“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
15
THERE 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.”
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.
Aunt Loma had dark circles under her eyes, and her clothes looked like she’d slept in them all night, which she had. The only thing looked good about her was the fur coat she was wearing, and that diamond flashing in the sunlight. Within a day or so I learned that what was troubling Loma was something clean clothes and a good night’s sleep couldn’t put right. Loma was depressed. Whenever Mama saw her coming, she’d go lie down on the black leather daybed. “I can just take Loma better if I’m layin’ down,” she told me.
To Mama and Papa and the rest of the town she had nothing much to say. But Loma needed to talk, and by her second day home she’d realized I was probably the closest friend she had. “Will, I guess you think I was crazy in the first place, but I didn’t marry him just for his money. I mean, I married him a lot for his money, but I was really very fond of him.” Loma got herself a glass of tap water and sat down at the kitchen table with a dramatic sigh.
“He claimed he was a Russian count. He had a wife and four children, and when he was still young they all died in a typhoid epidemic. He came to America in eighteen eighty-nine with twelve dollars in gold coins in his pocket and got a job in a New York factory.
“If you remember,” she said bitterly, “Pa never knew I existed from the time you were born. You had two daddies, your grandpa and your pa. I never had any. Vitch didn’t treat me like a daughter. It was more like I was a princess. He even called me Princess, and I found myself acting like one. When he’d have a party and I was his hostess, I’d pretend I was really a princess, kind of like stage acting, and it gave me a feeling of pride in myself. I liked that.”
Mama was taking a nap upstairs and Daddy was out visiting with Campbell Junior, showing off all the changes in town. It occurred to me that if I just kept quiet, Loma would tell me everything. I set some of Mama’s leftover Thanksgiving pie out on the table, got out two forks and plates, and settled down to listen.
“He never came to see me without bringing a gift, per-fume or earrings,” Loma said dreamily. “Once he brought me a little lap dog. I made him take that back. I just couldn’t look after a little dog like that in an apartment when I was gone so much.
“He came to every performance I was in. I guess you heard about him being at my performance when I was modeling corsets. That’s when we met.” She laughed. “He was so gallant and his foreign accent made him seem glamorous. He had all this money he’d made in America. And he talked all the time about the castle he grew up in, and the toys he’d had, and the servants, and the literary parties his parents put on. I just was too...he...it was just a world I used to read about and couldn’t believe existed. I’m not sure it ever did, even for Vitch.
“He’d kiss my hand when we met and he acted so proud of me. When he talked about us marrying, he said he’d build a mansion for me away from the noise and grime of New York City.”
I tried to picture Loma living in a mansion, bossing servants around.
“I respected him and I felt he respected me. It wasn’t like with Camp. I knew I couldn’t step all over Vitch the way I did Camp. Oh, Will, I was so disgusted by Camp, and then after he died I was so ashamed of the way I’d treated him.” Loma blushed, and I knew she was wondering if she should go on. But she was in too deep to stop now. I nodded to her, and then pretended to study my pie.
“But, Will, from the first night after I married Vitch, I knew...I couldn’t stand...I mean, he was like a coal miner or somebody. Good Lord, Will, you’ve got a degree in agriculture. You must know all about animal husbandry. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to tell you. Well, let’s say that my rich, gallant Mr. Vitch’s idea of husbandry was very animal.”
Loma said after the second night she was so repulsed and so mad, she told Vitch never to set foot in her room again. He got mean. “He said he’d take my name out of his will. He finally admitted that the main reason he wanted to marry me instead of just courting the rest of his life was because he wanted heirs. The next night I locked my bedroom door and he got a key and unlocked it. I didn’t have to fight him off then. He was so cold and calm. He said, ‘You will not leave this room until you grant me my rights.’ And he took my key and left and locked the door behind him.”
