“When my Emmy gits back you kin go to grass!”
But the last word was mumbled in the delicious sleep Mrs. Krantz had brought him.
Then Mrs. Krantz humbly polished the dulled andiron, cleaned the dirt out of the corners, restored the broom to its rightful corner, folded old Liebereich’s trousers and hung them over the back of a chair, lighted the lamp, shaded it, looked again at that scriptural text, as if to ask whether every cross had been borne, then went out, to return at five in the morning. For old Liebereich was permitted to sleep late. He was no trouble when he slept.
Now, while old Liebereich sleeps, I shall tell you some things you ought to know. In the idiom of the vicinage he was considered “funny,” which means only queer. Happiness had made him so, they said. His most constant and odious boast was that he had loved his wife for eighty years. It began, he said, when he was four and she was born.
And old Liebereich did not know that she was dead. Something had dulled his faculties when they told him she would die, and now he believed (as they told him, so that he would not “bother” them) that she was at her sister’s in Maryland to get well, and would be home soon. So the curious jerk of his head toward the door by the fireplace meant only that he was vigilant for his wife’s return. The neighbors thought it part of his aberration.
But even the little intelligence he retained made out this return to have been logically too long delayed. It was no longer “very soon,” as they had at first told him; it was scarcely “soon,” as they had at last told him.
And Christmas was coming!
“Do you think she will be here for Christmas?” he asked each one of them.
They assured him of this.
“Then I’ll hang up the old stockings and su’prise her!”