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

breastie
—but that’s hardly a love sonnet.
    If this Hugh Junior was so smart, why wasn’t he in the Army? I bet his daddy was busy pulling strings to get him a cushy lawyer job in Washington.
    I left Granny’s garden and cut through a gap in the hedge to the backyard of the house next door, where Miss Effie Belle Tate and Mr. Bubba used to live. Their niece, Miss Hyta Mae Brown, had a few boarders and ran a public dining room. Miss Love’s three teachers took all their meals over there.
    The smell of vegetable soup drifted from the kitchen window as I walked by. One of the cooks, Evaline, came out to the side of the back porch and poured her soapy dish water on the fig bush. “Evenin’, Mist’ Will!” she called. “Dish water sho’ do make figs grow. You wont som’a my good ole soup and cawnbread, son? Come on in de kitchen, I dish you up some. Hit’ll put meat on dem bones you got for laigs.”
    â€œThat’s hard to pass up, Evaline, but I got to catch a train.” I walked as far as Miss Hyta Mae’s pigeon cote before I turned towards South Main, far enough to avoid being seen from Miss Love’s veranda.
    If I passed anybody on the sidewalk, if any children were playing in their yards, if any lady waved at me from her porch, I didn’t notice. Walking fast, puffing furiously on the cigar, I kept repeating the name Progressive City, over and over. At the depot, I stared at the sign as if it had been put up only that morning. For ten years it had declared this was PROGRESSIVE CITY to train passengers, and for ten years I’d kept reading it COLD SASSY.
    Well, no more. All of a sudden the name Cold Sassy was as dead as Grandpa and Granny, and my old dog T.R., and Miss Effie Belle and Mr. Bubba. Growing up, I’d been made to feel like I was the town’s great hope for the future. Everybody proud of me, ready to make allowances. Now this was Progressive City, and I was just somebody who used to live here. My home town had gone on without me in the six years I’d been in Athens. And I had gone on without it, except for family.
    The truth was, I had outgrown Progressive City. I wondered why I never understood that before.
    ***
    The next day I saw the house in Mitchellville where Sanna Klein’s sister lived, and where Sanna had grown up.

7
    T HERE’S NO direct railroad line to Mitchellville. You got there by train; then somebody has to meet you five miles away at the depot in 1888, Georgia, a town named for the year it got incorporated. When my train pulled in, old Mr. Charlie Cadenhead was already there, waiting in a battered Model-T Ford.
    Mr. Charlie ran a dairy farm just south of Mitchellville and had done considerable cross-breeding of cattle. And Professor Harris, who ran the county agent program, wanted the dairyman’s figures regarding increase or decrease in milk production.
    Mr. Charlie was a short, white-haired, peculiar-shaped man. Had a big square head, thick neck, massive chest, bulging stomach, small hips, short arms, and short thin legs. He had on a blue denim shirt, a big straw hat, and overalls, and he smelled of chewing tobacco and hay.
    Soon as he found out my home town was Progressive City, he said, “Y’all got a new teacher this year, Miss Sanna Klein. She’s the prettiest little thang I ever seen. You met her yet?”
    â€œYessir.”
    He didn’t give me time to say more. Spitting out the window as we bounced on a rough dirt road with nothing but woods and farmland to either side, he shouted above the motor’s racket, “I tell you what, Mr. Tweedy. Iffen I was fifteen year younger and not marrit, little Sanna wouldn’t never have even got to P.C. I said so to her, on the steps of the post office, day before she left here. She just smiled and patted my arm.” Mr. Charlie honked at two boys walking on the road, and waved as we passed, leaving them in a wake of dust. “I