“That she is,” sang his wife, and Mrs. Macy Wheeler parroted her.
“… who has this day received a grievous shock.”
“That she has,” echoed the ladies in their choir-trained voices.
Dolly looked at Catherine, touched my hand, as though asking us to explain what was meant by the group glowering below like dogs gathered around a tree of trapped possums. Inadvertently, and just, I think to have something in her hands, she picked up one of the cigarettes Riley had left.
“Shame on you,” squalled Mrs. Buster, tossing her tiny baldish head: those who called her an old buzzard, and there were several, were not speaking of her character alone: in addition to a small vicious head, she had high hunched shoulders and a vast body. “I say shame on you. How can you have come so far from God as to sit up in a tree like a drunken Indian—sucking cigarettes like a common …”
“Floozy,” supplied Mrs. Macy Wheeler.
“… floozy, while your sister lies in misery flat on her back.”
Maybe they were right in describing Catherine as dangerous, for she reared up and said: “Preacher lady, don’t you go calling Dolly and us floozies; I’ll come down there and slap you bowlegged.” Fortunately, none of them could understand her; if they had, the sheriff might have shot her through the head: no exaggeration; and many of the white people in town would have said he did right.
Dolly seemed stunned, at the same time self-possessed. You see, she simply dusted her skirt and said: “Consider a moment, Mrs. Buster, and you will realize that we are nearer God than you—by several yards.”
“Good for you, Miss Dolly. I call that a good answer.” The man who had spoken was Judge Cool; he clapped his hands together and chuckled appreciatively. “Of course they are nearer God,” he said, unfazed by the disapproving, sober faces around him. “They’re in a tree, and we’re on the ground.”
Mrs. Buster whirled on him. “I’d thought you were a Christian, Charlie Cool. My ideas of a Christian do not include laughing at and encouraging a poor mad woman.”
“Mind who you name as mad, Thelma,” said the Judge. “That isn’t especially Christian either.”
The Reverend Buster opened fire. “Answer me this, Judge. Why did you come with us if it wasn’t to do the Lord’s will in a spirit of mercy?”
“The Lord’s will?” said the Judge incredulously. “You don’t know what that is any more than I do. Perhaps the Lord told these people to go live in a tree; you’ll admit, at least, that He never told you to drag them out—unless, of course, Verena Talbo is the Lord, a theory several of you give credence to, eh Sheriff? No, sir, I did not come along to do anyone’s will but my own: which merely means that I felt like taking a walk—the woods are very handsome at this time of year.” He picked some brown violets and put them in his buttonhole.
“To hell with all that,” began the Sheriff, and was again interrupted by Mrs. Buster, who said that under no circumstances would she tolerate swearing: Will we, Reverend? and the Reverend, backing her up, said he’d be damned if they would. “I’m in charge here,” the Sheriff informed them, thrusting his bully-boy jaw. “This is a matter for the law.”
“Whose law, Junius?” inquired Judge Cool quietly. “Remember that I sat in the courthouse twenty-seven years, rather a longer time than you’ve lived. Take care. We have no legal right whatever to interfere with Miss Dolly.”
Undaunted, the Sheriff hoisted himself a little into the tree. “Let’s don’t have any more trouble,” he said coaxingly, and we could see his curved dog-teeth. “Come on down from there, the pack of you.” As we continued to sit like three nesting birds he showed more of his teeth and, as though he were trying to shake us out, angrily swayed a branch.
“Miss Dolly, you’ve always been a peaceful person,” said Mrs. Macy Wheeler. “Please come on home with us; you don’t want to miss your dinner.” Dolly replied matter-of-factly that we were not hungry: were they? “There’s a drumstick for anybody that would like it.”
Sheriff Candle said, “You make it hard on me, ma’am,” and pulled himself nearer. A branch, cracking under his weight, sent through the tree a sad cruel thunder.
