Cold Sassy Tree (3 page)

Gourd leaves that yesterday drooped down like a hundred little half-closed umbrellas were now freshened with dew. But it was already hot, great goodness, and the dirt was powder-dry. I hadn't weeded since the last rain. I started pulling up the grass and weeds as if they were Miss Love Simpson—like I thought getting rid of them would get rid of her and bring Granny Blakeslee back from the grave and let us be a normal family again.

Nothing had been normal since Granny died. Mama was
grieving herself to death, Papa was sterner than ever, Aunt Loma was meaner, the laughter had gone out of Grandpa, and if he was about to sell the store, it wouldn't of upset everybody any more than him aiming to marry his milliner.

Worst of all, for me, was being in mourning.

I just didn't think I could stand any more mourning. For three whole weeks of summer vacation they hadn't let me play baseball or go fishing or anything. I couldn't mention the camping trip I'd been planning all spring with Pink Predmore and Lee Roy Sleep and Smiley Snodgrass, and I had missed a chance to ride in a Buick automobile all the way to Atlanta. Pink's uncle over in Athens invited him and me to go so we could fix his flat tires and push the car up hills—and out of ditches if it rained and the roads got slick. Pink went, but Mama wouldn't let me go. Also, I didn't get to go downtown for the Fourth of July parade, and they hadn't let me read the funny paper since the day Granny passed on.

Papa never had let us read the funny paper on Sunday. That was a sin. We had to save it till Monday. But now we were having to save the funnies indefinitely, and sometimes the newspaper got taken to start a fire with before I could tear out the page. The Katzenjammer Kids had dropped clean out of my life. Seems like I missed them about as much as I missed Granny. Maybe more. They were up there on the shelf in Mama's chiftbrobe with things happening to them, whereas Granny wasn't anywhere.

I wished she could come back for just a minute. I'd ask her wouldn't she hate my giving up the funnies and the automobile trip when there wasn't a thing I could do for her anymore. Despite she had wanted a nice funeral, I knew she wouldn't expect a boy to walk around with a long face the rest of his life.

I was just fixing to quit weeding and rest a spell under the big hickernut tree when I noticed my shadow was underfoot, nearly straight down. It must be right at dinner time. Gosh, Mama had told me to watch out for Papa and Grandpa. Dashing past the barn, the smokehouse, and Mama's flower pit, I ran through the house and got to the front door just as Papa hurried up the walk. He was by himself.

"Where's Grandpa at?" I asked.

"Where's Mama at?" he asked. He was sweaty and red-faced from rushing home and he looked upset.

"She's gone to bed, sir. I think she's sick."

Even now, eight years later, I remember how my papa looked that day—like a thundercloud, but also like a pitiful, lightning-struck tree. Taking the stairs two at a time, he didn't even notice me following behind.

As he burst into the darkened second-floor bedroom, he said, "Mary Willis, guess what! Your daddy just left in his buggy with Miss Love Simpson! Said they were off to Jefferson to get married!"

Mama bolted up. "You mean already?" she screeched. "Today?"

"You knew it?" roared Papa. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't dream he meant today!" Then she blurted out what all Grandpa had said that morning. "Hoyt, he said it didn't matter, said Ma havin'just passed away didn't matter! He said ... he said Ma was d-dead as she—" she started crying. "Dead as—oh, Hoyt, I c-cain't bear to repeat his w-words! He said ... Ma was dead as she'd ever b-be!"

Peeping in the doorway, I saw my mother was laying across the bed, on her side, pressing a handkerchief to her mouth. Papa had sat down by her and was patting her shoulder. He kissed her forehead. "There, there, Mary Willis hon. Don't carry on so. I admit it, I was surprised myself. But Lord knows, Mr. Blakeslee needs somebody to see after him. Hon, I'm sure Miss Love will be good to him. She'll—"

"She'll get the store, that's what she'll do!" cried Mama. "And this house! Maybe everything he owns! What if she has a baby, Hoyt? Did you think about that? And what if she marries again after Pa dies? Oh, Hoyt...."

I knew my mother thought the marriage was a scandal, but this was the first I guessed that she saw Miss Love as a scoundrel, a villain, out to steal hers and Aunt Loma's inheritance.

Slowly it dawned on me that if Grandpa Blakeslee died and left Miss Love the store, she really could marry again and let her new husband run it. And if he was somebody like Son Black, he might just push my daddy and Uncle Camp clean out. The threat was sobering even to me.

