Leaving Cold Sassy (9780547527291) (15 page)

“All right, now,” he said as the cut-out piece clattered to the floor. “A table had ought to fit the man that provisions it.” He sat down, pulled his chair up, and his stomach fitted the hole perfectly. He pulled his pie and a cup of coffee to the right of his stomach, ate the pie, sucked up the coffee, and lit a cigar, wearing a triumphant smile.

After supper, while Miss Maggie and the girls were washing, drying, and putting away dishes and setting out plate scrapings for the dog, Mr. Henry and the boys and I smoked in the parlor.

Mr. Henry was in charge, and seemed to have sobered up a little, but he was still belligerent. “I understand you studied agriculture at the university,” he said to me, puffing to get his cigar started again.

“Yessir.”

“Would you like to manage one of my farms over in Twiggs County? Or maybe you are about to get drafted. You trying to get in the Army or trying to stay out?”

“Tryin' to get in, sir.” I almost told him I was too skinny, but in the presence of his bulk, I lacked the nerve.

“Well, if you get rejected, my offer stands. It's mighty hard to get good overseers.”

I thanked him, but told him about the Tweedy farm in Banks County that I wanted to farm when the war was over.

***

Later, after Brother Hen and Sister Maggie had said good night, Sanna came into the parlor. We could hear loud talk from their bedroom—mean talk.

As we stood together in front of the fire, Sanna suddenly began to cry. I put my arms around her, and she rested her head on my chest as sobs racked her body. I kissed her forehead but had the good sense not to try for more. She never raised her face to mine, just sobbed. Finally I put my arm around her and guided her to the couch that was drawn up near the fire.

“How could he do this to Sister Maggie?” she said, with the tears still running down her cheeks. “As long as I can remember he got drunk on weekends, but never like this. He's never done anything like this. She's so humiliated, so ashamed. And she's heartbroken at the mess he's made of her dining table. She's always been so proud of the dining room suite.

“Right now I just hate him. He—I guess there haven't been many Friday nights he didn't get drunk, but not on weekdays and not when our friends were here. I just can't understand how he could be the mayor, sworn to uphold Georgia law, and we've got this Prohibition Act and he thinks nothing of violating it.

“To him the bootleggers are man's best friend. He's told the sheriff to let them alone as long as they don't hurt anybody, so the moonshiners come in the night and leave jars of moonshine behind the sacks of cow feed in the milk shed. ‘As long as it doesn't hurt anybody.' It just about kills Sister Maggie, and Annie Laurie and Lonzo and I have lived with it all our lives here. He's such a good, kind, wonderful man when he's sober, but a drink of whiskey makes him mean as he can be. Sister Maggie's never complained, she's never even admitted to us that he drinks, as if we wouldn't know it if she didn't say so.”

Sanna told me about Mr. Jolley's Friday night card games with his drinking cronies. She said her sister was helpless to put an end to them.

One night Sister Maggie got so mad she screamed at him, “No more card games here! I'm putting my foot down!” The next morning, she was groaning in pain as she limped to the breakfast table. “She told Annie Laurie and me that she dropped a heavy picture frame on her foot the night before, but we knew better. That's what she told everybody in town. When Sister Maggie realized that Brother Hen was either pretending not to know that he'd stepped on her foot and broken it, or that he really didn't remember, she told him the same story she'd told everybody else.

“But Annie Laurie had heard the whole thing the night before.

“I don't know what Sister Maggie will tell everybody at Thanksgiving dinner about what he did tonight. Of course, when he realizes how much he's upset her, he'll be sorry and he'll offer to buy her a new table. He can't buy what this one means to her, though. It was our grandmother's table.” Sanna was quiet for a moment, staring into the flames.

