Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns Page B

sweet-pee trick. I know that's how dogs stake out territory and also how they find their way home, but looks like T.R. would know by now that all we had to do to go home was turn around and follow the train tracks.
    Two or three times he stopped and stared back like he thought somebody was coming behind us. But then he would lower his head for a new scent and run ahead.
    We saw a few mill people near the tracks, picking blackberries into lard buckets, and a whole family of colored people. The Negroes smiled and waved and held up their buckets for me to see. The mill people didn't.
    It was hot, good gosh. My straw hat shaded my eyes, but that was all in the world good it did. "I guess I got about two hours," I muttered out loud. I knew the southbound train would cross the trestle over Blind Tillie Creek about when I ought to head home to milk.
    You couldn't exactly tell time by that train, but it would be close enough. It always came back through Cold Sassy with a load of lumber from the sawmill at Lula, bound for the lumberyard in Athens, and usually there were some passenger cars carrying folks who'd been to Atlanta. In the fall there were always cotton buyers, and usually four or five drummers who would set up their merchandise in a hotel room, stay a few days, then move on to another little town. Grandpa called them "Knights of the Grip." When Mama and Aunt Loma were young, he never let them hang around the depot. Drummers liked to flirt, were fresh-shaved, and wore suits, patent leather shoes, and big smiles. Girls always liked them.
    Less than a mile past Mill Town, I rounded a bend and saw the train trestle up ahead, marching through the air high above the wooded gorge where Blind Tillie Creek ran. Just before we got to the trestle I whistled for my dog and went slipping and sliding down a red-dirt path, past dusty briar bushes that reached out to scratch me as I ate my fill of blackberries.

    It was a sight cooler by the creek than up there on the tracks. I cut me a pole and was soon perched on a stump, fishing and eating fried chicken. Later I cut a blackgum twig to chew on and settled myself comfortable on the ground with the stump for a back rest.
    It was nice and peaceful there. Watching the shallow water splash and churn over rocks, I almost forgot how mad I was at Mama for making me stay in mourning, how mad I was at her and Aunt Loma for fussing about Grandpa marrying when he clearly needed a housekeeper, and how mad I was at him and Miss Love for not caring how the family felt. But then I got mad at Papa. Here I was at last—fishing—and I couldn't enjoy it for feeling guilty.
    I had sense enough to know my daddy really needed me to be home working the garden. But I wished he knew what it felt like to have fun. All Papa had ever done was work. Before he was knee-high to a gnat, his own daddy had him picking bugs off of cotton plants, and he was hoeing as soon as he knew the difference between a weed and a cotton stalk, and milking soon as his hands were big enough to squeeze a cow's tit. I bet he never in his life had sat in the shade of a train trestle holding a fishing pole and watching dragonflies walk on water.
    Grandpa Blakeslee bragged a lot about my daddy being such a dandy worker. I was proud he wasn't lazy like his own daddy, who spent the summer days on his porch swatting flies and even had him a pet hen to peck up the dead ones. Grandpa Tweedy always claimed he couldn't work. "My veins is too small," he'd say. "My blood jest cain't git th'ew fast enough to let me do much." Naturally he had a beard. He was too lazy to shave. He was even too lazy and self-satisfied to go anywhere, except to preaching over at Hebron or to Cold Sassy to sell his cotton. Wasn't ever on a train but once, when he went to Dr. Mozely's funeral in Athens. All of us went, but first Grandpa Tweedy and my daddy had to decide if it was all right to ride that train. Being Sunday, it might be a sin.
    Like Grandpa Tweedy, Papa