Cold Sassy Tree (4 page)

I liked to look at the advertisements in the mail-order catalogues he kept by the cash register.
Manhood Restored
was my favorite:

Nerve Seeds guaranteed to cure all nervous diseases such as Weak Memory, Loss of Brain Power, Headaches, Wakefulness, Lost Manhood, Nightly Emissions, nervousness, all drain and loss of power in generative organs of either sex caused by over-exertion, youthful errors, excessive use of tobacco, opium or stimulants which lead to infirmity, consumption or Insanity. Can be carried in vest pocket. $1 per box address Nerve Seed Co., Masonic Temple, Chicago, 111.

Grandpa had him a big sign out front over the entrance to the store. In fancy red letters outlined in gold it said:

GENERAL MERCHANDISE
Mr. E. Rucker Blakeslee, Proprietor

Besides keeping the store's ledgers, my daddy took a lot of the buying trips to Atlanta and Baltimore and New York City. I went to New York with him one time when I was little bitty. I'd heard about damnyankees all my life and there I was in a city just full of them. It scared me to death.

Granny's Uncle Lige Toy, who used to have a restaurant business feeding county prisoners, was in charge of Grandpa's cotton warehouse, one of the biggest in north Georgia, and also the store's cotton seed business. Uncle Lige was the one to talk to if you wanted to put your bales in storage till you could get a better price.

A third cousin of Papa's, Hopewell Stump, from out in Banks County, clerked and took care of the chickens that folks brought to trade out for nails, flour, sugar, coal oil, coffee, and chewing tobacco. There used to be smelly chicken coops out on the board sidewalk in front of every store in town, but after Cold Sassy was incorporated in 1887, the Baptist missionary society ladies petitioned the town council to get rid of them. So when Grandpa built his brick store in 1892 he put a great big chickenhouse in back, and every Friday Cudn Hope shipped hens, roosters, and frying-size pullets to Athens or Atlanta on the train.

Uncle Camp mostly swept the floor and put out stock, and in the wintertime broke up wooden shipping crates to burn in the stove. Grandpa called him "born tired and raised lazy." Said getting him to finish something was like pushing mud. "Money don't jump out at you, boy," he'd say. "You got to work for it."

Campbell Williams was Uncle Camp's whole name. He was a pale thin fellow with pale thin yellow hair and a pale thin personality. He was always checking the time so he could show off his gold pocket watch.

He wasn't but nineteen when he came to Cold Sassy from over near Maysville, Georgia. The day Camp walked into the store and asked for a job, Grandpa took one look and said he didn't need no hep right now. Camp got him a job at the tannery, working for Wildcat Lindsey, but soon lost it, and then worked a while at the gin. Grandpa didn't bring him into the store till after
he married Aunt Loma, and never did have any respect for him.

Love Simpson was the first woman Grandpa ever hired. She grew up in Baltimore and had never married but didn't look or act like any other old maid in town. She was tall, plump, and big-bosomed, stood very straight, moved lively, and wore flouncy, fashionable clothes. Miss Love had a sparkly way of talking and she laughed a lot.

I remember the first time I saw her. I had been standing in front of the store watching a flock of turkeys trot through town. If a turkey strayed, a man would snap a long whip around its neck and pull it back in line.

When I went inside, there was the new milliner, seated at a table littered with feathers, bird wings, satin bows, stiff tape, bolts of velvet, linen, silk, and so on, and several life-size dummy heads. She had one of the heads in her lap, wrapping folds of pink velour around it and sticking pins here and there to hold the cloth in place. Looking up, she saw me, smiled and said, "What's all the commotion outside, honey?" She had two pins in the corner of her mouth and had to speak around them.

"A turkey drive, ma'am. The men are rushin' to get'm through town before first dark, cause when it's time to roost, they go'n fly to the nearest tree and they ain't go'n budge till daybreak."

I was only twelve then. It was before I got long-legged, so with her sitting down and me standing, my head was just about level with hers. I forgot all about the turkeys, I was so busy smelling her perfume and looking at her freckles. They were like brown pepper. She had gray-blue eyes, long black lashes, a tilted-up nose, a big smiley mouth, and thick wavy brown hair piled high and perky on her head.

Miss Love took the pins out of her mouth. "I guess you live here in Cold Sassy," she said, smiling extra friendly.

