by Fannie Flagg
At that very moment her closest neighbor and friend, Elner Shimfissle, drove up the driveway, completely unaware of what had just taken place. She was just stopping by to bring Louise and Polly a freshly made pecan pie, before she drove the other pies over to the church. Elner got out of the truck and opened the kitchen door, calling out, “Hey, girls, I’ve got a—” then stopping dead in her tracks. The first thing she spotted was the naked man sitting on the floor with the bucket on his head.
“Good Lord,” she said, dropping her pie. “What’s going on? Louise, Louise!”
Louise heard her and called out, “Oh, Elner. Help me, help me.” Then Elner ran past the man to the bedroom in the back. Louise let her in and Elner saw that Polly had blood on her face. Immediately Elner ran over and helped Louise take Polly into the bathroom to clean up the cuts on her head and her lip, and Elner tried to calm Louise down enough so she could tell her what had happened.
“Who’s that naked man?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s he doing with a mop bucket on his head?”
“I don’t know,” said a frantic Louise. “He was here when I came in…. I should have never left her, it’s all my fault.”
When Elner had sized up the situation, she said, “You stay here. I’ll be right back.”
“Don’t go in there!” screamed Louise. “He’s liable to kill you!”
“Not if I get to him first,” she said. “The very idea of him doing such a thing…”
She then looked around for something heavy, and picked up a lamp. “Lock the door behind me,” she said, and walked back into the kitchen, ready for a fight. But the naked man had not moved from where he had been. Still, Elner took no chances. She knew he could be playing possum and jump up at her, so she picked a rolling pin up off the counter. And now, armed with a lamp and a rolling pin, she walked over slowly, but the man did not move. She nudged him with her foot, and he fell over onto his side with the bucket still on his head and just lay there motionless. Satisfied it was safe, she then reached down and pulled the bucket off the man’s head and recognized him as Louise’s hired hand. He was not a pretty sight. No wonder Polly had put a bucket over his head. Elner walked over and pulled the tablecloth off the kitchen table; she did not care to look at a naked man dead or alive. After she had covered him up, she went back into the bedroom. Polly had evidently put up a pretty good fight, because she had not been raped, and other than being roughed up, she was not too badly hurt. After they got her into bed with her doll, Elner said in a calm, matter-of-fact tone of voice, “Louise, when you get her to sleep, could I see you in the kitchen for a minute?”
When Louise came back to the kitchen, she was still shaking all over. Elner was sitting at the kitchen table calmly drinking a cup of coffee and eating a piece of her own pecan pie.
“Is he still here?”
“Oh yes.” Elner nodded over at the man underneath the red and white tablecloth. “Polly may be retarded, but she’s a good shot, I’ll say that for her. Got him right between the eyes.”
“What?”
“That’s your hired hand over there.”
Louise looked over at the covered-up body. “Oh my God. Is he dead?”
“He sure is. As far as I can figure, he must have pulled a gun on her and she somehow got it away from him.” She indicated a gun lying on the table beside her. “I found it on the floor near the sink.”
Louise looked down at the gun, then gasped. “Elner, that’s my gun! Do you think he shot himself with it?”
“It’s not likely he could shoot himself between the eyes, throw the gun across the room, and then put a bucket on his head.”
“Then who shot him?”
Elner said, “I think it would be safe to say that it was Polly.”
“But how did she get the gun?”
“I don’t know. Where did you have it?”
She ran over to the door of the pantry. “I kept it in here.” When Louise opened the door, she saw that inside the pantry there were cans and broken jars strewn all over the floor. “I kept it right here, on the second shelf behind the beans,” she said, pointing.
Elner got up, walked over, and looked in at the mess. “Well, Louise, she must have run in here trying to get away from him, and it got knocked off the shelf, and she picked it up and pulled the trigger. She might have thought it was a cap pistol. I don’t know.”
“Oh my God. We have to call the police right away and let them know somebody’s been shot.”
Elner looked at her and said, “We could do that, but let’s take a minute before we do anything.”
“But what about him, I mean, don’t we have to call right away?”
“Oh, don’t worry about him, he’s not going anywhere.” Elner stepped inside the pantry with Louise, closed the door behind her, and said, “Now listen, Louise, I’ve been thinking. The fact that he’s shot between the eyes could be looked on by some people as a murder.”
“Murder!” Louise said loudly, then lowered her voice. “But he was trying to rape her. It was self-defense, an accident. She didn’t mean to kill him.”
“Self-defense or not, the police are going to have a lot of questions, there may even be a trial, and it would be in the newspapers. You don’t want poor little Polly dragged through that, it would scare her to death, she probably doesn’t even understand what happened yet.”
“You’re right, she would be terrified.” Louise started wringing her hands. “I know, I’ll just say I did it! I came in and saw what he was trying to do and I shot him.”