Then she said, “Annie Laurie and I have always vowed we would never marry a man who would even take a drink. Sister Maggie says if a man has habits you can't live with, and he doesn't love you enough to change before the wedding, don't expect him to change later. She had to learn that the hard way. I've learned it the hard way too. Will, I didn't really tell you what happened that night with Hugh in Jefferson, did I? You remember what I told you about the tub running over and the mess the dinner party became, and I told you that I wished the rest of what had happened was as funny? Hugh got mad with me that night, Will, and I was mad with him, and he got drunk. He stayed up drinking after everybody went to bed, and I didn't sleep a wink either. In the middle of the night I smelled smoke and ran out to the hall, and his mother and father were already rushing towards the parlor with blankets and buckets of water. Hugh had gone to sleep smoking a cigarette and the upholstery had caught fire. He and his father had an awful row when it was all over and I wasn't supposed to know any of it. Hugh didn't come down to breakfast the next morning and everybody was upset—the way it's going to be here in the morning—and when Mr. Blankenship offered to bring me on back home—he said Hugh was sick—well, you were there when I arrived.

“I vowed never to marry a man who drinks, and I'm not going to.”

I was driven to confess. “Sanna, there's a lot of drinkin' goes on at frat houses. One night I took a drink and I guess I took another and another, but I started feelin' sick and went to my room. Sometime in the night I woke up in a pool of vomit. I couldn't believe it. I'd thrown up all that stinkin' stuff and was too drunk even to wake up.”

She went pale and her face tensed. Before she could say anything, I said, “I tried to drink a few times since then, Sanna. I've found out that one drink makes me sick. Every time. I can't even finish a drink, in fact. So now I have a good excuse not to. I just tell people it makes me sick, and then I don't feel so awkward, or like, because I'm not drinkin', I'm passin' judgment on what other people are doin'. So you see, that's not anything you have to worry about with me, now or ever. I can't drink and I know it, and all my friends know it.”

***

Mr. Henry had very little to say at breakfast and looked awful, fitted into his semicircle at the table. He was gone most of the morning to get his two cousins from his farm near Mitchellville. The boys went over to see a friend of Lonzo's, and the girls helped in the kitchen.

I met Maybelle, the cook, a sweet, dignified brown colored woman with scant hair and no teeth. I could tell she had been crying. Later, when I was reading in the parlor, I could hear Sanna and Maybelle through the open doors of the dining room. They were at the buffet, taking out silver and linens for the table. Maybelle said, “Miss Sanna, ever'body in town go'n be laughin' at us. Dey go'n ax me do it be so, did Mr. Henry cut up Miss Maggie's table, but I ain' go'n tell nobody nuthin'. I des go'n make lak I don' hear, or I go'n say, ‘What Mist' Henry do or doan do ain' none my bizness.' But I go'n be shamed, Miss Sanna, and po' Miss Maggie, she go'n be mighty shamed.”

The rain had stopped, and the day was cold and darkly overcast. But the dinner Miss Maggie served that afternoon was splendid. The turkey was a huge torn, and the dressing was the best I think I ever ate, baked and browned crisp, but what I was most thankful for at that dinner was the good cheer. It was as if a quick rain had cleared out the strain and anger at Mr. Henry that had spoiled the air ever since I arrived. I'm sure it began as just courtesy, with everyone trying not to bring hard feelings to the festivities, but the festivities took over as soon as Mr. Henry got back with the two old cousins. I remember how happy the young people were, and how the strained looks on Sanna's and Miss Maggie's faces lifted, and how even Mr. Henry joined in. His morning-after misery seemed to have eased, and he was the jovial, twinkled-eyed fat man I had expected him to be. He sat in the curve of that whacked-out semicircle as casually as if the table had been designed and built that way.

I'm sure we talked about the war—everybody did in those days—and I remember the old ladies talked about their ailments. Everybody talked about past Thanksgivings, and I did my best to liven things up anywhere I could. Mr. Henry's two old cousins, Cudn Em and Cudn Abby, both had heavy mustaches, and Cudn Em had a humped back. Sanna said later they never went anywhere except to see close relatives because they were so embarrassed about their mustaches. I asked her why they didn't just shave, but she said they thought that's the way the Lord meant for them to look and to change it would be a sin.

Cudn Em was especially taken with sin. She had a Bible covered in faded red calico that she kept in her lap. The hump on her back reminded me of a man who came through Cold Sassy once selling blankets. He carried them on his back the way Cudn Em carried her hump. Sanna said Cudn Em felt the Lord was punishing her with the bent back for some sin. She never could figure out what the sin was, but she'd got the notion that if she kept opening the Bible, closed her eyes, then looked where her finger landed on a page, it might give her a clue about her sin. I liked her. Her head was bent so far forward she couldn't hold it up, but every now and then she'd look at me sideways with a shy little smile.

