Silas shakes his head. “He’s been chasin’ me for damages ever since he got hurt,” he says.
“Ain’t he goin’ to get any, Silas?” says Mis’ Toplady, pitiful.
“Get any?” says Silas. “It was his own fault. He told me a week before about them belts bein’ wore. I told him to lay off till I could fix ’em. But no—he kep’ right on. Said his wife was sick and his bills was eatin’ him up. He ain’t nobody to blame but his own carelessness. I told him to lay off.”
I looked over to Mis’ Toplady, and she looked over to me. And I looked at Abigail and at Mis’ Holcomb, and we all looked at each other. Only Mis’ Sykes—she set there listening and looking like her life was just elegant.
“Can’t you take that case, Mis’ Toplady?” says Silas.
“I’ll go and see them folks,” she says, troubled. And I guess us ladies felt troubled, one and all. And so on during all the while we was discussing the Doles and the Hennings and the Bettses and the rest. And when the meeting was over we four hung around the stove, and Mis’ Sykes too.
“I s’pose it’s all right,” Mis’ Toplady says. “I s’pose it is. But I feel like we’d made a nice, new apron to tie on to Friendship Village, and hadn’t done a thing about its underclothes.”
“I’m sure,” says Mis’ Sykes, looking hurt for Silas that had cut out the apron, “I’m sure I don’t see what you mean. Faith, Hope, and Charity, and the greatest of these is Charity. Does that mean what it says, or don’t it?”
“Oh, I s’pose it does,” says Mis’ Toplady. “But what I think is this: Ain’t there things that’s greater than the whole three as most folks mean ’em?”
Mis’ Sykes, she sort of gasped, in three hitches. “Will you tell me what?” she says, as mad as if she’d been faith, hope, and charity personally.