Mame and I smiled in concert. But whether the flood done it, or whether we done it—who cared?
“But, land, you, Mame!” I says. “I thought you—I thought Mis’ Sykes....”
“I know it,” says Mame. “I was. She did. But the first thing I knew to-day, there we was peeling potatoes together in the same pan, and we done it all afternoon. I guess we kind of forgot about our bad feeling....”
I set there, smiling in the dark.... I donno whether you know a village, along toward night, with the sky still pink, and folks watering their front lawns and calling to each other across the streets, and a little smell of bon-fire smoke coming from somewheres? It was like that. And when Mis’ Sykes come to tell us the flower was beginning to bloom, I says to myself that there was lots more in bloom in the world than any of us guessed.
THE PARTY
Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman done her mourning like she done her house work—thorough. She was the kind of a housekeeper that looks on the week as made up of her duties, and the days not needing other names: Washday, Ironday, Mend-day, Bakeday, Freeday, Scrubday, and Sunday—that was how they went. With them nothing interfered without it was a circus or a convention or a company or the extra work on holidays. She kept house all over her, earnest; and when the Fire Chief died, that was the way she mourned.
When I say mourning I mean what you do besides the feeling bad part. She felt awful bad about her husband, but her mourning was somehow kind of separate from her grieving. Her grieving was done with her feelings, but her mourning was done more physical, like a diet. After the first year there was certain things she would and wouldn’t do, count of mourning, and nothing could change them.
Weddings and funerals Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman stayed true to. She would go to either. “Getting connect’ or getting buried,” she said, “them are both religious occasions, and they’s somethin’ so sad about either of ’em that they kind of fit in with weeds.”
But she wouldn’t go to a party if there was more than three or four to it, and not then if one of ’em was a stranger to her. And she wouldn’t go to it unless it was to a house—picnics, where you sat around on the ground, she said, was too informal for them in mourning. Church meetings she went to, but not club meetings, except the Cemetery Improvement Sodality ones. It was like keeping track of etiquette to know what to do with Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman.
“Seems though Aunt Hettie is more married now than she was when Uncle Eben was living,” her niece use’ to say.