City and town life -- Fiction; Short stories, American
"But Calliope, she turned sharp away from him an' begun lookin' around
the room, like she see it for the first time--smoky lamp-chimney, old
newspapers layin' 'round, used-up glasses, an' such like. The room was
one o' the kind when they ain't no women or children. An' then, when she
see all that, pretty soon she looked back at him, layin' sick in his
chair, alone an' done for, like he said. An' I see her take her arms in
her hands an' kind o' rock.
"'Ain't the little fellow a care to you, Cally?' he says then, wistful.
"She went over towards him, an' I see her pick up his pillow an' smooth
it some an' make to fix it better.
"'Yes,' she says then, 'you're right. He is a care. An' he's your
grandchild. You must take him with you just as soon as you're well
enough,' she says.
"He broke clear down then, an' he caught her hands an' laid his face on
'em. She stood wonderful calm, lookin' down at him--an' lookin'. An' I
laid the hollyhocks down on the rug or anywheres, an' somehow I got out
o' the room an' down the stairs. An' I set there in the lower hall an'
waited.
"She come herself in a minute. The big outside door was standin' open,
an' when I heard her step on the stairs I went on ahead out to the
porch, feelin' kind o' strange--like you will. But when Calliope come up
to me she was just the same as she always was, an' I might 'a' known she
would be. She isn't easy to understand--she's differ'nt--but when you
once get to expectin' folks to be differ'nt, you can depend on 'em some
that way, too.
"The moon was noon-high by then an' filterin' down through the leaves
wonderful soft, an' things was still--I remember thinkin' it was like
the hushin'-up before a bride comes in, but there wasn't any bride.
"When we come to our house--just as we begun to smell the savoury bed
clear out there on the walk--we heard something ... a little bit of a
noise that I couldn't put a name to, first. But, bless you, Calliope
could. She stopped short by the gate an' stood lookin' acrost the road
to the corner house where the New People lived. It was late for
Friendship, but upstairs in that house a lamp was burnin'. An' that room
was where the little noise come from--a little new cry.
"'Oh, Liddy,' Calliope says--her head up like she was singin'--'Oh,
Liddy--the New People have got their little child.'
"An' I see, though of course she didn't anywheres near realize it then,
that she was plantin' herself another cedar."
XIX
HERSELF
After all, it was as if I had first been told about refraction and then
had been shown a rainbow. For presently Calliope herself said something
to me of her having been twenty. One would as lief have broken the
reticence of a rainbow as that of Calliope, but rainbows are not always
reticent. I have known them suggest infinite things.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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