The Ponder Heart (6 page)

So I just politely turned on my heel, leaving them both there with fourteen perfect quarts of peach preserves cooling on the back porch behind me. But before I could get down the front steps—

"Miss Edna Earle! Miss Edna Earle!" Narciss came streaking out after me. "Call Dr. Lubanks!"

"I imagine I can handle it," I says. "What is it?"

"It's him," says Bonnie Dee in the door behind her, on one foot.

"Say please, then," I says, and when she did, I went back in. I thought there'd be a little tiny cut on one cheek. But there he stretched. What had happened was, poor Uncle Daniel had gotten out of the habit of knowing what to expect, and when Bonnie Dee came real close to his eye with that razor, biting her tongue as she came, he'd pitched right out of his chair—white as a ghost with lather all over his cheeks and buttermilk dotting his tie.

"Narciss!" I says. "Holler for the closest!"

Grandpa considered he had a perfectly good way of getting in touch with the doctor or anybody else: a Negro on the back of a mule. There's a white man sitting at the crossroads store with a telephone and nothing to do all day but feed those birds.

Dr. Ewbanks had this to say, after he'd come and we'd all finished a good dinner: "Daniel, you know what? You've got to use more judgment around here. You've got a racing heart."

"Sure enough?" says Uncle Daniel. He'd been almost guarded with Dr. Ewbanks ever since Grandpa's funeral. But he smiled clear around the table at that word "heart." "You hear that, Edna Earle.? Hear that, sugar? It's my heart. Promise you won't ever go scootin' off again, then scare me that way coming back."

And Bonnie Dee crosses her heart, but looking around at us all while she does it, like she don't know which one to cross it to, me or Uncle Daniel or Dr. Ewbanks or Narciss or the kitchen cat. Dr. Ewbanks winks at her, and when Uncle Daniel runs around the table, so pale and proud, to get a kiss from her, she says, "Aren't you 'shamed! You always do the wrong thing."

I'll never forgive her.

I had her retroactive allowance right there in my pocketbook—I'd been about to forget it. I replaced my napkin, marched out to the parlor, straight to Grandma's vase on the table. It's two babies pulling a swan and holding something I always thought was a diploma. It had never held anything but calling cards before. I wish you could have seen it the way I left it, stuffed and overflowing with money. You would have wondered what had happened to the parlor table.

 

And here at the Beulah, coming in singing, Uncle Daniel commenced on, "Oh, my bride has come back to me. Pretty as a picture, and I'm happy beyond compare. Edna Earle got her back for me, you all, and Judge Tip Clanahan sewed it up. It's a court order, everybody. Oh, I remember how I fretted when she tried to run away."

"So do I," I says. "You cried on my shoulder."

"Did I?" he says. "Well, I don't have to cry any more. She's perched out there on the sofa till I get home tonight. I'll hug her and kiss her and I'll give her twenty-five dollars in her little hand. Oh, it would do you good to see her take it."

I put my finger on his lips.

I can't think just what they call that in Court—separate maintenance, I think it is. Only, Uncle Daniel and Bonnie Dee weren't separate as long as he maintained her, is what the difference amounted to. Old Judge Clanahan is pretty well up on things for a man of seventy-five. Uncle Daniel was so happy it was nearly more than he could stand. I sometimes feared for his heart, but he'd forgotten all about that} or she'd made him ashamed of it, one.

He even quit coming to town so much; he'd just send for me to come calling out there if he wanted company. And when I walked in, he'd beam on me and make me look through the bead curtains into the parlor. There she'd be, Bonnie Dee Peacock, curled up on Grandma's rosewood sofa, busy in the light of the lamp—spitting on her finger, turning through the magazines, cutting the coupons out by the stack and weighting them down under the starfish, and eating the kind of fudge
anybody
can make.

And after all I did, lo and behold! Poor Uncle Daniel—here he came around the Courthouse Square all by himself one day, in the middle of hot afternoon, carrying both the suitcases and wearing two hats. I was out in my flowers in front, getting a few weeds out of the ground with my little old hatchet.

"Edna Earle!" he starts calling as soon as he sees me. "Have you got a few cold biscuits I could have before supper, or a little chicken bone I could gnaw on? Look! I've come."

I jumped up and shook my hatchet at him. "Has she gone again?" I said. "Now she said she wouldn't—I heard her."

"Edna Earle, she didn't go a step," says Uncle Daniel, setting down his suitcases real gentle before me and taking off both hats. He'd walked all the way in, but made it all in one trip. "She didn't break her promise," he says. "She run me off."

And he walked in and made himself at home right away and didn't take it as hard as you'd imagine. He was so good.

And to tell you the truth, he was happy. This time, he knew where she was. Bonnie Dee was out yonder in the big old lonesome dark house, right in the spot where he most wanted her and where he left her, and where he could think of her being—and here was himself safe with Edna Earle in the Beulah Hotel, where life goes on on all sides. I moved out a lazy drummer and gave Uncle Daniel that big front room upstairs with the Courthouse out the window—the one where he is now. Christmas came, then spring, then Court, and everything in the world was going on, and so many more people were here around than out in the country—than just Bonnie Dee, the Peppers, and the Negroes, the Negroes, the Peppers, and Bonnie Dee. He had a world more to see and talk about here, and he ate like it.

You know, whatever's turned up, we've always
enjoyed
Uncle Daniel so—and he's relied on us to. In fact, he's never hesitated to enjoy himself. But Uncle Daniel never was a bit of good with nothing to talk about. For that, you need a Sistrunk. Something had better happen, for Uncle Daniel to appreciate life. And if he wasn't in the thick of things, and couldn't tell you about them when they did happen, I think he'd just pine and languish. He got that straight from Grandma. Poor Bonnie Dee: I never believed she had one whit of human curiosity. I never, in all the time she was married to Uncle Daniel, heard her say "What next?"

