Cold Sassy Tree: Chapters 41–50

We just foller the creek at the next fork instead of stayin’ on the Athens road. That way, we can keep gettin’ water to pour in the radiator. And if we make it to the town, maybe we can find a mechanic with solderin' tools.

Cushie Springs was not what I’d call a town. It was just a handful of houses. Scant hope of finding a mechanic here.

“If you’d been willing to spend the money, sir, we could have had separate rooms. Weren’t you lucky there were two berths on the boat!”

I swear I saw the ghost of Granny flit distraught around the room. I wanted to sic her on him, shout, “He ain’t in here, Granny! He’s in yonder with her! Go haint him!”

“Defiled cain’t be the right word for you, Love. Or don’t them Methodist preachers talk none bout a forgivin’ God? Ain’t you heard how Jesus said go and sin no more? He didn’t say go waller in yore sin!”

We pushed the cage into a dark corner and tried to make it look like a natural part of the junk stored back there. Set an old globe on top of the croker sacks, and some cracked slates they kept for mill children to use, and two or three old windowshade maps of Europe that wouldn’t let up and down anymore.

In front of it all, we put two scuttles of dusty coal and a faded half-furled Confederate flag, saved last year when Cold Sassy’s old wooden schoolhouse burned down.

Talk about pandemonium, we had it on stage and behind stage and all over that school auditorium!

With that she leaped up, holding the baby tight, and slapped my face so hard I reeled backwards.

After Grandpa went back to work just before Christmas, Aunt Loma had the gall to go ask him herself to raise Camp’s pay.

Two months before, when Arthur’s sixteen-year-old sweetheart died of galloping consumption, the Cold Sassy Weekly had called her passing “the saddest and yet most beautiful death in memory, lamented in verse by her brother James, well-known invalid poet of Maysville, Georgia.”

Brother Belie Jones didn’t give any eulogy, but he asked God to comfort the young widow and raise the baby in the Bosom of the Lamb, and then he read Scriptures for an hour.

And since he owned her house as well as ours, it hadn’t taken him two minutes to see that by putting the two families together and leasing out Loma’s place, the rent money would just about equal her upkeep.

But it was easy to see the widow was restless, and before long she waylaid Grandpa, when he stopped by for his snort, to ask if she could come work at the store.

“I like the Yankee way better,” she said, bristling.

The Rucker Blakeslee Hotel sign was finally up, and they said Mr. Clem Crummy just about got apoplexy every time a stranger asked was the ho-tel owned by the same feller had the brick store up the street.

He did order Granny a coconut and a crate of oranges every Christmas to make him some ambrosia with, but his Christmas gift to Miss Love had been a new buggy top with side and back curtains, and now not two months later he’d bought her that Graphophone.

“O! I have bought the mansion of a love, but not possess’d it” was his lament.

But hark! Mayhap Miss Love doth use Juliet’s words to tease: “If thou think’st I am too quickly won, I’ll frown and be perverse and say thee nay, so thou wilt woo....”

Well, Grandpa was wooing, no doubt about it. And seemed like Miss Love was enjoying being wooed.

Anyhow, it wasn’t long before the two of them came down to the store and set up the millinery table again, and Miss Love put a sign in the window saying Mrs. Loma Williams was under her tutelage and was ready to accommodate customers for new Easter hats at a special low price.

“Will, uh—” She flushed and pulled away. “I jest wanted you to know before—” She faltered.

There were two of them, one big and burly, the other a younger fellow with a slight build.

“You ain’t never seen a telephone?” Grandpa was trying to goad him.

“Most of us Christians need to go to church, Rucker. By ourselves, we feel uneasy about God, and we’re too bashful to pray except when we’re sick or scared. We read our Bibles, but we never think things out the way you do. But you—it’s a wonder God didn’t call you to preach, Rucker.”

“I got called to preach one time,” said Grandpa. “Up in the mountains when I was a-peddlin’.” He laughed. “But it warn’t the Lord thet called me. I done the callin’. Called myself Brother Blakeslee, itinerant Baptist preacher and peddler of fine merchandise.”

‘Wait a minute, folks!’ I shouted. ‘All what I jest said, thet was s’posed to be the Devil a-talkin’. Now if y’all will shet up, I’ll tell you what God said back to thet old fork-tail varmint.’

Grandpa laughed kind of rueful.

Somebody’s got to learn him better than to cheat folks, else he’s liable to land in jail.

Sometimes he just mumbled gibberish. Other times it was real sentences, but they didn’t make sense.

Grandpa drifted into a fitful sleep, then waked with a start about two-thirty and between gasps for breath went to raging at something or somebody, all the time pulling at his whiskers.

Listen, ain’t it the fever causin’ him to be funny-turned? I mean, the delirium; ain’t that from the high fever?

When the coughing subsided, Grandpa started to drift away again, but she called him back.

Her eyes misting, she touched my face with her wizened hand.

It was awful, the burying. Such a pitiful little band of mourners, so bumbling without Mr. Birdsong or anybody else to tell us what to do.

As Papa put one arm around Mama and the other around Mary Toy, Miss Love’s composure crumbled and she went to crying.

Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.

The family gathered at Grandpa’s house that night after supper for the reading of the will. The lawyer was Mr. Predmore, Pink’s daddy.
My daddy was named executor.

Well, that would be less for Miss Love than Mama and them had feared, but a lot more than Miss Love had bargained for back when she said I do. Still and all, to me it seemed fitting, her having moved up from housekeeper to bona fide widow.

The last bequest was for Loomis Toy, “the sum of fifty dollars in appreciation of his loyal service to the store and my family.”