“Louise, honey, think. Again, no witnesses. I’ve seen this kind of thing on Perry Mason, and if something does go wrong, who will take care of Polly for the rest of her life? You don’t want her to wind up in that awful state institution, do you? Remember how awful it was when we went over there?”
“Yes, it was horrible, and I promised her she would never have to go.”
“Yes, and after what all you went through to get to keep her at home? I’m just afraid if they find out she shot a man, they could take her away from you, and put her out there for good.”
Louise burst into tears. “I’m so confused. I don’t know what to do.”
Elner cracked the door open a little and looked over at the large lump underneath the red and white checked tablecloth for a moment, then closed the door again and said to her friend, “You know, Louise, normally I’d say that everybody deserves a decent funeral, but any man that would try and rape a little retarded girl, well, that’s just a horse of a different color.”
“Oh, Elner. I just don’t know what to do.”
“I know you don’t, Louise, so listen to me. Nobody knows about this but us, and Polly’s not going to say anything. By the way, who is he, anyway?”
“Just a drifter looking for work, as far as I know. I don’t even know his last name.”
Elner looked out at him again. “Well, it’s not like he’s a family man and will be missed, and who’s to say he hasn’t done this before or what he might have done to some other poor girl in the future.”
“What are you saying?” asked Louise.
Elner closed the door. Twenty minutes later when the two women came out of the pantry, they had a plan.
As soon as the sun went down and Polly was sound asleep, they moved into action.
About ten minutes later Louise came back into the kitchen with all of the hired man’s things in a duffel bag.
“Did you get everything?”
“Yes.”
Elner then walked over and leaned down and picked the man up by his arms. She stood him up against the counter and then heaved him up over her shoulders. “Open the door, Louise.”
“Can you carry him all by yourself? Don’t you want me to help?”
“Honey, I’m a big strong farm woman, just open the door…and get the shovel.”
Louise looked over at the table. “Should we bury the gun with him?”
“Good Lord, no. If some
body does find him, we don’t want your gun to be with him. Leave it and I’ll get rid of it later.”
After Elner had thrown the hired hand into the back of her truck and they had driven him a good distance away, back to the very end of Louise’s property, Elner and Louise got out and dug the hole. When they finished, Elner heaved him over the side and they started filling it back up with the loose dirt.
“What if they catch us?” asked a nervous Louise. “What if somebody comes looking for him?”
“If anybody does, just say he left. You don’t have to say he left feet first.”
When they were driving back to the farmhouse, Elner said, “Just promise me one thing, Louise.”
“What?”
“Be careful about who you hire from now on. People may act nice, but you never know.”
As Elner’s husband, Will, always used to say, “Think what you want, but some days luck is just on your side.” Being so far out in the country, nobody heard the shot out at the Franks farm, except a few men shooting quail in a field about two miles away, and they figured it was just other hunters. Nor did anyone ever ask about the hired hand, whose fatal mistake had been trying to drag Polly to the bedroom. Polly may have been retarded, but that day all she knew was that her mother had told her not to leave the kitchen under any circumstances, and she hadn’t. No matter how hard that man had tried to drag her out, she was not going. It had been sheer plain old good luck that in the struggle in the pantry the gun had landed next to her. Poor Polly didn’t know the difference between a Roy Rogers cap pistol and a real gun, and pulled the trigger. Another piece of good luck: she had shot somebody who was not well liked, or even missed, for that matter.
The night of the shooting, after she’d helped Louise clean up the mess, Elner had taken the gun home and had hidden it in the henhouse. She figured if someone ever did find the body, she would call the police and confess that she had done it and show them the murder weapon. She didn’t want to go to jail, but if it would keep poor little Polly at home with her mother, she’d do it. Now that she was a widow, all she had was a cat, and she figured Sonny could do without her a lot easier than Polly could do without her mother. A few years later, when Elner sold the farm, she stuck the gun in her purse and brought it to town with her, just in case.
The Repercussions
Elner Shimfissle had been told that everything that happened, happened for a reason. Of course she couldn’t have known it at the time, but the repercussions of her having fallen out of the fig tree turned out to be many and varied.
A few years later, Polly Franks died of heart failure. After her daughter passed away, Louise Franks sold their ten-acre farm to a developer for a small fortune. Norma handled the sale. Louise sold it all, except for one small half acre of land way out in the back of the property. Norma thought it was odd, since she was not going to live there, but Louise explained, “Norma, I have an old beloved pet buried out there, and I just don’t want that land developed.” Louise moved into town and used the money she made on her property to build and staff a school for the developmentally handicapped, and named it The Elner Shimfissle Center.
After his encounter with Elner, Dr. Bob Henson changed his mind about people and became much happier in his work.
And as fate would have it, a year later the slip-and-sue ambulance-chasing lawyer, Gus Shimmer, fell over in court with a major heart attack. He had to be rushed to Caraway Hospital, and it was Dr. Bob Henson who worked on him for over three hours, literally saving his life. The same Dr. Henson he would have sued if Norma had let him.