About the time she ran him off is when she began ordering off after everything. The Memphis paper did that. With her name in it that one time, she tried a whole year of it, and here it came, packed with those big, black ads. (Well, her name
was
in again. Mercy on us.)

We heard about the ordering from Narciss, when we saw Narciss in Bonnie Dee's pink voile dress she got married in, parading through Sistrunk's Grocery with a store-bought watermelon wrapped in her arms. Narciss said sure she was dressed up—she spent all her time now saying "Thank you!" As for Miss Bonnie Dee, her new clothes were gorgeous, and she hoped for some of those too some day, when they got holes. Narciss said there were evening dresses and street dresses and hostess dresses and brunch dresses—dresses in boxes and hanging up. Think of something to wear. Bonnie Dee had it.

And
things
began to pour into that house—you'd think there wouldn't be room. Narciss came chugging into town more times a week than ever, to claim something mighty well wrapped and tied, at the post office or the freight depot, and ride it home on the back seat.

Bonnie Dee even got a washing machine.

"She'll find she's going to need current out there," I says one day. "She may not be prepared for that."

"Yes'm she is," says Narciss. "She prepared. White man back agin yesterday."

"Does she remember it's Grandpa's house she's in?" I says, and Narciss drove off in a fit of the giggles, going zigzag.

But Bonnie Dee kept the washing machine on the front porch, just like any Peacock would be bound to do. Narciss didn't have any idea how to work any machinery but a Studebaker car. I wonder how many of those things they ever did bring under control. I told Narciss I was sure they came with directions hanging on, if there were eyes to read them.

I imagine Bonnie Dee was making hay while the sun shone. Because sure as you're born, if she hadn't run Uncle Daniel off, he'd be there giving things away as quick as she could get them in the door, or up to the porch. She was showing how
she
felt about things. Poor Bonnie Dee, I sometimes do think! Of course down payments were as far as her mind went.

And to crown it all, she got a telephone.

I passed by the place myself, going for a quick ride before dark with Mr. Springer when he was tired (so tired I drove) and Uncle Daniel sitting up behind. Bonnie Dee was out in the yard fully to be seen, in a hunter's green velveteen two-piece dress with a stand-up collar, and Narciss was right behind her in blue, all to watch the man put it in. They waved their hands like crazy at the car going by, and then again going back, blowing dust on all that regalia. Do you think it's ever rung once?

Of course I never asked Uncle Daniel why she ran him off, and don't know to this day. I don't want to know.

So Uncle Daniel was happy in the Beulah and Bonnie Dee was out yonder dressing up and playing lady with Narciss. And it got on toward summer again, but I just couldn't throw myself into it. My conscience pricked me. And pricked me and pricked me. Could I go on letting Uncle Daniel think
that
was the right way to be happy? Could you let your uncle?

I don't know if you can measure love at all. But Lord knows there's a lot of it, and seems to me from all the studying I've done over Uncle Daniel—and he loves more people than you and I put together ever will—that if the main one you've set your heart on isn't speaking for your love, or is out of your reach some way, married or dead, or plain nitwitted, you've still got that love banked up somewhere. What Uncle Daniel did was just bestow his all around quick—men, women, and children. Love! There's always somebody wants it. Uncle Daniel knew that. He's smart in a way you aren't, child.

And that time, he did it talking. In Clay he was right on hand. He took every soul I let in at the Beulah straight to his heart. "Hello, son—what's news?"—then he'd start in. Oh, the stories! He made free with everybody's—he'd tell yours and his and the Man in the Moon's. Not mine: he wouldn't dream I had one, he loves me so—but everybody else's. And things couldn't happen fast enough to suit him. I used to thank my stars this was a Courthouse town.

Well, if holding forth is the best way you can keep alive, then
do
it—if you're not outrageously smart to start with and don't have things to do. But
I
was getting
deaf!

So one Friday morning at nine-thirty when we were sitting down to our cokes in the dining room, I made up my mind to say something. Mr. Springer happened to be here. And Eva Sistrunk had wandered in and sat down—invited herself.

I waited till Uncle Daniel took a swallow—he was giving Mr. Springer's brother-in-law's sister a major operation in Kansas City, Missouri} and thank goodness we never laid eyes on
her,
before her operation or after. Then I said, "Uncle Daniel, listen just a minute—it's a little idea I woke up with. Why don't you try not giving Bonnie Dee the money this Saturday?"

Did I say he'd gone on giving her the money? And that Judge Tip Clanahan and Mr. Bank Sistrunk were both threatening to wash their hands of us for letting her treat us that way.

But I'm a Ponder too. I always got twenty-five dollars in fives from Eloise at the bank, and Uncle Daniel and I climbed in my trusty Ford, every Saturday afternoon after dinner, and ran the money out there. I took it up to the door, folded inside an envelope, and Uncle Daniel sat and watched from the car. Somehow he didn't seem to want to go in, just catch his glimpse. He's a real modest man, you know, and would never push his presence on you unless he thought you wanted him; then he would.

I was perfectly willing about it. I just prissed across the yard and up the steps to the porch and around the washing machine to the front door and called for Narciss. If there'd been a doorbell, I'd have rung it, at my own birthplace. I wore white gloves and a hat, as it was. And Narciss would be waiting to go to town, and holler "Miss Bonnie Dee!" And Bonnie Dee would sashay to the door wearing some creation and put out her little hand—not always too shining—and take the envelope. Uncle Daniel didn't get to see much of her—just a sleeve.