"Yes'm. I'm Will Tweedy, ma'am. You must be the new milliner."

"And you must be Mr. Hoyt's boy." She nodded in the direction of Papa, who was over by the cash register.

"Yes'm."

"He is a very nice man, and good-looking, too." That pleased me. Papa was stocky, not tall, but he was neat about his clothes,
had a handsome face, and shaved every morning. Most men in Cold Sassy had a beard or just shaved on Saturday night to get ready for Sunday.

Miss Love held up the dummy head with the pink velour wrapping, turning it this way and that to get the effect. "You like this hat, Will Tweedy?"

I didn't have much opinion about hats, or much interest either. "Well'm," I mumbled, "I cain't hardly tell what it's go'n look like yet."

Miss Love laughed. A hearty laugh. Her lips were so red they looked painted almost. "You're a good diplomat, Will Tweedy."

One thing I noticed that day was how proper Miss Love spoke. Till then, I never met anybody who could talk as proper as Aunt Carrie. Aunt Carrie was taught to speak cultured at a private school in Athens run by a French woman, Madame Joubert.

I found out later that Miss Love learned to talk right from a rich educated lady in Philadelphia that she used to go stay with every spring and fall, making hats for her and her daughters.

"Mrs. Hanover was always correcting my grammar and pronunciation," Miss Love told me. "If I mumbled or made the least little mistake, I had to say it over and over till I got it right. I guess Mrs. Hanover liked me. She said that with my flair for fashion, her friends couldn't tell me from one of them till I opened my mouth. 'Cultivate good speech, Miss Simpson,' she'd say, 'and you can marry above yourself.' She gave me her finishing school grammar book. I still have it. I felt certain if I memorized that book I could marry the Prince of Wales—or at least a railroad president."

Grandpa was real proud of the store having a milliner trained at the Armstrong and Cater Company in Baltimore. In 1901, the company had sent Miss Love and her best friend out to a big store in Texas. When she wanted to leave Texas, Armstrong and Cater sent her, sight unseen, to Grandpa. He had written asking for a milliner and Miss Love was available, so that's all there was to it. But for weeks after she came to town, men would poke Grandpa in the ribs, nod toward the milliner's table, and say, "You shore know how to pick'm, Mr. Blakeslee," or, "You got you a real looker, ain't you?" Grandpa would grin and say you dang right.

At first Miss Love stayed at Granny and Grandpa's house, in their company room. Later she boarded with Mr. and Mrs. Eli P. Crabtree, whose son Arthur was bad to drink and took an overdose of laudanum in the cemetery one cold night. They found him dead the next morning, huddled up against his sweetheart's tombstone, and now Miss Love was renting Arthur's old room. The Crabtrees thought she was real nice, but she didn't tell her business to them or anybody, and didn't have close friends. The only thing Cold Sassy knew about her was what that milliner in Athens told Aunt Loma.

Besides about her daddy being in the Union Army, the woman told it as gospel that after Miss Love got engaged to a rich Texas rancher and went home to Maryland to make her trousseau clothes, her best friend got you-know-what by her fee-ance, and they eloped. Aunt Loma said if her fee-ance and her best friend were that kind of trash, "it don't speak so well for Love Simpson."

You have to take into account that Aunt Loma was just eighteen when Miss Love hit town, and the jealous type. Aunt Loma was blue-eyed and had the thickest long curly red hair you ever saw, with little tendrils around her face that made her look sweet and innocent. Till Miss Love came, she was considered just the prettiest thing in Cold Sassy, and also the most fashionable. While visiting one time in Atlanta, Loma went to M. Rich & Bros, and bought herself some handmade French drawers with lace-edged ruffles, and also what she called "a blue poky-dot foulard dress with an overskirt of Georgette crepe." Grandpa like to had a fit about her spending the money, but after she cried, he let her alone about it. The only thing not fashionable about Aunt Loma was her bosom.

She was so flat you didn't have to be big to be bigger, and Miss Love Simpson was definitely bigger. At some point Miss Love made the mistake of remarking that Loma had just the perfect figure for the stylish new shirtwaists with lots of tucks and ruffles in front. That was because of Loma's flat busts, so though it was meant as a compliment, she was insulted. She hadn't had much to do with Miss Love since, especially not after one Saturday when she wanted to buy a little blue hat with white bird wings on it that Miss Love was wearing and didn't want to sell. I heard what was said because I was down at the store washing fly spots off the show window.

