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

pants pocket.
    Hoyt Willis Tweedy
    ***
    Miss Love kept envelopes on top of her desk. I wrote “To Miss Klein” on one and dropped the letter in the teachers’ mail basket on the hall table by the stairs. I couldn’t help noticing Miss Klein had a letter there from Mrs. Henry K. Jolley in Mitchellville, and two more in long business envelopes with the embossed return address
Blankenship, Crowe, and Blankenship, Attorneys-at-Law, Jefferson, Georgia.
In a bold scrawl above the print was written “Hugh A. Blankenship, Jr.”
    I knew about the legal firm of Blankenship and Crowe. I used to go over to Jefferson sometimes for court week with Pink Predmore and his lawyer-daddy, and if it was a trial that amounted to anything, you could count on Mr. Blankenship or Mr. Crowe representing one side or the other. I was discouraged for a second or two but tossed my note in the basket anyway.
    I blame everything that’s happened between Sanna and me on the sight of that name scrawled so bold and confident, as if he and his daddy’s firm had legal rights to her. Before that moment I’d only been smitten by Sanna Klein’s beauty. Suddenly I was determined to marry her.
    That’s what I was thinking as I headed for the front door, but I stopped in my tracks when I realized that the veranda was occupied. I recognized the voice of Miss Alice Ann Boozer. “Did you know Loma Blakeslee Williams come in on the train last week from New York City?”
    â€œEverybody this side the cemetery knows it,” said a voice I couldn’t quite place. “Why you think I wouldn’t know a thing like that?”
    â€œCause you been gone, Miz Jones,” said Miss Alice Ann.
    Of course. The other lady was the wife of the Reverend Brother Belie Jones.
    I knew I ought to go speak to them, but not being in much of a mood for woman talk, I tiptoed over to Miss Love’s wing chair by the window and sat down with a magazine. But I couldn’t read with those voices floating right in. I heard Miss Alice Ann ask Mrs. Jones how was her sister.
    â€œSister’s really on the down-go,” said the preacher’s wife. “But I couldn’t just stay on there till Kingdom Come. Like I told her, Brother Jones needs lookin’ after too. So yesterd’y I hired her a colored girl and took the train home.”
    â€œWhere is it she lives? I never can remember.”
    â€œA little coal-minin’ town—Brilliant, in Alabama.”
    â€œFunny name.”
    I could hear rocking chairs just going to town out there. Then one stopped and Miss Alice Ann spoke again. “When’s Miss Love go’n git here?”
    â€œAny minute now. I ‘phoned down at the store, and she said meet her here, she’d be on terreckly. I’ve got my good fall hat in this hatbox. She’s go’n make it over. I’m sure glad you happened along to keep me comp’ny.”
    With the chairs going
rockity-rockity-rockity,
I didn’t have to be out there to see Mrs. Jones, a tall stout lady in her sixties with swimmy eyes and a red face, probably fanning herself with a piece of cardboard, or Miss Alice Ann, so fat she didn’t have a lap and so short her little feet barely touched the floor.
    Years ago Miss Alice Ann had caught me kissing Lightfoot McLendon in the cemetery and told it all over town. I hated her back then, but now she was just an old lady. Suddenly she said, “I bet you ain’t heard about Loma Williams splashin’ her bare chest with cold well water, Miz Jones. I mean BARE chest! Done it out on the Tweedys’ back porch!”
    â€œMy land!”
    â€œAnd she was wearin’ her shirtwaist tucked into some long baggy purple pants! I seen a movin’ pitcher show one time with some ha-reem women dancin’ in thin baggy pants. That’s all right for heathen women, I reckon, but it don’t speak well of a Christian lady to wear