On the way I met Sampson. “What you got there, son?” I asked.
“A present for Campbell Junior.” He proudly held up a big contraption of nailed-together wood scraps. “See, sir, he can mash this and that and that, and then turn this magic wand down towards Georgia and wish himself right back home. If he does everything right, the wish will come true. I invented it!”
After inspecting and admiring and not saying it had about as much chance of going to New York as Campbell Junior had of staying here, I asked Sampson if he thought Miss Klein was a good teacher.
He said she sure was strict.
I asked if Miss Klein and Miss Clack and Miss Hazelhurst had got home yet.
“No, sir. All the teachers stayed in after school. They had to go to the principal’s office,” he said, spinning a loosely nailed stick on his invention. “I don’t think they’ve been bad. They just had to go meet.”
“Yeah, well, son, I’m on my way to your house. It’s time to inspect the livestock.” Every so often I’d stop by to check over Papa’s cow, Grandpa’s old mule, Miss Love’s gelding, known as Mr. Beautiful, and Sampson’s pony, Miss H, named by him when he was four and learning the alphabet. “You still puttin’ that salve on H’s leg?” I asked.
The boy hedged. “Uh, most of the time Loomis does it, Uncle Will. Mother pays him to feed and water, so I just asked him to doctor H’s leg, too, while he’s at it.”
“It’s not your place to tell Loomis what to do.”
“He said he’d be glad to. Just glad to.”
“Well, you’re old enough now to do all the stable work. You’re not even feedin’ and curryin’ the pony?”
“Why should I, Uncle Will? I don’t ride her anymore. She’s got so little, and all she wants to do is walk or trot. Hey, just let me run give this to Campbell Junior. I’ll be right back. I want to show you my new circus trick on Mr. Beautiful!”
“You’re gettin’ too big for your britches, but, you’re not big enough for that tall horse. Stay off of him, Sampson.”
His face reddened. “Mother lets me. I don’t have to mind you.”
“And I don’t have to fool with a smart aleck named Simpson.” I turned to walk away. He grabbed my arm.
“Please don’t call me Simpson, Uncle Will. Cause of Miss Klein, everybody at school calls me Simpleton now. Please, Uncle Will? I was just mad at you. I didn’t mean it, sir.”
I looked at him hard. “Try being a friend to Campbell Junior this afternoon, Sampson. He’s in bad need of one right now.”
6
WHEN I got back to Miss Love’s house after checking the animals, I was naturally hoping Sanna Klein would be there. She wasn’t, and it occurred to me that even if she came in before I had to leave, she probably wouldn’t be by herself. So I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote her a note, using my office stationery with the letterhead Cooperative Extension Service, Georgia State College of Agriculture, Athens, Georgia.
***
Dear Miss Klein,
I would still like to see you Sunday night provided you get in from Jefferson early enough. I plan on being in Cold Sassy anyway, so you don’t need to let me know ahead. I’ll come down to Miss Love’s right after supper to see if you’re back yet, and we can go to church. I often spend Sunday night with my folks and ride the early freight train back to Athens next morning.
Please excuse the eccentric appearance of this paper. It’s been folded up in my pants pocket.
Hoyt Willis Tweedy
***
Miss Love kept envelopes on top of her desk. I wrote “To Miss Klein” on one and dropped the letter in the teachers’ mail basket on the hall table by the stairs. I couldn’t help noticing Miss Klein had a letter there from Mrs. Henry K. Jolley in Mitchellville, and two more in long business envelopes with the embossed return address Blankenship, Crowe, and Blankenship, Attorneys-at-Law, Jefferson, Georgia. In a bold scrawl above the print was written “Hugh A. Blankenship, Jr.”
I knew about the legal firm of Blankenship and Crowe. I used to go over to Jefferson sometimes for court week with Pink Predmore and his lawyer-daddy, and if it was a trial that amounted to anything, you could count on Mr. Blankenship or Mr. Crowe representing one side or the other. I was discouraged for a second or two but tossed my note in the basket anyway.
I blame everything that’s happened between Sanna and me on the sight of that name scrawled so bold and confident, as if he and his daddy’s firm had legal rights to her. Before that moment I’d only been smitten by Sanna Klein’s beauty. Suddenly I was determined to marry her.
That’s what I was thinking as I headed for the front door, but I stopped in my tracks when I realized that the veranda was occupied. I recognized the voice of Miss Alice Ann Boozer. “Did you know Loma Blakeslee Williams come in on the train last week from New York City?”
“Everybody this side the cemetery knows it,” said a voice I couldn’t quite place. “Why you think I wouldn’t know a thing like that?”
“Cause you been gone, Miz Jones,” said Miss Alice Ann.
Of course. The other lady was the wife of the Reverend Brother Belie Jones.
I knew I ought to go speak to them, but not being in much of a mood for woman talk, I tiptoed over to Miss Love’s wing chair by the window and sat down with a magazine. But I couldn’t read with those voices floating right in. I heard Miss Alice Ann ask Mrs. Jones how was her sister.
