“Mis’ Merriman,” I says, “what tulips! Or,” says I, flattering, “is it a bon-fire, with lumps in the flame?”
Mis’ Merriman was bending over, setting out her peony bulbs, with her back to me. When I first spoke, she looked over her shoulder, and then she went right on setting them out, hard as she could dig. “Glad you like something that belongs to me,” says she, her words kind of punched out in places by the way she dug.
Then I remembered. Land, I’d forgot all about it. But at the last meeting of the Friendship Married Ladies’ Cemetery Improvement Sodality—we don’t work for just Cemetery any more, but we got started calling it that twenty years back, and on we go under that name, serene as a straight line—at that last meeting I’d appointed Mis’ Timothy Toplady a committee of one to go to the engine-house to get them to leave us sell garbage pails at cost in the front part; and it seems Mis’ Merriman had give out that she’d ought to be the one to do it, along of her husband having been Fire Chief for eleven years and more, and she might have influence with ’em. I’d of known that too, if I’d thought of it—but you know how it is when they pitch on to you to appoint a committee from the chair? All your i-dees and your tact and your memory and your sense takes hold of hands and exits out of you, and you’re left up there on the platform, unoccupied by any of ’em—and ten to one you’ll appoint the woman with the thing in her hat that first attracts your attention. Mebbe it ain’t that way with some, but I’ve noticed how it is with me, and that day I’d appointed Mis’ Toplady to that committee sole because she passed her cough-drops just at that second and my eye was drawed acrost to them and to her. I’d never meant to slight Mis’ Fire Chief and I felt nothing on this earth but kindness to her, and yet when I heard her speak so, all crispy and chilly and uppish, about being glad I liked something about her, all to once my veins sort of run starch, and my bones lay along in me like they was meant for extra pokers, and I flashed out back at her:
“Oh, yes, Mis’ Merriman—your tulips is all right——” bringing my full heft down on the word “tulips.”
And then I went on up the street with something—something—something inside me, or outside me, or mebbe just with me, looking at me, simple and grave and direct and patient and—wounded again. And I felt kind of sick, along up and down my chest. And the back of my head begun to hurt. And I breathed fast and without no pleasure in taking air. And I says to myself and the world and the Something Else:
“Oh, God, creator of heaven and earth that’s still creatin’ ’em as fast as we’ll get our meannesses out of the way and let you go on—what made me do that?”
And nothing told me what—not then.
Just then I see Mis’ Holcomb-that-was-Mame Bliss come out on their side porch and hang out the canary. I waved my hand acrost to her, and she whips off her big apron and shakes it at me, and I see she was feeling the sun shine clear through her, just like I’d been.
“Come on down with me while I do an errant,” I calls to her.
“My table ain’t cleared off yet,” says she, decisive.