However, when Franklin Pixton found out that Dr. Henson had saved Gus Shimmer’s life, right in the middle of a lawsuit against his hospital, he was not happy. “Where is malpractice when you really need it?” he mused. But he needn’t have worried about Gus Shimmer. After Dr. Henson saved his life, Gus made a vow to God never to sue another hospital or doctor again. Not only was Gus a changed man, his informant at Caraway Hospital was gone for good as well.
The male nurse who had been Gus’s informant, the same one who had caused Ruby’s friend Boots Carroll to be demoted, had finally called the wrong woman “bitch.” Mrs. Betty Stevens, a very wealthy and generous widow—her husband had invented Johnny Cat, one of the best kitty litters—was in for gallbladder surgery and overheard the male nurse referring to her as “that old rich bitch” behind her back. Considering she had given millions to the hospital fund and was a close friend of Mrs. Franklin Pixton’s, the nurse was fired on the spot, and Boots was back in her old job as head supervisor. It was not that Mrs. Betty Stevens objected to being called rich or a bitch. It was the “old” part she’d objected to. After all, she was still a good-looking woman of sixty-four.
From the day the lawyer Winston Sprague found the shoe on the roof, he was never quite the arrogant know-it-all, some said “snotty young man on the rise,” again. He had gone from thinking he was smarter than everyone else in the world, to someone who was now not quite so sure. To some this may have been a bad thing, however, in Winston’s case it proved to be the best thing that ever happened to him. The girl he had been in love with for so many years, the one who had assured him she wanted to get married, just not to him, happened to see him out in a crowd of friends, and noticed that there was something different about him. He sat alone and had a faraway look in his eye. When she walked over to speak to him, and asked how he was, he told her he had just quit his job, and was headed for a two-week stay at an ashram in Colorado.
“An ashram? Hmm,” she thought. “That’s interesting. This guy may not be such a jerk after all.” So instead of leaving, she sat down.
Six months later, after the girl had agreed to marry him, she said, “Winston, I don’t know what happened to you, it’s almost like you’re not the same person anymore.” And she meant that as a compliment.
Winston did not tell her about finding the shoe, the event that had changed him, but a few days later, after his yoga class, he drove across town to the trophy shop and walked in with a brown paper bag under his arm and said to the man behind the counter, “I’d like to have something bronzed, do you bronze shoes?”
“Yes,” the man said. “We do baby shoes.”
Winston opened the bag, pulled out the golf shoe, and put it on the counter. “Can you do this?”
The man looked at it. “This? You want this bronzed? Just one shoe?”
“That’s right, can you do it?”
“Well, I guess so, do you want a plaque on it or anything?”
Winston thought for a moment. “Yes. Just put ‘The Shoe on the Roof.’”
“The shoe on the roof?”
“Yes,” he said with a smile. “It’s sort of an inside joke.”
But Winston’s was not the only romance that resulted in marriage. On June 22 at the Unity Church in Elmwood Springs, Reverend Susie Hill pronounced Dr. Brian Lang and Linda Warren man and wife. And although Verbena Wheeler swore she would never set foot in one of those “new age do-it-yourself” churches, she did.
But best of all, Linda Warren’s corporate community project, Adopt a Cat Month, had been so successful that the idea had spread to other corporations, and thousands of cats all across the country were being taken home every day, and they didn’t even know it was all because Elner Shimfissle fell out of her fig tree one April morning.
Another Easter
8:28 AM
As for Norma, her attention to detail served her well, and soon Cortwright Realty became Cortwright-Warren Realty and she was very happy about that. But as far as the other part of her life, sadly she never did receive a sign, a wonder, or a miracle, and she had pretty much given up even looking for one, until another Easter four years later.
Norma was out at the cemetery leaving the lilies on her parents’ graves like she always did, trying not to let the plastic flowers that were now on almost every grave make her insane. But as she was leaving, she happened to walk by the old Smith plot on the south side of the cemetery wh
ere Neighbor Dorothy was buried, and for some unknown reason she stopped and read the two names on the large tombstone in the middle and was stunned when she saw what was written.
DOROTHY ANNE SMITH
Beloved Mother
1894–1976
ROBERT RAYMOND SMITH
Beloved Father
1892–1977
Norma’s mouth flew open. Raymond? She never knew Neighbor Dorothy’s husband was named Raymond! Suddenly that tiny little flicker of hope that had almost burned out started up again, and she smiled and stood there looking up at the blue sky. And it was such a pretty day too.
The following Sunday, also for some unknown reason, Macky got up and said to Norma, “I think I’ll go to church with you today and see what it’s all about.” Norma didn’t know what had brought this on, but she was so glad he picked that day to go, because the text of Susie’s sermon that Sunday was:
There Lives More Faith in Honest Doubt, Believe Me, Than Half the Creeds.
—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON