She nudged Hugh, and he glanced at the ceiling, but just said sh-h-h-h. He wanted to hear Judge Fuss tell about his first legal client, a chicken thief called Two Fingers.
But the judge never got to say what happened at Two Finger’s trial. He stopped in midsentence, staring up as those first drops became a stream. The dim electric lights flickered, went out! Before anybody could duck or dodge, the crystal chandelier crashed down with a mess of wet plaster. Women screamed and men cursed, and the colored women in their white uniforms flew in. Missouri looked up and shouted, “Lawd a mercy, de bed gwine come down nex’!”
Miss Klein, sobbing anew, said, “It was j-just the biggest m-m-mess you ever saw, Mr. Tweedy!” The candles on the sideboard and buffet gave enough light to show plaster and food all over the lace tablecloth, roses scattered, cut-glass goblets and china plates broken. Everything was crushed, and the chandelier sprawled over the table like a big dead octopus.
Judge Fuss’s shoulders were drenched with water and crumbled plaster. A piece of oyster clung to Mr. Crowe’s vest. One arm of the chandelier dripped gravy. A green tomato pickle was impaled on the jagged glass of a broken electric light bulb. Miss Klein discovered she had wet congealed salad in her lap.
Mr. Blankenship jumped up and shouted at his wife, “That fool tub! How come you didn’t call Mr. Amos like I told you to!”
Hugh grabbed Miss Klein’s shoulder and said, “Sanna! Did you take a bath?” Then he dashed upstairs behind his daddy.
Miss Klein was too shocked to speak.
Missouri shook her fist at the ceiling. “I’se been a-tellin’ you, Miz ’Ships, dem faucets and dem drainpipes, dey ain’ nothin’ but RUST. An’ all dat fine china busted!” She waved her arms towards the table. “Lawd hep us. Whut we go’n do, Miz ’Ships?”
As if rising from a stupor, Mrs. Blankenship got up and said, “We’re going to clean it up.”
Sanna was weeping by then. “It’s all m-my f-fault! I took a bath!”
“No, it’s mine. I just kept putting off calling Mr. Amos. Sanna, see if you can help Aunt Trudy wipe the soufflé off her neck.”
I could tell that Sanna Klein was reliving all this now, after reliving it all the time she should have been sleeping the night before. “And you do see, Mr. Tweedy,” she wailed, “why no matter how much Mrs. Blankenship tried to comfort me, it was all—all—m-my f-f-fault! I just f-felt so hot and d-dusty after the ride over! I hated to p-put on my nice dress f-for the p-party when I was so sweaty—I mean, perspiring so much. I...”
She had completely run out of steam.
My way of comforting probably wasn’t like Mrs. Blankenship’s. I said, “It strikes me as how this would make a fine scene in a movie film, Miss Klein. Comedy or tragedy, either one.”
She didn’t say anything. Just kept crying.
“Gosh, Miss Klein,” I said finally, “from now on you’d better watch out.”
“Wh-what?” she spoke from the middle of a sob.
“I mean, you may be in real danger. One day you’re under a tree and a watermelon drops out of it and hits you, and a week later a chandelier crashes down onto a dinner table and splashes you with congealed salad!”
A moment of stunned silence on her part, then as I started laughing, Miss Klein’s mouth turned up at the corners. But not for long. “I wish I could see something funny about the rest of last night.” She looked at me and went to laughing again. As the big clock bonged for twelve-thirty, I heard a clatter of voices and high heels on the front porch.
“Must be Miss Love and them, Miss Klein, comin’ in from church.”
“Oh, my,” she whispered, distressed. “I don’t...can you just tell Miss Love I’m back, Mr. Tweedy? And...” she reached out and touched my hand, “and thank you.” With that, she grabbed her bag and disappeared up the stairs.
During Sanna Klein’s miserable recital of broken glass and gravy stains I had begun to feel as if this were something we were in together. But walking home for dinner with my folks, I kept puzzling. None of what Miss Klein told me explained why she’d come back so early in the day, or why it was the daddy who brought her home. Why not the sweetheart?
She couldn’t have flunked out of the fancy family. If so, Mr. Blankenship wouldn’t have sounded so kind and sad, saying he wished things had turned out different.
What did it all mean? It was months before I found out.
***
Cudn Milford and his wife, Cudn Zena, had arrived by buggy, in time to go to church with Mama and Papa. When I got home they were on the front porch with Papa. They lived in Pocatelago Community, better known as Poky, which was eight miles from P.C. All Poky amounted to was a large general store at the crossroads and farms all around. One of those farms was where Grandpa Blakeslee grew up.
Cudn Zena’s face was lop-sided from a stroke. Her right eye and cheek drooped and the right side of her mouth, which made her f’s come out like h’s. But that didn’t stop her from talking.
“My, don’t you look hine, Will!” she said as I came up the steps. “Spittin’ image of Cudn Rucker, ain’t he, Mr. Milhord. But, son, you need some weight on you. Skinniest, long-leggedest thang I ever seen. Come ’ere and hug this old lady!”
“How you been doin’, Cudn Zena,” I asked, reaching down to her in a bear hug.
“Well, my hace ain’t too good, but the rest of me is as good as common, thank you, thank you.” Cudn Zena always was a talker, once she got started, and right then she got started telling Papa and me her latest hope for a cure. “Y’all know Porter Springs, don’t you, up in the mountains near Dahlonega? Other day I got to rememberin’ my Uncle Alva, how he was so afflicted with the rheumatism, he dragged his heet around like an alligator. And he got well at Porter Springs. Told me he stayed three days in a boardin’ house up thar and drank two gallons a day of that mineral water, and when he come home, he could walk just hine and go about his worldly bizness.”
Cudn Milford butted in. “She wants me to take her up yonder, but I cain’t afford it. Miss Zena, I’m willin’ if you’re willin’ to sleep in a tent.”
“I got my aigg money,” she replied from the good side of her mouth.
“Maybe he likes you the way you are,” I said cheerfully.
“Well, I don’t. Lookin’ like a clown don’t matter much, but my eye hurts. Hit cain’t blink. I have to keep my hand over it like this and tie a rag across it at night. Uncle Alva told me bout lots of sick hoiks he met up there, stayin’ in them little cottages or the boardin’ house or the ho-tel and drankin’ the water. Just miracles. One man had piles in the worst way, and he spent hive days on the spring water and his piles was healed. A lady who’d had laig sores for seven years got cured in a two-week period. Now, listen to this, Hoyt—a man from White County had the dropsy? You know, somethin’ wrong with his heart and him swole up all over? Uncle Alva said the man at the ho-tel said the man come up there swole up all over like he’d bust if you stuck a pin in him. Weighed three hundret pound if he weighed a ounce. And drankin’ that water made him start shrinkin’. In just three weeks he was down to a hundret and thirty. The ho-tel man swore on a Bible that time he was ready to leave, this man could run, wrestle, li’t thangs like anybody else! I don’t know i’ Porter Springs is the hancy summer resort it used to be back then, but there’s still places to stay, I know that.”
A tear rolled down her cheek from the drooped eye. But she wiped it off, and though the right side of her face drooped in despair, a smile of hope brightened the good side. About then Mama called us in to dinner. Once we’d passed all the food and got to eating good, Cudn Zena started talking about my Grandpa Blakeslee.
“Remember that old log cabin your daddy was born in?” she asked Mama. “You know, up on that woody clay hill between Poky and Erastus? Well, we went over there to see it—I reckon it was a year ago January, wadn’t it, Mr. Milford?”
He nodded and said the cabin had plumb rotted down.
“Vines growin’ betwist and betw
een the logs,” said Cudn Zena. “Them vines had just pulled it apart.”
Everybody was sad to hear that, but then we had a good time swapping stories about Grandpa Blakeslee. The Poky folks told some I’d never heard before. Like for instance when Grandpa was about twelve years old and stayed out possum hunting on Saturday night and went to sleep on the bench next morning at church. “The preacher noticed,” said Cudn Zena, “and right in the middle of his sermon he said real loud, ‘Rucker Blakeslee, I’m askin’ you to pray.’ Remember Aunt Lula Pritchett? Well, Aunt Lula, she punched Rucker and said, ‘Git up and pray, son.’” Grandpa, stumbling to his feet, said Lordmakeusthankfulfortheseandallourmanyblessin’s.Amen. Then he sat down and went back to sleep.