But somehow the picture didn't fit. Maybe Grandpa didn't care what folks said or thought about him, but he cared a lot about Mama and Papa and Aunt Loma. I mean, he didn't
like
Aunt Loma a lot, but he loved her. Also, he set great store on a man doing right by his family.

Peeping in again, I saw Papa had his arm around Mama. She was crying. "When a woman m-marries a man old enough to be her f-father," she said, "you can b-b-bet your ... bottom dollar it's for ... w-what she can g-g-get out of him.... Pa's a fool, Hoyt! And I just don't see h-how we can start all over when he d-dies. Oh, Hoyt...!"

She kept wailing and Papa kept patting her. I didn't know what to think about all that, but I knew I didn't want them to catch me out there listening. Tiptoeing around to the other side of a golden oak bureau that was in the hall near their bedroom door, I squatted down.

"I'm sick over the whole thing," Mama muttered. "Just sick! No tellin' what kind of fam'ly she comes from. There's a milliner in Athens who trained with Love in Baltimore and she says Love's daddy fought on the Union side in the War. That by itself should of made Pa think twice, feelin' like he does about Yankees. Hoyt, we don't even know what her father does, for heaven's sake, or whether the fam'ly has any education or background, or any standin' at all in their community." Mama was a great one for not marrying beneath yourself.

Papa argued that the family surely must be educated, judging by the way Miss Love talked so proper. "She seems like somebody with background."

"Well, one thing I know, Miz Predmore says the only letters Love Simpson gets from Baltimore are from the millinery company that trained her. The postmaster told her. We figure she must be ashamed of her folks. If she don't write them and don't hear from them and don't ever say pea-turkey about them to anybody, something's wrong."

"Please, hon, don't let yourself get all wrought up."

"Her fam'ly could be common as Camp's folks, for all we know. Ignorant. No-count. Even low-down. I still don't see how Loma could of married into that sharecropper white trash. With all her education and advantages, she's got a daddy-in-law who cain't read or write and a mother-in-law who dips snuff. And Camp's sisters work in the fields just like colored girls. Thank the Lord they didn't come to the weddin'."

Papa couldn't stand it when Mama got to low-rating Uncle
Camp's people. "Now, hon, that don't have anything to do with your pa."

"It does, too. Even if Love's folks ain't ignorant, they could be dead-beats. Jesus said take up your cross and follow Me, but He didn't ast us to go out and nail ourselves to a board. Some fine day, mark my words, Love's fam'ly will get off the train from Baltimore to come live off of Pa. Just like Camp's folks are go'n be livin' off of he and Loma before it's over. Or maybe livin' with them. Only reason Loma married Camp, she was mad cause Pa wouldn't let her go off with those actors. That's just exactly why. She was bound and determined to get her way about something—just to spite Pa."

It was true. A touring Shakespeare company had let Loma try out after their performance in Cold Sassy's brush arbor and then asked her to join the troupe. Everybody in town said Lord help Loma if she ends up an actress. Even if she got rich and famous and did command performances for Edward VII, like she said she would, she couldn't ever live down the taint.

But Grandpa said, "Loma, I ain't a-go'n let you do it. Ain't no tellin' what kind of a life you'd live with them kind a-folks."

She stomped and cried and carried on something awful. "I wish I was a boy so I could go off on my own!"

"I wish you was a boy, too, but you ain't," Grandpa retorted, "and you ain't go'n be no actress, neither. So hesh up." Loma went to her room and threw things, but Grandpa didn't hear it. He had gone on back to the store.

I myself used to wonder why Loma didn't find some more actors to run off with—a thing she wanted to do—instead of marrying Campbell Williams just to spite her daddy. Well, and now her daddy had married Miss Love—maybe partly to spite Cold Sassy.

"Loma and Pa, they're just alike." Mama was fuming. "They don't ever consider anybody else. Neither one of them. When I think of the nice widders Pa's age who'd be happy to marry him, I don't see why he had to pick an old maid from Up North who's had to work for a livin'."

In Cold Sassy, ladies who work for pay are looked down on—except schoolteachers or widder women with no close kinfolks to turn to. Milliners are considered in a class with store clerks and telephone hello-girls.

"Why wouldn't Pa let me look after him?" Mama went on. "We could of moved up to his house."

"And go back to usin' lamps and privies?" asked Papa irritably. "And give up Queenie?" Grandpa didn't have electricity or running water and didn't believe in hiring colored help.

That silenced my mother, but only for a minute. In a new burst of tears, she said, "Hoyt, Pa has disgraced the whole f-f-fam'ly. The whole t-town!"

Most likely Papa was patting her shoulder again. "It's go'n turn out all right, hon. Just don't forget I work for him, and Camp works for him. Y'all have got to be nice to Miss Love. Now, hon, I need to get back to the store. Please, let's go eat."

"You and Will eat." Mama's muffled voice came out of her pillow. "I'm not hungry. The nerve, that woman thinkin' she can take Ma's place! And everybody's go'n say—you mark my words—they go'n say Pa must have been sweet on her from the day he laid eyes on her. It's like he just couldn't hardly wait for Ma to p-p-pass!"

I guess my mother didn't notice that Papa had left the room. I waited till he got downstairs before I crept down myself. I couldn't stand hearing her keep on talking against Grandpa.

I
USED TO TRY
to undress Grandpa Blakeslee's face in my mind and think how he'd look clean-shaved. I never could picture him like that, but I liked looking at him the way he was—his eyes merry, his upper lip hidden under the droopy mustache, his bushy gray beard usually stained here and there with tobacco juice.

Most people thought I was his spittin' image. Granny used to say I walked like Grandpa, twitched my shoulders like him—"cain't neither one a-y'all set still"—and looked like him "cept for yore eyes bein' brown and his'n so blue, and the fact yore nose ain't humped." Grandpa's nose had got broke three times, and it showed. First time, he was trying to fly: "I was maybe twelve year old. Jumped out'n a hayloft holdin' a dang umbrella and it turned inside out." The other two times, his nose got busted in fistfights.

At fifty-nine, Grandpa still had all his teeth, which should be a comfort to Miss Love. He only wore glasses to read. He was lean, strong, straight, and taller than most men—the way I was taller than most fourteen-year-old boys. My grandmother was small. She could stand under his arm if he stuck it straight out, and never could keep up with him when they walked together. His long legs swung in giant strides; she trotted at his heels like a good little dog.

Grandpa was a buster all right.

He was a Democrat, a Baptist, and a devout Confederate veteran. The words
Abraham Lincoln
couldn't be spoke in his presence.
His only hand was soft and smooth, not like the rough, red, calloused hands of farmers. In a fight he used the elbow of his left arm as a deflector and his "fightin' right" to punch with.

The fights were embarrassing to the family but real entertaining to the Baptists, for he would stand up at the next Wednesday night prayer meeting, in the testimonial and confessing part, and tell the Lord all about it. One Wednesday night he ended a long prayer with "Lord, forgive me for fittin' thet man yesterd'y—though Thou knowest if I had it to do over agin I'd hit him harder."

Grandpa was a good shot with a pistol. He never went hunting, but he could prop a Winchester rifle on a fence and shoot into the mouth of a Coca-Cola bottle fifty feet away and not even chip the glass, except for the hole at the bottom where the bullet came out.

I never could figure why Papa and Mama let him keep his quart jars of moonshine in the closet in our company room. At the time, Papa made and drank locust beer, and Mama made scuppernong and blackberry wines for church communion. After the Georgia legislature declared a prohibition against alcoholic beverages in 1907, Papa quit making or drinking beer—he believed in being law-abiding—and the churches started using fruit nectars instead of wine. But even before Prohibition, neither Papa nor Mama could stand whiskey-drinking.

Yet there stood those jars of corn whiskey on our closet shelf.

Why couldn't my daddy ask him to keep them down at the store? Or after Granny died and wasn't there anymore to disallow it, why didn't he take the stuff to his own house?

My parents never once spoke of his drinking in front of me or Mary Toy. Acted like he just went in the company room to hitch up his suspenders or something. But I doubt they could of said anything even if he hadn't been Mama's papa and Papa's employer. Grandpa had the manner of a king or duke: when he said do or don't do something, you said yessir before you thought. And if he said he meant to do something—like keep his corn whiskey in your closet or marry Miss Love Simpson—if you couldn't say yessir, you sure-dog didn't say no sir. Not out loud.

What I admired most was his flair for practical jokes. That was a way of life you could learn early, as I discovered when I was little bitty and Cudn Doodle told me to lick a frozen wagon wheel
and my tongue stuck to the ice. Playing jokes didn't have to stop because you got grown. Grandpa must of been twenty-five at least when he turned over the privy at the depot with a Yankee railroad bigwig in it.