Read Online Leaving Cold Sassy (9780547527291) by Olive Ann Burns - Free Book Online Page A

good looks.” A moment of silence for the dead, and she added, “I don’t see as he’ll ever git a marker, though. Who’d pay for it?”
    They stood up again, and I was halfway to the door when Mrs. Jones said, “Oh, I meant to ast you. What about Will Tweedy?” I drew back as they moved towards the steps. “Did he join the Army while I was gone?”
    â€œNot as I know of.”
    â€œI just don’t see how he’s managed to stay out. Nothin’s wrong with him.”
    Miss Alice Ann said the trouble was my daddy. “Mr. Hoyt just goes to pieces when anybody asts has Will joined up. Claims Will is a heap more use to the war on the home front than if he was a-totin’ a gun.”
    Mrs. Jones had just one question. “What could be more use to the war than him doin’ his patriotic duty?”
    I wanted to stalk out there and take up for myself and Papa too, but what could I say? “I’ve always been crazy about that boy,” added the preacher’s wife, “but even before I left to go see about Sister, folks were sayin’ looks like Will’s a slacker. I don’t think Mr. Hoyt ought to carry on so. He ain’t the only daddy that cain’t bear to think of his boy in foreign trenches.”
    I retreated. Sneaked down the hall, out the back door and down the steps, and wandered into what used to be Granny Blakeslee’s rose garden.
    For the first time in my life I hated Cold Sassy and all it stood for. Call it Progressive City or Branch Water, I didn’t care. “I don’t belong here anymore,” I muttered to the rose bushes among the tangled expanse of jimson weed, honeysuckle, trumpet vine, and Johnson grass. I took a cigar and a match out of my shirt pocket, scratched the match across a rock, lit up, and stood there puffing smoke and staring—at nothing. I was suddenly overwhelmed by a great homesickness for Granny Blakeslee and Grandpa.
    Granny had died when I was fourteen. Grandpa and I were out here cutting roses at daybreak on the morning of her funeral. I remembered how he had straightened up, indicating the dewy splendor of color around us with the stub of his left arm, and said, “Miss Mattie Lou shore was a fool about roses. Did you know, boy, she’s got over sixty different kinds?” Later, as he was lining the open grave pit with roses, tears had spilled down on his cheeks.
    That was June the fourteenth, 1906. Three weeks later, Grandpa Blakeslee told my mother and Aunt Loma he aimed to marry Miss Love Simpson, the young milliner at his store. He said Miss Mattie Lou was dead as she’d ever be and he needed him a housekeeper, and a wife would just be cheaper than hiring a colored woman. That afternoon he took Miss Love over to Jefferson in his mule-drawn buggy. They got married at the courthouse.
    When Grandpa died the next May, I overheard Miss Alice Ann Boozer say, “It serves him right, after the way he done Miss Mattie Lou. Married that Yankee woman and didn’t live a year,” Cold Sassy eventually accepted the fact of the marriage. But even now, ten years later, nobody ever let anybody forget it.
    Her first summer as a widow, Miss Love told me she intended to keep up Miss Mattie Lou’s rose garden. But her talent was making hats and money, not growing roses. After Sampson was born, in February 1908, the sixty varieties were on their own—or, as we say in the South, “own their own.”
    I could have waited for Miss Sanna Klein another fifteen minutes and still made the train, but could I really compete with a Harvard lawyer named Blankenship who could quote Shakespeare? I didn’t even like Shakespeare. I might have if the teachers hadn’t made us read all those footnotes. I could do a pretty good job quoting “To a Daffodil” or “To a Mouse”—
Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie, o what a panic’s in thy