Middle West -- Fiction; Short stories, American; Villages -- Fiction
Then I remembered. Land, I’d forgot all about it. But at the last
meeting of the Friendship Married Ladies’ Cemetery Improvement
Sodality--we don’t work for just Cemetery any more, but we got started
calling it that twenty years back, and on we go under that name, serene
as a straight line--at that last meeting I’d appointed Mis’ Timothy
Toplady a committee of one to go to the engine-house to get them to
leave us sell garbage pails at cost in the front part; and it seems Mis’
Merriman had give out that she’d ought to be the one to do it, along of
her husband having been Fire Chief for eleven years and more, and she
might have influence with ’em. I’d of known that too, if I’d thought of
it--but you know how it is when they pitch on to you to appoint a
committee from the chair? All your i-dees and your tact and your memory
and your sense takes hold of hands and exits out of you, and you’re left
up there on the platform, unoccupied by any of ’em--and ten to one
you’ll appoint the woman with the thing in her hat that first attracts
your attention. Mebbe it ain’t that way with some, but I’ve noticed how
it is with me, and that day I’d appointed Mis’ Toplady to that committee
sole because she passed her cough-drops just at that second and my eye
was drawed acrost to them and to her. I’d never meant to slight Mis’
Fire Chief and I felt nothing on this earth but kindness to her, and
yet when I heard her speak so, all crispy and chilly and uppish, about
being glad I liked _something_ about her, all to once my veins sort of
run starch, and my bones lay along in me like they was meant for extra
pokers, and I flashed out back at her:
“Oh, yes, Mis’ Merriman--your _tulips_ is all right----” bringing my
full heft down on the word “tulips.”
And then I went on up the street with something--something--something
inside me, or outside me, or mebbe just _with_ me, looking at me, simple
and grave and direct and patient and--wounded again. And I felt kind of
sick, along up and down my chest. And the back of my head begun to hurt.
And I breathed fast and without no pleasure in taking air. And I says to
myself and the world and the Something Else:
“Oh, God, creator of heaven and earth that’s still creatin’ ’em as fast
as we’ll get our meannesses out of the way and let you go on--_what_
made me do that?”
And nothing told me what--not then.
Just then I see Mis’ Holcomb-that-was-Mame Bliss come out on their side
porch and hang out the canary. I waved my hand acrost to her, and she
whips off her big apron and shakes it at me, and I see she was feeling
the sun shine clear through her, just like I’d been.
“Come on down with me while I do an errant,” I calls to her.
“My table ain’t cleared off yet,” says she, decisive.
“Mine either,” I says back. “But ain’t you just as fond of the sun in
heaven as you are of your own breakfast dishes? Come on.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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