Kentucky -- Fiction; Older women -- Fiction; Widows -- Fiction
"And talkin' about sunsets, child, reminds me of a picture in
Henrietta's parlor. There never was anything like the inside o'
Henrietta's home. Her and Archibald went all over Europe when they was
first married, and everywhere they went they gethered up pictures and
marble images and such things, and whichever way you'd turn there was
somethin' to look at that you never'd seen before. And when you've
been livin' all your life in a house like this old farmhouse o' mine,
it gives you a curious sort o' feelin' to be set down all at once in a
place like Henrietta's. Why, for two or three days I hardly knew the
name of anything I was eatin' or drinkin' or lookin' at or walkin' on
or settin' on, and when I try to ricollect the different rooms, I git
'em all mixed up. But there's one thing that's jest as clear as day in
my mind, and that is the picture I'm tellin' you about. The name of it
was 'The Angelus.' Now ain't that a pretty name?--'The Angelus.' Why,
it sounds jest like music. The minute I come across it, I stopped
still in front of it and looked and looked and looked. And says I,
'Child, this picture makes me feel like sayin' my prayers.' And
Henrietta laughed, and says she, 'Grandma, that's jest what the people
in the picture are doin'.' And she said that over yonder in France, in
some o' the places out in the country, places pretty much like our
Goshen neighborhood, I reckon, they was in the habit o' ringin' the
church bells at sundown, and when people heard the bells, they'd stop
whatever they was doin' and say their prayers. And she told me all
about the man that painted 'The Angelus,' how poor he was, and how
folks laughed at his pictures, and wouldn't buy 'em because he painted
things jest as they was, plain and natural. She said her picture was a
copy of the one he painted, and when she saw how much I liked it, she
says, 'Grandma, I'm goin' to get you a copy of "The Angelus,"' and I
says, 'No, child, I ain't one o' the kind that has to have a picture
o' the folks and the things they love. I've got that picture right in
my old brain, and all I have to do to see it is jest to shut my eyes
and it'll come--the sunset and the field and the two people prayin'
and the bell,--I'll hear that, too, ringin' jest like the old bell
that used to ring in Goshen church.' Every day I'd go into the parlor
at Henrietta's about the time the sun'd be goin' down, and I'd look
first at the sunset in the sky and then at the sunset in the picture,
and I couldn't tell which was the prettiest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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