The Ponder Heart (2 page)

And as for Uncle Daniel, he went right ahead, attracting love and friendship with the best will and the lightest heart in the world. He loved being happy! He loved happiness like I love tea.

***

And then in April, just at Easter time, Grandpa spent some money himself, got that new Studebaker, and without saying kiss-my-foot to me, Grandpa and old Judge Tip Clanahan up and took Uncle Daniel through the country to Jackson in that brand-new automobile, and consigned him.

"That'll correct him, I expect," said Grandpa.

Child-foolishness! Oh, Grandpa lived to be sorry. Imagine that house without Uncle Daniel in it. I grew up there, but all you really need to know about is it's a good three miles out in the country from where you are now, in woods full of hoot-owls.

To be fair, that wasn't till after Grandpa'd tried praying over Uncle Daniel for years and years, and worn out two preachers praying over them both. Only I was praying against Grandpa and preachers and Judge Tip Clanahan to boot, because whatever
you
say about it, I abhor the asylum.

Oh, of course, from the word Go, Uncle Daniel got more vacations than anybody else down there. In the first place, they couldn't find anything the matter with him, and in the second place, he was so precious that he only had to ask for something. It seemed to me he was back home visiting more than he ever was gone between times, and pop full of stories. He had a pass from the asylum, and my great-grandfather Bell had been a big railroad man, so he had a pass on the branch-line train, and it was the last year we had a passenger train at all, so it worked out grand. Little train just hauls cross-ties now. Everybody missed Uncle Daniel so bad while he was gone, they spent all their time at the post office sending him things to eat. Divinity travels perfectly, if you ever need to know.

Of course, let him come home and he'd give away something. You can't stop that all at once. He came home and gave the girl at the bank a trip to Lookout Mountain and Rock City Cave, and then was going along with her to watch her enjoy both, and who prevailed on him then? Edna Earle. I said, "Dear heart, I know the asylum's no place for you, but neither is the top of a real high mountain or a cave in the cold dark ground. Here's the place." And he said, "All right, Edna Earle, but make me some candy." He's good as gold, but you have to know the way to treat him} he's a man, the same as they all are.

But he had a heap to tell. You ought to have heard some of the tales! It didn't matter if you didn't know the people: something goes on there all the time! I hope I'm not speaking of kin of present company. We'd start laughing clear around town, the minute Uncle Daniel hopped off the train, and never let up till Grandpa came chugging in to get him, to set him on the down-train. Grandpa did keep at it. And I don't know how it worked, but Uncle Daniel
was
beginning to be less open-handed. He commenced slacking up on giving away with having so much to tell.

The sight of a stranger was always meat and drink to him. The stranger don't have to open his mouth. Uncle Daniel is ready to do all the talking. That's Understood. I used to dread he might get hold of one of these occasional travelers that wouldn't come in unless they had to—the kind that would break in on a story with a set of questions, and wind it up with a list of what Uncle Daniel's faults were: some Yankee. But Uncle Daniel seemed to have a sixth sense and avoid those, and light on somebody from nearer home always. He'd be crazy about you.

Grandpa was a little inclined to slow him down, of course. He'd say, "Who?—What, Daniel?—When?—Start over!" He was the poorest listener in the world, though I ought not to say that now when he's in his grave. But all the time, whatever Uncle Daniel might take it into his head to tell you, rest assured it was the Lord's truth to start with, and exactly the way he'd see it. He never told a lie in his life. Grandpa couldn't get past that, poor Grandpa. That's why he never could punish him.

I used to say Mr. Springer was the perfect listener. A drug salesman with a wide, wide territory, in seldom enough to forget between times, and knowing us well enough not to try to interrupt. And too tired to object to hearing something over. If anything, he laughed too soon. He used to sit and beg for Uncle Daniel's favorite tale, the one about the time he turned the tables on Grandpa.

Turned the tables not on purpose! Uncle Daniel is a perfect gentleman, and something like that has to
happen;
he wouldn't contrive it.