“Sister’s really on the down-go,” said the preacher’s wife. “But I couldn’t just stay on there till Kingdom Come. Like I told her, Brother Jones needs lookin’ after too. So yesterd’y I hired her a colored girl and took the train home.”
“Where is it she lives? I never can remember.”
“A little coal-minin’ town—Brilliant, in Alabama.”
“Funny name.”
I could hear rocking chairs just going to town out there. Then one stopped and Miss Alice Ann spoke again. “When’s Miss Love go’n git here?”
“Any minute now. I ‘phoned down at the store, and she said meet her here, she’d be on terreckly. I’ve got my good fall hat in this hatbox. She’s go’n make it over. I’m sure glad you happened along to keep me comp’ny.”
With the chairs going rockity-rockity-rockity, I didn’t have to be out there to see Mrs. Jones, a tall stout lady in her sixties with swimmy eyes and a red face, probably fanning herself with a piece of cardboard, or Miss Alice Ann, so fat she didn’t have a lap and so short her little feet barely touched the floor.
Years ago Miss Alice Ann had caught me kissing Lightfoot McLendon in the cemetery and told it all over town. I hated her back then, but now she was just an old lady. Suddenly she said, “I bet you ain’t heard about Loma Williams splashin’ her bare chest with cold well water, Miz Jones. I mean BARE chest! Done it out on the Tweedys’ back porch!”
“My land!”
“And she was wearin’ her shirtwaist tucked into some long baggy purple pants! I seen a movin’ pitcher show one time with some ha-reem women dancin’ in thin baggy pants. That’s all right for heathen women, I reckon, but it don’t speak well of a Christian lady to wear such.”
“No, it don’t.”
“Anyhow, Queenie said Loma splashed water on herself awhile and then buttoned up that shirtwaist and commenced to stretch. This-a-way and that-a-way, up, down, and sideways. Queenie told Miz Predmore she got skeered Miss Loma’d had a stroke, she went to breathin’ so hard! Time she got done she was downright raspin’—like a peach seed had got stuck in her th’oat!” Sitting inside by the open window, I nearly laughed out loud. Mama hadn’t told me all this.
“Loma told Queenie how in New York City she stands in front of a open window to splash herself—even when hit’s a-snowin’. Said you sho do feel good when you git th’ew.”
“It don’t take a genius to know why you’d feel good to git th’ew,” said Mrs. Jones, “but it’d take a fool to think it up in the first place. All I got to say, folks sure do turn strange when they go l
ive in New York City.”
“I reckon you know Loma’s done got herself engaged to one a-them Yankees. Shoo, now. Git away!” she yelled all of a sudden. “I think God invented yellow jackets just to drive folks off of their porches. Specially in hot muggy weather like we been havin’. Shoo, shoo! Git! Shoo! What Loma ought to do, she ought to come on back to P.C. where she belongs.”
“I don’t know as she belongs down here anymore,” Mrs. Jones put in. “A woman who’d smoke and wear pants? And make her livin’ on a vaudeville stage?”
Almost in hugging distance of the conversation, I wanted in the worst way to go join in. But I knew if I went out there, they’d just go to talking about the weather.
“Of course she don’t admit she works in vaudeville,” Miss Alice Ann was saying. “Loma calls it a the-ater. But lately she’s been doin’ mannequin work, too!”
“No!”
“Yes’m! She told somebody that’s how she met this man that she’s a-go’n marry. Her and some other ladies was modelin’ Gossard corsets one mornin’, s’posed to be just lady buyers in the auditorium, but halfway th’ew, somebody spied a man hidin’ under a seat off to the side, and hit was him! Loma told it herself. She thinks it’s funny.”
I sure thought it was funny. But not one hee-hee or ha-ha came from the preacher’s wife. “I bet he got hustled out in a hurry,” she said with disgust.
“I speck he did. But Loma said he come backstage later and ast her to go eat with him, and Lord if she didn’t have any better sense’n to do it! He took her to one a-them fancy rest’rants. I reckon with him bein’ so old, and hit daylight and a nice place, Loma figured he couldn’t do her no harm.”
So that’s how Aunt Loma got her diamond.
“Too bad she didn’t stay here and marry Herbert Sloan back when he ast her to. Li’l Herbert, I mean. Not his daddy. But they say Loma said Li’l Herbert was pussy-footy—and besides, she couldn’t stand the name Herbert, and anyhow she wouldn’t marry anybody short as him if his name was Valentino.”
Mrs. Jones snorted. “I bet if Loma had of known Li’l Herbert would inherit that pile of money, he’d of looked two feet taller. All I got to say is anybody mean enough to say a thing like that about such a sweet little man deserves to marry a Yankee. I never could understand how she’s had so many men chasin’ after her. I got to admit it, though, she’s helt on to her looks.”
“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 cig
ar 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.