Leaving Cold Sassy (9780547527291) by Olive Ann Burns Page B

don’t know i’ Porter Springs is the hancy summer resort it used to be back then, but there’s still places to stay, I know that.”
    A tear rolled down her cheek from the drooped eye. But she wiped it off, and though the right side of her face drooped in despair, a smile of hope brightened the good side. About then Mama called us in to dinner. Once we’d passed all the food and got to eating good, Cudn Zena started talking about my Grandpa Blakeslee.
    â€œRemember that old log cabin your daddy was born in?” she asked Mama. “You know, up on that woody clay hill between Poky and Erastus? Well, we went over there to see it—I reckon it was a year ago January, wadn’t it, Mr. Milford?”
    He nodded and said the cabin had plumb rotted down.
    â€œVines growin’ betwist and between the logs,” said Cudn Zena. “Them vines had just pulled it apart.”
    Everybody was sad to hear that, but then we had a good time swapping stories about Grandpa Blakeslee. The Poky folks told some I’d never heard before. Like for instance when Grandpa was about twelve years old and stayed out possum hunting on Saturday night and went to sleep on the bench next morning at church. “The preacher noticed,” said Cudn Zena, “and right in the middle of his sermon he said real loud, ‘Rucker Blakeslee, I’m askin’ you to pray.’ Remember Aunt Lula Pritchett? Well, Aunt Lula, she punched Rucker and said, ‘Git up and pray, son.’” Grandpa, stumbling to his feet, said
Lordmakeusthankfulfortheseandallourmanyblessin’s.Amen.
Then he sat down and went back to sleep.
    I told about the Halloween night Grandpa pushed over the privy at the Cold Sassy depot, knowing the Yankee president of the railroad was in there, and how the man offered a fifty-dollar reward to anybody who’d tell who did it. Nobody would. Mama and Queenie were clearing off the table by then, ready to bring in Cudn Zena’s pecan pie.
    I sat there wishing Mary Toy and Aunt Loma and Campbell Junior were still here. The table seemed suddenly lonesome without them.
    And without Granny and Grandpa...
    I didn’t look forward to an afternoon hearing about who all in the family was sick, so when Mr. Talmadge from Athens stopped by in his automobile to see Papa and offered me a ride back, I took him up on it.
    That night I spent an hour writing a five-sentence letter to Sanna Klein:
    ***
    Dear Miss Klein,
    I’m sitting here in my rented room eating sardines and crackers whereas I had hoped to be with you. If it’s in order, I would like to take you to church next Sunday night. Please let me know if that is OK. I hope you don’t have a “previous.” You already seem like an old acquaintance.
    Hoyt Willis Tweedy
    ***

10
    M ORE THAN seventeen years passed between the September night I wrote that letter and the Monday night last November when I read it again, in a dingy one-room cabin at the Rest-Easy Motor Court near Shellman, Georgia.
    In desperation I had taken a cotton-buying job as one of four field men in a new farmers’ cooperative. When I started traveling in south Georgia for forty-five dollars a month, all I had in the world was a wife, four children, a milk cow, a bird dog, a worn-out Model-A Ford, and an expense account for gas plus two dollars and fifty cents a day for food and lodging.
    If I happened to be talking to a farmer anywhere near noon, I could count on his wife inviting me to dinner. If I slept in the car two nights, I could save enough expense money to buy gas and get home to Progressive City for a weekend. If it wasn’t a hot night, sleeping in the car was real pleasant. Plenty of fresh air, no roaches, and not many more mosquitoes than in a cheap hotel room.
    In the car I had to sleep folded up, but that wasn’t much worse than sleeping at the Rest-Easy Motor Court, where the mattress was thin and the springs as rusty and sagging as