Grandpa one time, for a treat, brought Uncle Daniel home to vote, and took him back to the asylum through the country, in the new Studebaker. They started too early and got there too early—I told them! And there was a new lady busying herself out at the front, instead of the good old one. "Low-in-the-hole!" as Uncle Daniel says, the lady asked
him
who the old
man
was. Uncle Daniel was far and away the best dressed and most cheerful of the two, of course. Uncle Daniel says, "Man alive! Don't you know that's
Mr. Ponder?
" And the lady was loading the Coca-Cola machine and says, "Oh, foot, I can't remember everybody," and called somebody and they took Grandpa. Hat, stick, and everything, they backed him right down the hall and shut the door on him boom. And Uncle Daniel waited and dallied and had a Coca-Cola with his nickel when they got cold, and then lifted his hat and politely backed out the front door and found Grandpa's car with the engine running still under the crape myrtle tree, and drove it on home and got here with it—though by the time he did, he was as surprised as Grandpa. And that's where he ends his story. Bless his heart. And that's where Mr. Springer would turn loose and laugh till Uncle Daniel had to beat him on the back to save him.

The rest of it is, that down in Jackson, the madder Grandpa got, the less stock they took in him, of course. That's what crazy
is.
They took Grandpa's walking stick away from him like he was anybody else. Judge Tip Clanahan had to learn about it from Uncle Daniel and then send down to get Grandpa out, and when Grandpa did get loose, they nearly gave him back the wrong stick. They would have heard from him about
that.

When Uncle Daniel got here with that tale, everybody in town had a conniption fit trying to believe it, except Judge Tip. Uncle Daniel thought it was a joke on the
lady.
It took Grandpa all day long from the time he left here to make it on back, with the help of Judge Clanahan's long-legged grandson and no telling what papers.
He
might as well not have left home, he wouldn't stop to tell us a word.

There's more than one moral to be drawn there, as I told Mr. Springer at the time, about straying too far from where you're known and all—having too wide a territory. Especially if you light out wearing a seersucker suit you wouldn't let the rummage sale have, though it's old as the hills. By the time you have to prove who you are when you get there, it may be too late when you get back.
Think
about Grandpa Ponder having to call for witnesses the minute he gets fifty miles off in one direction. I think that helped put him in his grave. It went a long way toward making him touchy about what Uncle Daniel had gone and done in the meanwhile. You see, by the time Grandpa made it back, something had happened at home. Something will every time, if you're not there to see it.

 

Uncle Daniel had got clear up to his forties before we ever dreamed that such a thing as love flittered through his mind. He's so
sweet.
Sometimes I think if we hadn't showed him that widow! But he was bound to see her: he has eyes: Miss Teacake Magee, lived here all her life. She sings in the choir of the Baptist Church every blessed Sunday: couldn't get
her
out. And sings louder than all the rest put together, so loud it would make you lose your place.

I'll go back a little for a minute. Of course we're all good Presbyterians. Grandpa was an elder. The Beulah Bible Class and the Beulah Hotel are both named after Grandma. And my other grandma was the second-to-longest-living Sunday School teacher they've ever had, very highly regarded. My poor little mama got a pageant written before she died, and I still conduct the rummage sales for the Negroes every Saturday afternoon in the corner of the yard and bring in a sum for the missionaries in Africa that I think would surprise you.

Miss Teacake Magee is of course a Sistrunk (the Sistrunks are
all
Baptists—big Baptists) and Professor Magee's widow. He wasn't professor
of
anything, just real smart—smarter than the Sistrunks, anyway. He'd never worked either—he was like Uncle Daniel in that respect. With Miss Teacake, everything dates from "Since I lost Professor Magee." A passenger train hit him. That shows you how long ago
his
time was.

Uncle Daniel
thought
what he was wild about at that time was the Fair. And I kept saying to myself, maybe that
was
it. He carried my plant over Monday, in the tub, and entered it for me as usual, under "Best Other Than Named"—it took the blue ribbon—and went on through the flowers and quilts and the art, passing out compliments on both sides of him, and out the other door of the Fine Arts Tent and was loose on the midway. From then on, the whole week long, he'd go back to the Fair every whipstitch—morning, noon, or night, hand in hand with any soul, man, woman, or child, that chose to let him—and spend his change on them and stay till the cows come home. He'd even go by himself. I went with him till I dropped. And we'd no more leave than he'd clamp my arm. "Edna Earle, look back yonder down the hill at all those lights still a-burning!" Like he'd never seen lights before. He'd say, "Sh! Listen at Intrepid Elsie Fleming!"