I told about the Halloween night Grandpa pushed over the privy at the Cold Sassy depot, knowing the Yankee president of the railroad was in there, and how the man offered a fifty-dollar reward to anybody who’d tell who did it. Nobody would. Mama and Queenie were clearing off the table by then, ready to bring in Cudn Zena’s pecan pie.
I sat there wishing Mary Toy and Aunt Loma and Campbell Junior were still here. The table seemed suddenly lonesome without them.
And without Granny and Grandpa...
I didn’t look forward to an afternoon hearing about who all in the family was sick, so when Mr. Talmadge from Athens stopped by in his automobile to see Papa and offered me a ride back, I took him up on it.
That night I spent an hour writing a five-sentence letter to Sanna Klein:
***
Dear Miss Klein,
I’m sitting here in my rented room eating sardines and crackers whereas I had hoped to be with you. If it’s in order, I would like to take you to church next Sunday night. Please let me know if that is OK. I hope you don’t have a “previous.” You already seem like an old acquaintance.
Hoyt Willis Tweedy
***
10
MORE THAN seventeen years passed between the September night I wrote that letter and the Monday night last November when I read it again, in a dingy one-room cabin at the Rest-Easy Motor Court near Shellman, Georgia.
In desperation I had taken a cotton-buying job as one of four field men in a new farmers’ cooperative. When I started traveling in south Georgia for forty-five dollars a month, all I had in the world was a wife, four children, a milk cow, a bird dog, a worn-out Model-A Ford, and an expense account for gas plus two dollars and fifty cents a day for food and lodging.
If I happened to be talking to a farmer anywhere near noon, I could count on his wife inviting me to dinner. If I slept in the car two nights, I could save enough expense money to buy gas and get home to Progressive City for a weekend. If it wasn’t a hot night, sleeping in the car was real pleasant. Plenty of fresh air, no roaches, and not many more mosquitoes than in a cheap hotel room.
In the car I had to sleep folded up, but that wasn’t much worse than sleeping at the Rest-Easy Motor Court, where the mattress was thin and the springs as rusty and sagging as my spirits.
I was lonely, tired to the bone, too restless to sleep. My shoulders kept twitching, and my eyes were red and sore from driving all day on dusty roads.
I wished I hadn’t gone home for the weekend—home now being an upstairs apartment in P.C., rented from a silent old man and a sharp-tongued old lady who didn’t like children fussing and banging doors. I wasn’t used to that anymore myself. The children made me nervous as heck, Sanna was a witch, and the dog was whining and limping from a thorn in his foot that had begun to fester.
I got the thorn out and soaked Pup’s foot in Epsom salts water, but there was no balm for the anger that was festering in Sanna.
I didn’t blame her. Responsibility for the children was a heavy weight to bear alone. They had always gone to school and church in P.C., so they already had friends there. But my losing the farm and our new house had broken Sanna’s heart and my pride. Change of any kind was hard on Sanna, but she always said she was never happier than out there in the country having babies— four born in less than five years—with me coming in for meals, helping any way I could. It was hard on her when I had to quit farming and start traveling. It was a lot worse when she was looking after four rowdy children by herself—trying to sound brave but worrying by herself, sleeping by herself, trying to make my little salary last till the end of the month and feeling disliked by my mama.
But good Lord, it wasn’t easy on me either. I was really by myself. The first time I had to leave her for south Georgia, neither Sanna nor I slept the night before, and at four A.M. I said, “There’s no point waitin’ for the clock to ring. I’m gettin’ up.” Sanna had packed my bags the night before. She fixed me a good breakfast, and by first light I was raring to be off.
“Do you want to look in on the children?” Sanna asked.
“I’ll never leave if I do,” I said. We went hand in hand down the stairs, tiptoeing so as not to wake anybody.