"You've sold hats off your head before," Aunt Loma argued, pushing out her bottom lip.

"I know," Miss Love answered sweetly. "But I made this hat special to go with this dress. Let me fix up something else for you."

Aunt Loma's face flushed red as her hair, she was so mad, and she flounced off acting like a store-owner's daughter to a hired hand. "I must say, Love Simpson," she hissed, "you'd do well to quit thinking you're good as your betters!"

As they say in Cold Sassy, Aunt Loma was behind the door when they passed out the tact. And her temper was such that if King Edward VII or the Lord God Almighty Himself had been around when she got mad, she wouldn't of talked any less awful. In fact, she'd of been glad of the extra audience.

I just couldn't stand Aunt Loma. As long as I could remember, she'd bossed me like I was her slave. She was only six years older than me, for gosh sake, which to my mind didn't give her any right to lord it over me like she was a hundred. God help Miss Love Simpson if she really had gone off and married Grandpa against her will—against Aunt Loma's will, I mean. I hoped Miss Love understood what she was up against. I could of told her, because I had been up against Aunt Loma all my life.

There were some people in Cold Sassy who called Miss Love "that Yankee woman" or made fun of her for being a suffragette. Not a man in town thought it mattered a hoot about women voting, and only two ladies went to the first women's suffrage meeting Miss Love set up. Either nobody else was interested or their husbands wouldn't let them come, one. After that meeting, most folks felt a little uneasy about Miss Love. Still and all, just about everybody liked her.

The men liked her because she was pretty and friendly and, as Mr. Cratic Flournoy put it, full of ginger and pepper.

The ladies liked her because she made hats that could of come straight out of New York City. Also, she had a pattern book of the newest styles and would order patterns for anybody who wanted her to, and she showed the ladies how to fix their hair fashionable.

The congregation at the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, liked her because her piano-playing was loud and lively. Ever
since Miss Love started playing for preachin', folks had sung out good, patting their feet and generally getting in shape to shout and amen during the sermon.

Just the same, Cold Sassy thought it was one thing to like Miss Love and another thing entirely to marry her. Especially if your wife died just three weeks ago.

A
S
M
AMA EXPECTED
, there wasn't anybody in Cold Sassy who didn't wonder if Grandpa hadn't been sweet on the milliner a long time, and maybe was relieved to get shet of Miss Mattie Lou so he could marry Miss Love.

For sure Miss Love wasn't a bit like Granny, except they were both feisty. Granny always wore her skimpy gray hair pulled straight back behind her ears and fastened in a ball. I never saw a frill or ribbon on her and I figured she had never been pretty. She told me that when she and her cousin were young, they walked by the harness shop one day and chanced to hear an old man say what nice girls they were. Another man said, "Yeah, but one of'm shore is strange around the eyes."

"We never knowed which'n he meant," Granny said, laughing.

I knew which'n. It was Granny. Her eyes were the farthest apart I ever saw. She had big ears, too, and the last few months a peculiar knot came on one side of her throat. It wasn't a goiter. Doc Slaughter said blamed if he knew what it was. Grandpa teased her about it. "You look like you done swallered a goose aigg, Miss Mattie Lou, and it got stuck in yore goozle."

She just laughed. She was kind of worried about the knot, but really didn't care how it looked, and Grandpa didn't either.

Her not having a boy baby was the only thing Grandpa ever threw up to her. Once I saw tears come in her eyes when he mentioned it.

Granny used to say she never did see why Mr. Blakeslee married her. "When he come back to Cold Sassy after the War, he
was the handsomest man you ever seen and I was a old maid. Twenty-one year old and never had a beau in my life. I was fixin' to go in to church one Sunday mornin' when this good-lookin' feller, he tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Ain't you Miss Mattie Lou Toy? You don't need no sermon today. Stay out here and le's talk.' I ain't seen him since the fourth grade but I knowed it was Rucker Blakeslee. So we stayed in the churchyard, like a reg'lar courtin' couple, and talked one another's ears off. Afterwards it was dinner on the grounds, and we talked some more. Fore that day was over Mr. Blakeslee said he was a-go'n marry me, soon as he come back from peddlin' in the mountains." I remember she laughed about how quick Grandpa could make up his mind. "Maybe he thought I was rich," she added, laughing again.