For a week he sent the maid in with Loma’s meals. Even though the maid was afraid she’d lose her job if she didn’t lock the door behind her, at last she felt so sorry for Loma, she did leave the door open. Loma packed a bag and was sneaking down the steps when Vitch saw her and forced her back to her room. The next day there were gardeners working outside near her window. She called to them that she was being kept prisoner and asked them to bring her a ladder. She threw a diamond pin down to them, then put the rest of her jewelry in a drawstring bag that she tied around her waist, stuffed a few clothes in a small satchel, climbed down the ladder, and got away in a taxi.
She sent a telegram to the headmaster at Campbell Junior’s school, saying she had to take him out early for the holidays because of illness in the family. She met his train in New York after hocking her gold pins in a pawnshop so she could buy their train tickets to Cold Sassy.
I never doubted Loma would find a way to get back at Mr. Vitch. She was so vindictive that Grandpa once said if he wanted to make a raid on Hell, he would make Loma his first lieutenant.
Editor’s note: Although Olive Ann worked on several scenes that were to appear later in the novel, the chronological narrative ends here. We know from her notes for the rest of this chapter that the following Sunday was going to be a beautiful day and that Will was going to borrow his papa’s car to pick up Sanna in Mitchellville and drive her back to Cold Sassy.
From Olive Ann Burns’s Chapter Notes:
On the way home Sanna is going to tell Will more about the situation in Mitchellville—in fact, this may be when she tells him some of the stuff that I have her telling him the night before. May somehow get around to her telling him about the day Papa got hooked by the bull. Want as fast as possible for him to learn more about her and her family, but there are things she won’t tell him until she knows they are going to marry and she knows she has got to tell him about her family.
Feed in some of the information about Loma and her husband in letters home—the braggy things she can write home about so that her returning home is totally unexpected. That way she won’t have so much to tell Will, and it will keep Loma alive in the minds of the reader if there are little dribbles of it from the time she comes home to get Campbell Junior to go back North with her. Now Loma is left high and dry in New York, as far as the reader is concerned, except for the letter saying that she has just gotten married.
Note: Actually I think what I’m going to do is have Loma say nothing about why she’s home. Just say she’s homesick and wanted to come home and Campbell Junior wanted to come back there to school and she’s obviously very upset, though she tells everybody else in town....Want her to have time after arriving to get the word out around town that she’s just homesick, and then the Sunday paper (maybe of Thanksgiving weekend or the following), the headlines in the Atlanta newspaper, pick up a story in great detail from New York telling all the gory details about this rich man, and his wife having to escape from him by climbing down a ladder and being helped by two gardeners and how she claims she was locked in her room. Saw this story in a paper about 1895—have notes on this with more details—look up and concentrate on getting details—in 1917 same kind of yellow journalism, though in a local weekly they would not—they would protect the people—let this be a shock to Cold Sassy, not only the details but her name given and her home town, where according to the paper her husband suspects she may have gone.
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Note: When Loma left to go to New York City, she knew she would have to finance herself because she couldn’t be sure of getting enough work in the entertainment field. Loma has her house rented. Will asks if she’s going to live there. “You could pretend you’re a widow. I heard about a widow who painted her house black the week after her husband died.” She sold her interest in the store to Hoyt. Miss Love and Sampson own half the store and Hoyt owns the other half and runs the store, which he would love to do anyway, so when she’s back she has these jewels but she’s not going to be there long, so she rents rooms at Miss Hyta Mae’s boarding house for herself and Camp—maybe at this point Camp’s room and the room she had used before she went to New York—maybe Mama has rented it to a teacher or someone. In those days people were always renting rooms, so it may not be available for her to come back to and she doesn’t want to either, because she doesn’t think she’ll be there long—and this will get Miss Hyta Mae back into the reader’s mind. I want her to be a running character through the book, because she’s interesting. I don’t know what wonderful or awful things will be happening to her, but I think when Will is through with the Army and comes back to farm, it will be the Depression, and I think Miss Hyta Mae and Miss Love and Will’s mother will all be calling on him to do the kinds of things that need doing around the house that a woman can’t do or thinks she can’t do, and that’s going to be a bone of contention with Sanna because maybe he needs to fix fences on the farm and instead he goes over to do little things for all these women who depend on him.
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