I kissed Sanna good-bye, but we kept clinging to each other. Leaving her and the children was like having my arms and legs torn off. My heart ached. I held her head to my chest and stroked her hair. Then with a deep sigh, trying to make my voice cheerful, I said, “I’ll be back this weekend, hon. Or at least by the next weekend. It won’t seem so long.”
“It will to me,” she said. “Will, I hate living in P.C. when we owe everybody in town. What if something happens to one of the children? What if...”
“Mama and Papa are just three blocks away, and Miss Love says she’ll help you. All you got to do is ask.”
Taking her hands in mine, I kissed them. I got past the screen door then, but couldn’t walk away. Her on one side of the screen, me on the other, and we were both crying. We both knew things would never be the same again.
They haven’t been.
But by the time the Model-A hit the city limits of Progressive City, my spirits rose like a balloon. Ahead lay new places, new people, new challenges. I had a job, by gosh, and it had a future. “God help me, I’m go’n make a livin’ for my fam’ly! Dear God, I got to get my self-respect back.”
With my foot heavy on the gas pedal, the car picked up speed and I let out a yell. “Boy howdy, God!” I hadn’t said boy howdy in years. I hadn’t felt like saying boy howdy in years.
I had quit farming in 1928, when the banks foreclosed. Before we knew what hit us, we’d lost the farm and were renting rooms in town. When I first went to work for a former county agent who organized a Georgia cotton cooperative, I had to travel, but I could make it home most nights. That venture failed, but Mr. Downes formed a new cooperative, and I agreed to take south Georgia as my territory. Sanna said I should have insisted on the northeast territory. I told her I’d never get ahead if I made demands, but I guess I was wrong. The northeast went to a man whose wife refused ever to move. Sanna always resented that.
Long before the end of the cotton season in south Georgia, I’d stopped trying to get home every single weekend. I was working eighteen hours a day and sometimes couldn’t get off before two o’clock Saturday afternoon. Heading for home, I’d be so excited about seeing Sanna I wouldn’t stop for supper, just maybe get a Co-Cola and a moon pie when I stopped for gas. If I didn’t have a blow-out and the roads weren’t slick, I’d get in around ten at night, worn out and hungry for supper. I did try for every other weekend, but the longer we lived apart, the more my life in south Georgia seemed to be the real thing, and my family in Progressive City a little remote. When I’d let myself worry about home, I couldn’t do my job. When I did go home, after a night with Sanna and seeing that she and the children were all right, and how the money was holding out, then it seemed like I might as well just go on back. I’d leave right after Sunday dinner, which we always had at Mama and Papa’s house. That made Sanna anxious, because she knew they didn’t approve of the way she was raising the children. On Monday I’d start the week already worn out.
Part of my job was to buy cotton, but the most important part was to try to sell the farmers on th
e advantages of belonging to a cooperative, instead of selling to middlemen who tried to buy cheap and could hold the bales in warehouses till the price went up and then sell high to the mills. It cost an individual farmer a lot to warehouse his cotton crop. “You go with the co-ops,” I told them, “and whatever profit gets made will come back to you, according to how much cotton you sell through us. And when spring comes we’ll sell you seed and fertilizer, and whatever else you need, at a discount, and at the end of the year whatever we’ve made above expenses goes back to you.” To show how we kept down operating expenses, I always managed to get in how much the wives of us field men fussed about how low our salaries were. And that was the truth. Sanna couldn’t see that we’d lose the farmers’ trust if we drove big cars or stayed in high-priced hotels. I kept reminding her I’d have more time at home when the fall cotton session wound down.
I found the letters just before I left on Sunday, when I was looking through drawers for a screwdriver to tighten a doorknob for Sanna, but I didn’t try to read any till I got to Shellman the next night. The only light in the little room was a bulb hanging from the ceiling on a long cord. I turned the pillows to the foot of the bed and untied the faded blue ribbon. I think what I was hoping for was some understanding of the difference between what Sanna and I had in the beginning and this mixed-up mess we were in now. Part of it, of course, was being separated, but that wasn’t all.
Sanna had them sorted according to postmark date. Her letters and mine. I reckon she kept every letter I ever wrote her, which is not exactly surprising. She can’t throw away an old grocery list, much less the dentist bill from 1929 that we still haven’t paid and may never be able to.
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