Another guest, Mrs. Faunt, was a neighbor whose husband had died on the Fourth of July. The Jolleys invited her for dinner when they heard she would be alone for Thanksgiving. She had an ear trumpet, which she aimed in the direction of whoever was speaking. She was a beautiful old lady in a navy blue wool dress, with a heavy shawl around her shoulders. Her face was powdered, her thick gray hair piled fashionably atop her head. She was the one who started the liveliest conversation of the day, about storms. The lightning we'd had the day before was unusual, and Mrs. Faunt said she was scared to death.

“That lightnin' yesterday brings to mind the time we was all settin' on the porch after dinner,” she said. “That was in the summertime, and all-a sudden it come up a storm, a real bad one, with lightnin' flashin' and thunder thunderin' somethin' awful. We all went inside, and the dogs and cats tried to get in the house too, but Mama said, ‘Don't let them animals come in! They'll draw the lightnin'!' We had a big old rooster named Uncle Lenox and that rooster flew up on the porch to get out of the rain, but Mama went out and shooed him off. Then he flew up on the iron gate and Mama told Lem to go make him get down. ‘He'll draw lightnin',' but Lem said, ‘Roosters ain't animals, they birds. And birds don't draw no lightnin'.' He said he could prove it, and he yelled out the door, ‘All right, rooster, draw. Draw! I say draw that lightnin', Uncle Lenox!' And bless patty, down come a single bolt and down fell Uncle Lenox! We had him for supper that night.”

Maybelle was passing her big yeast rolls. “I heerd that a white man got hit by lightnin',” she said, “and he turnt black. But I doan know as he stayed black.”

Cudn Abby, hiding her mustache with her hand, said, “I had a teacher got hit one time and from then on her neck was twisted to one side. Good thing lightnin' never strikes twice in the same place.” She laughed. “If Miss Mable had got hit in the neck again, she'd a-been lookin' backwards the rest of her life.”

“Well, it can strike twice,” said Mr. Henry. “Miss Maggie will back me up on it. The Quillians over on Fourth Street, their chimney got struck by lightnin' fifteen years ago and it happened again just a short while back, sometime last year.”

“That's right,” said Miss Maggie. “They say brick and ashes fell down all over Mrs. Quillian's living room furniture.”

I got in on that. “One night we had an electrical storm so bad,” I said, with the last of my turkey poised on my fork, “that next morning our neighbor came to the back door with a long coil of pine bark in his hand. ‘I think this belongs to y'all,' he told Mama. Lightnin' had struck the big tree that straddles the fence between our house and his. I kind of collect stories about weather, so I remember.”

Sanna went with us that evening when Mr. Henry drove me to the depot in Greensboro. It was black dark when I got home, and there was a Western Union telegram under my door.

 

Received at 7:50
P.M
.—Air F430

New York, New York
11/28/17

Mr. H. W. Tweedy
c/o Mayfield Boarding House
Athens, Georgia
ARRIVING MORNING TRAIN SATURDAY WITH
CAMPBELL JUNIOR STOP
BEG YOU BREAK NEWS TO FAMILY STOP
LOMA

T
HERE WAS
no way to break news like that gently to Mama and Papa. With the office closed, I had planned on spending Friday and Saturday with them in P.C., so I just took the telegram with me and said, “Mama, looks like you don't have to worry about Campbell Junior up there with the Yankees anymore.”

“Will, do you think this means Loma's gettin' a divorce? What...”

“Maybe it's the old man that's gettin' a divorce. But if you notice, she didn't say anything about divorce. Maybe she'll just do like lots of people and come home for a while and then they'll make up and off she'll go again, specially if he waves some money in her direction. You know what they say. A dollar is the fastest flyin' machine yet known.”

Mama always was one to worry about what everybody would think, but I believe it was Aunt Loma she was worrying about while we waited at the depot for the train to come in on Saturday.

They arrived, just like the telegram said they would. Campbell Junior looked like he had grown an inch since September and lost some of that fat. You never saw a boy so happy to be home.