“If he lays a hand on any one of you, kick him in the head,” advised Judge Cool. “Or I will,” he said with sudden gallant pugnacity: like an inspired frog he hopped and caught hold to one of the Sheriff’s dangling boots.
The Sheriff, in turn, grabbed my ankles, and Catherine had to hold me around the middle. We were sliding, that we should all fall seemed inevitable, the strain was immense. Meanwhile, Dolly started pouring what was left of our orangeade down the Sheriff’s neck, and abruptly, shouting an obscenity, he let go of me. They crashed to the ground, the Sheriff on top of the Judge and the Reverend Buster crushed beneath them both. Mrs. Macy Wheeler and Mrs. Buster, augmenting the disaster, fell upon them with crow-like cries of distress.
Appalled by what had happened, and the part she herself had played, Dolly became so confused that she dropped the empty orangeade jar: it hit Mrs. Buster on the head with a ripe thud. “Beg pardon,” she apologized, though in the furor no one heard her.
When the tangle below unraveled, those concerned stood apart from each other embarrassedly, gingerly feeling of themselves. The Reverend looked rather flattened out, but no broken bones were discovered, and only Mrs. Buster, on whose skimpy-haired head a bump was pyramiding, could have justly complained of injury. She did so forthrightly. “You attacked me, Dolly Talbo, don’t deny it, everyone here is a witness, everyone saw you aim that mason jar at my head. Junius, arrest her!”
The Sheriff, however, was involved in settling differences of his own. Hands on hips, swaggering, he bore down on the Judge, who was in the process of replacing the violets in his buttonhole. “If you weren’t so old, I’d damn well knock you down.”
“I’m not so old, Junius: just old enough to think men ought not to fight in front of ladies,” said the Judge. He was a fair-sized man with strong shoulders and a straight body: though not far from seventy, he looked to be in his fifties. He clenched his fists and they were hard and hairy as coconuts. “On the other hand,” he said grimly, “I’m ready if you are.”
At the moment it looked like a fair enough match. Even the Sheriff seemed not so sure of himself; with diminishing bravado, he spit between his fingers, and said Well, nobody was going to accuse him of hitting an old man. “Or standing up to one,” Judge Cool retorted. “Go on, Junius, tuck your shirt in your pants and trot along home.”
The Sheriff appealed to us in the tree. “Save yourselves a lot of trouble: get out of there and come along with me now.” We did not stir, except that Dolly dropped her veil, as though lowering a curtain on the subject once for all. Mrs. Buster, the lump on her head like a horn, said portentously, “Never mind, Sheriff. They’ve had their chance,” and, eyeing Dolly, then the Judge, added: “You may imagine you are getting away with something. But let me tell you there will be a retribution—not in heaven, right here on earth.”
“Right here on earth,” harmonized Mrs. Macy Wheeler.
They left along the path, erect, haughty as a wedding procession, and passed into the sunlight where the red rolling grass swept up, swallowed them. Lingering under the tree, the Judge smiled at us and, with a small courteous bow, said: “Do I remember you offering a drumstick to anybody that would like it?”
HE MIGHT HAVE BEEN PUT together from parts of the tree, for his nose was like a wooden peg, his legs were strong as old roots, and his eyebrows were thick, tough as strips of bark. Among the topmost branches were beards of silvery moss the color of his center-parted hair, and the cowhide sycamore leaves, sifting down from a neighboring taller tree, were the color of his cheeks.
Despite his canny, tomcat eyes, the general impression his face made was that of someone shy and countrified. Ordinarily he was not the one to make a show of himself, Judge Charlie Cool; there were many who had taken advantage of his modesty to set themselves above him. Yet none of them could have claimed, as he could, to be a graduate of Harvard University or to have twice traveled in Europe.
Still, there were those who were resentful and felt that he put on airs: wasn’t he supposed to read a page of Greek every morning before breakfast? and what kind of a man was it that would always have flowers in his
