From Place to Place

by Irvin S. Cobb

"Do it all mean, den, dat after all dese yeahs you's tryin' to git shet of me—tryin' to t'row me aside lak an' ole worn-out broom? Well, I ain't gwine go!" Her voice soared shrilly to match the heights of her tantrum.

"Your wages will go on just the same—Harvey insists on that as much as we do," Emmy Lou essayed. "Don't you see, Auntie, that your life will be easier? You will have your own little home and your own little garden. You can come to see us—come every day if you want to. We'll come to see you. Things between us will go on almost exactly the same as they do now. You know how much we love you—Mildred and I. You know we are trying to think of your comfort, don't you?"

"Of course you do, Aunt Sharley," Mildred put in. "It isn't as if you were going clear out of our lives or we out of yours. You'll be ever so much happier."

"Well, I jes' ain't gwine go nary step." The defiant voice had become a passionate shriek. "Think Ise gwine leave yere an' go live in dat little house down dere by dem noisy tracks whar all dem odds an' ends of pore w'ite trash lives—dem scourin's an' sweepin's whut come yere to wuk in de new cotton mill! Think Ise gwine be corntent to wuk in a gyarden whilst I knows Ise needed right yere to run dis place de way which it should be run! Think Ise gwine set quiet whilst Ise pulled up by de roots an' transported 'way frum de house whar Ise spend purty nigh de whole of my endurin' life! Well, I won't go—I won't never go! I won't go—'ca'se I jes' can't!" And then, to the intense distress of the girls, Aunt Sharley slumped into a chair, threw her floury hands over her face and with the big tears trickling out between her fingers she moaned over and over again between her gulping breaths:

"Oh, dat I should live to see de day w'en my own chillens wants to drive me away frum 'em! Oh, dat I should live to see dis day!"

Neither of them had ever seen Aunt Sharley weep like this—shaken as she was with great sobs, her head bowed almost to her knees, her bared arms quivering in a very palsy. They tried to comfort her, tried to put their arms about her, both of them crying too. At the touch of their arms stealing about her hunched shoulders she straightened, showing a spark of the spirit with which they were more familiar. She wrenched her body free of them and pointed a tremulous finger at the door. The two sisters stole out, feeling terribly guilty and thoroughly miserable.

It was not the Aunt Sharley they knew who waited upon them that dusk at supper. Rather it was her ghost—a ghost with a black mask of tragedy for a face, with eyes swollen and reddened, with lips which shook in occasional spasms of pain, though their owner strove to keep them firm. With their own faces tear-streaked and with lumps in their throats the girls kept their heads averted, as though they had been caught doing something very wrong, and made poor pretense of eating the dishes that the old woman placed before them. Such glances as they stole at her were sidelong covert glances, but they marked plainly enough how her shoulders drooped and how she dragged herself about the table.

Within a space of time to be measured by hours and almost by minutes she seemed to have aged years.

It was a mute meal and a most unhappy one for the sisters. More than once Aunt Sharley seemed on the point of saying something, but she, too, held her tongue until they had risen up from their places. From within the passageway leading to the rear porch she spoke then across the threshold of the door at the back end of the dining room.

"You, nur nobody else, can't turn me out of dis house," she warned them, and in her words was the dead weight of finality. "An' ef you does, I ain't gwine leave de premises. Ise gwine camp right dere on de sidewalk an' dere I means to stay twell de policemens teks me up fur a vagrom. De shame of it won't be no greater fur me 'n 'tis fur you. Dat's all!" And with that she was gone before they could answer, if indeed they had any answer to make.