“I reckon you have had your hands full planting cotton,” said Mrs. Boyd. “I didn’t expect you; besides, I’ve had all I could do in my own field.”
“Yes, my boys have been hard at it,” said Mrs. Waycroft. “I don’t go to the field myself, like you do. I reckon I ain’t hardy enough, but keeping things for them to eat and the house in order takes all my time.”
“I reckon,” said Mrs. Boyd, studying the woman’s face closely under the faded black poke-bonnet—“I reckon you’ve got something to tell me. You generally have. I wish I could not care a snap of the finger what folks say, but I’m only a natural woman. I want to hear things sometimes when I know they will make me so mad that I won’t eat a bite for days.”
Mrs. Waycroft looked down at the ground. “Well,” she began, “I reckon you know thar would be considerable talk after what happened at meeting Sunday. You know a thing like that naturally would stir up a quiet community like this.”
“Yes, when I think of it I can see there would be enough said, but I’m used to being the chief subject of idle talk. I’ve had twenty odd years of it, Mary Waycroft, though this public row was rather unexpected. I didn’t look for abuse from the very pulpit in God’s house, if it is His. I didn’t know you were there. I didn’t know a friendly soul was nigh.”
“Yes, I was there clean through from the opening hymn. A bolt from heaven on a sunny day couldn’t have astonished me more than I was when you come in and walked straight up the middle aisle, and sat down just as if you’d been coming there regular for all them years. I reckon you had your own private reasons for making the break.”
“Yes, I did.” The wrinkled mouth of the speaker twitched nervously. “I’d been thinking it out, Mrs. Waycroft, for a long time and trying to pray over it, and at last I come to the conclusion that if I didn’t go to church like the rest, it was an open admission that I acknowledged myself worse than others, and so I determined to go—I determined to go if it killed me.”
“And to think you was rewarded that way!” answered Mrs. Waycroft; “it’s a shame! Ann Boyd, it’s a dirty shame!”
“It will be a long time before I darken a church door again,” said Mrs. Boyd. “If I’m ever seen there it will be after I’m dead and they take me there feet foremost to preach over my body. I didn’t look around, but I knew they were all whispering about me.”
“You never saw the like in your life, Ann,” the visitor said. “Heads were bumping together to the damagement of new spring hats, and everybody was asking what it meant. Some said that, after meeting, you was going up and give your hand to Brother Bazemore and ask him to take you back, as a member, but he evidently didn’t think you had a purpose like that, or he wouldn’t have opened up on you as he did. Of course, everybody thar knowed he was hitting at you.”