daffodil” or “To a Mouse”—
Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie, o what a panic's in thy breastie
—but that's hardly a love sonnet.

If this Hugh Junior was so smart, why wasn't he in the Army? I bet his daddy was busy pulling strings to get him a cushy lawyer job in Washington.

I left Granny's garden and cut through a gap in the hedge to the backyard of the house next door, where Miss Effie Belle Tate and Mr. Bubba used to live. Their niece, Miss Hyta Mae Brown, had a few boarders and ran a public dining room. Miss Love's three teachers took all their meals over there.

The smell of vegetable soup drifted from the kitchen window as I walked by. One of the cooks, Evaline, came out to the side of the back porch and poured her soapy dish water on the fig bush. “Evenin', Mist' Will!” she called. “Dish water sho' do make figs grow. You wont som'a my good ole soup and cawnbread, son? Come on in de kitchen, I dish you up some. Hit'll put meat on dem bones you got for laigs.”

“That's hard to pass up, Evaline, but I got to catch a train.” I walked as far as Miss Hyta Mae's pigeon cote before I turned towards South Main, far enough to avoid being seen from Miss Love's veranda.

If I passed anybody on the sidewalk, if any children were playing in their yards, if any lady waved at me from her porch, I didn't notice. Walking fast, puffing furiously on the cigar, I kept repeating the name Progressive City, over and over. At the depot, I stared at the sign as if it had been put up only that morning. For ten years it had declared this was
PROGRESSIVE CITY
to train passengers, and for ten years I'd kept reading it
COLD SASSY.

Well, no more. All of a sudden the name Cold Sassy was as dead as Grandpa and Granny, and my old dog T.R., and Miss Effie Belle and Mr. Bubba. Growing up, I'd been made to feel like I was the town's great hope for the future. Everybody proud of me, ready to make allowances. Now this was Progressive City, and I was just somebody who used to live here. My home town had gone on without me in the six years I'd been in Athens. And I had gone on without it, except for family.

The truth was, I had outgrown Progressive City. I wondered why I never understood that before.

***

The next day I saw the house in Mitchellville where Sanna Klein's sister lived, and where Sanna had grown up.

T
HERE'S NO
direct railroad line to Mitchellville. You got there by train; then somebody has to meet you five miles away at the depot in 1888, Georgia, a town named for the year it got incorporated. When my train pulled in, old Mr. Charlie Cadenhead was already there, waiting in a battered Model-T Ford.

Mr. Charlie ran a dairy farm just south of Mitchellville and had done considerable cross-breeding of cattle. And Professor Harris, who ran the county agent program, wanted the dairyman's figures regarding increase or decrease in milk production.

Mr. Charlie was a short, white-haired, peculiar-shaped man. Had a big square head, thick neck, massive chest, bulging stomach, small hips, short arms, and short thin legs. He had on a blue denim shirt, a big straw hat, and overalls, and he smelled of chewing tobacco and hay.

Soon as he found out my home town was Progressive City, he said, “Y'all got a new teacher this year, Miss Sanna Klein. She's the prettiest little thang I ever seen. You met her yet?”

“Yessir.”

He didn't give me time to say more. Spitting out the window as we bounced on a rough dirt road with nothing but woods and farmland to either side, he shouted above the motor's racket, “I tell you what, Mr. Tweedy. Iffen I was fifteen year younger and not marrit, little Sanna wouldn't never have even got to P.C. I said so to her, on the steps of the post office, day before she left here. She just smiled and patted my arm.” Mr. Charlie honked at two boys walking on the road, and waved as we passed, leaving them in a wake of dust. “I told her, ‘I reckon you heard how teachers don't last more'n a year in that town.' Just teasin', you know, but Miss Sanna thought I meant they git fired. I told her, ‘No'm, they git marrit.' She cain't blush, Mr. Tweedy, on account of she's got that dark complexion. But she looked mighty flustered, sayin' marriage was the fartherest thang from her mind. I said, ‘Yes'm, but everybody knows a town's got to keep gittin' in good new bloodlines if it's go'n keep a-growin'—just like me with my dairy herd.'”

We were on the little wagon road that led up to his farmhouse, and Mr. Charlie turned to give me a wide grin and a wink. “Are you a single man, Mr. Tweedy?”

“Look out, sir!” I shouted. A big white hen, frantic and squawking, was back-and-forthing across the road not knowing which way to go. But when she decided the only way to go was up, she nearly hit the windshield in a panic of squawks and flailing wings.

Mr. Charlie stuck his head out the window and shouted back at her, “You dang dummy!” Then he turned to me and grumped, “That one's ready for the pot. Too old to lay aiggs, but she's Miss Emma's pet.”

I saw the herd, copied Mr. Charlie's figures, helped him and Miss Emma eat a big dinner, and asked her if she'd give me the recipe for her whipped cream and chocolate pie for my mama—“that is, if you don't keep it secret.”

Driving back through Mitchellville, Mr. Charlie went down a side street and slowed almost to a stop in front of a large white frame house. “That's where little Miss Sanna Klein growed up,” he explained. “Come here when she was a little girl to live with the Henry Jolleys. Miss Maggie is her older sister. Mr. Henry's mayor of Mitchellville and has got his hands in just about every business around here. Owns the bank and sawmill and a little factory makin' shuttles out of dogwood for textile mills, and a furniture factory. That one's turnin' out rifle butts now for the U.S. Army. The mayor owns considerable land, too. Buys it cheap on the courthouse square whenever his bank forecloses on somebody. They's some that faults him, with good reason, but he shore done right by little Sanna, sendin' her th'ew four year at college like she was his blood kin. Well, you got a train to ketch.”

Going on through town, Mr. Charlie waved towards a building and said that was Mayor Jolley's bank.

“The mayor is sump'm to see. Must weigh four hundret pounds. Everthin' bout him is big, cept he ain't tall. His whole face and head is fat—fat ears, fat lips, and his eyelids so swole up with fat you cain't hardly see his eyes. His face is always red, mainly cause he's bad to drank. That's his main fault. He thinks bootleggers are man's best friend. They say he told the sheriff to let them stills alone long as the boys don't hurt nobody. They pay him back in free moonshine.