Intrepid Elsie Fleming rode a motorcycle around the Wall of Death—which let her do, if she wants to ride a motorcycle that bad. It was the time she wasn't riding I objected to—when she was out front on the platform warming up her motor. That was nearly the whole time. You could hear her day and night in the remotest parts of this hotel and with the sheet over your head, clear over the sound of the Merry-Go-Round and all. She dressed up in pants.

Uncle Daniel said he had to admire that. He admired everything he saw at the Fair that year, to tell the truth, and everything he heard, and always expected to win the Indian blanket; never did—
they
never let him. I'll never forget when I first realized what flittered through his mind.

He'd belted me into the Ferris Wheel, then vanished, instead of climbing into the next car. And the first thing I made out from the middle of the air was Uncle Daniel's big round hat up on the platform of the Escapades side-show, right in the middle of those ostrich plumes. There he was—passing down the line of those girls doing their come-on dance out front, and handing them out ice cream cones, right while they were shaking their heels to the music, not in very good time. He'd got the cream from the Baptist ladies' tent—banana, and melting fast. And I couldn't get off the Ferris Wheel till I'd been around my nine times, no matter how often I told them who I was. When I finally got loose, I flew up to Uncle Daniel and he stood there and hardly knew me, licking away and beside himself with pride and joy. And his sixty cents was gone, too. Well, he would have followed the Fair to Silver City when it left, if I'd turned around good.

He kept telling me for a week after, that those dancing girls wore beyond compare the prettiest dresses and feather-pieces he ever saw on ladies' backs in his life, and could dance like the fairies. "They every one smiled at me," he said. "And yet I liked Miss Elsie Fleming very well, too." So the only thing to be thankful for is he didn't try to treat Intrepid Elsie Fleming—she might have bitten him.

As for Grandpa, I didn't tell him about the twelve banana ice cream cones and where they went, but he heard—he played dominoes with Judge Tip—and as soon as he got home from the Clanahans' he took a spell with his heart. The Ponder heart! So of course we were all running and flying to do his bidding, everything under the sun he said. I never saw such lovely things as people sent—I gained ten pounds, and begged people to spare us more. Of course I was running out there day and night and tending to the Beulah between times. One morning when I carried Grandpa his early coffee, which he wasn't supposed to have, he said to me, "Edna Earle, I've been debating, and I've just come to a conclusion."

"What now, Grandpa?" I said. "Tell me real slow."

Well, he did, and to make a long story short, he had his way} and after that he never had another spell in his life till the one that killed him—when Uncle Daniel had
his
way. The heart's a remarkable thing, if you ask me. "I'm fixing to be strict for the first time with the boy," was Grandpa's conclusion. "I'm going to fork up a good wife for him. And you put your mind on who."

"I'll do my best, Grandpa," I said. "But remember we haven't got the whole wide world to choose from any more. Mamie Clanahan's already engaged to the man that came to put the dial telephones in Clay. Suppose we cross the street to the Baptist Church the first Sunday you're out of danger."

So up rose Miss Teacake Magee from the choir—her solo always came during collection, to cover up people rattling change and dropping money on the floor—and when I told Uncle Daniel to just listen to that, it didn't throw such a shadow over his countenance as you might have thought.

"Miss Teacake's got more breath in her than those at the Fair, that's what she's got," he whispers back to me. And before I could stop his hand, he'd dropped three silver dollars, his whole month's allowance, in the collection plate, with a clatter that echoed all over that church. Grandpa fished the dollars out when the plate came by him, and sent me a frown, but he didn't catch on. Uncle Daniel sat there with his mouth in an O clear through the rest of the solo. It seems to me it was "Work, for the Night Is Coming." But I was saying to myself, Well, Edna Earle, she's a Sistrunk. And a widow well taken care of. And she makes and sells those gorgeous cakes that melt in your mouth—she's an artist. Forget about her singing. So going out of church, I says, "Eureka, Grandpa. I've found her." And whispers in his ear.