The Ponder Heart (4 page)

"Go on home, girl," says Judge Tip, "and get ready for your grandfather; he's loose and on his way. Already talked to DeYancey on the long-distance; don't know why he couldn't wait. I got no intention of washing my hands of Daniel or any other Ponder, and I'm not surprised for a minute at anything that transpires, only I'm a quiet studious man and don't take to all this commotion under my window." It woke him up, that's what.

"I don't see why there has to be any commotion anywhere," I says—and down on the street I made up my mind I'd say that to everybody. "People get married beneath them every day, and I don't see any sign of the world coming to an end. Don't be so small-town."

That held them, till Grandpa got back.

He got back sooner than I dreamed. I shook my big purse at him, when the car went by, to head him off, but he and De Yancey just hightailed it straight through town and out to the place. Nearly everybody still in the house along the way got out front in time to see them pass. I understand Miss Teacake Magee even drove by Ponder Hill, pretending she was looking for wild plums. I said, Edna Earle,
you'd
better get on out there.

All right, I said, but let me get
one
bath. It generally takes three, running this hotel on a summer day. I said shoo to the rummage sale and let them go on to the store.

While I was in the tub, ring went the telephone. Mr. Springer got to town just in time to answer it. I had to come down in front of him in my kimona, and there was DeYancey, calling from the crossroads store; I could hear their two good-for-nothing canaries. I fussed at him for not stopping here with Grandpa, because he might know I'd have something to tell him.

DeYancey said
he
had a surprise for
me,
that he'd better not tell me in front of a lot of people. I could have sworn I heard Eva Sistrunk swallow.

"Tell me quick, DeYancey Clanahan," I says. "I've all but got my hat on now—I
think
I know what it is."

DeYancey only starts at the beginning. He said he and Grandpa pulled up under the tree at the Ponder place and went marching in by the front door. (I told him they hadn't been beat home by much. Mr. Springer called from his room that to Silver City and back and to the asylum and back is just about equal distance.) De Yancey said they heard running feet over their heads, and running feet on the stairs—and whisk through the old bead curtains of the parlor came somebody that poor Grandpa had never laid eyes on in his life or dreamed existed. "She'd been upstairs, downstairs, and in my lady's chamber," says DeYancey. "She was very much at home."

"No surprise so far," I says. "Bonnie Dee Peacock."

"All in pink," he said, like I wasn't telling him a bit. "And she'd picked one of Narciss's nasturtiums and had it in her mouth like a pipe, sucking the stem. She ran to the parlor windows and took a good look out of each one." He said Uncle Daniel came in behind her and after he kissed Grandpa, stepped to the mantel and rested his elbow on it in a kind of grand way. They smelled awful smoke—he had one of Grandpa's cigars lighted. Narciss was singing hallelujah somewhere off.

I said, "But DeYancey, you're leaving out what I want to hear—the words. What did Grandpa say?"

DeYancey said Grandpa
whispered.

"I don't believe you."

DeYancey said, "It's all true. He whispered, and said 'They're right.'"

"Who?" I said.

"Well, the Clanahans," said DeYancey. "He whispered—" and DeYancey whispered, all hollow and full of birdsinging over the wires, with Lord knows who not with us—"'When the brains were being handed around, my son Daniel was standing behind the door.'"

"Help," I said. "And did Uncle Daniel hear it? Let me go, DeYancey, I haven't got time for conversation. I've got to get out there and stand up for both of them."

"Don't you want to hear the surprise?" he says.

Well, he
did
have a surprise; he just had to get to it. Do you know it turned out that she'd just married Uncle Daniel
on trial?
Miss Bonnie Dee Peacock of Polk took a red nasturtium out of her mouth to say that was the best she could do.

After that, Grandpa just pounded with his stick and sent DeYancey out of his sight, with a message he would speak to me in the morning. And when he was getting his car out of the yard, DeYancey said, Narciss had the fattest chicken of all down on the block, and hollered at him, "We's goin' to keep her!" and brought her ax down whack.

"Just hang up and go home and take a bath, DeYancey," I says. "I've heard all I'm going to. I'm going to put on my hat."

Well, it's our hearts. We run to sudden ends, all we Ponders. I say it's our hearts, though Dr. Ewbanks declares Grandpa just popped a blood vessel.

Grandpa, Uncle Daniel, and Bonnie Dee still in pink were all about to sit down. I was just walking in the door—smelled chicken. Uncle Daniel says to me, "Just in time, Edna Earle. Poor Papa! You know, Edna Earle, he's hard to please."

And lo and behold.

 

We had the funeral in the Presbyterian Church, of course, and it was packed. I haven't been able to think of anybody that didn't come. It
had
mortified the Sistrunks that following behind one of them so close would come a Peacock; but with Grandpa going the sudden way he did, they rallied, and turned up in their best, and Miss Teacake asked to be allowed to sing. "Beautiful Isle of Somewhere" was her choice.

Uncle Daniel held every eye at the services. That was the best thing in the world for Uncle Daniel, because it distracted him from what was going on. Oh, he hates sickness and death, will hardly come in the room with it! He can't abide funerals. The reason every eye was on him was not just because he was rich as Croesus now, but he looked different. Bonnie Dee had started in on him and cut his hair.

Now I'll tell you about Bonnie Dee. Bonnie Dee could make change, and Bonnie Dee could cut hair. If you ask me can I do either, the answer is no. Bonnie Dee may have been tongue-tied in public and hardly able to stand in high heels, till she learned how, but she could cut your hair to a fare-ye-well, to within a good inch of your life, if you put a pair of scissors in her hand. Uncle Daniel used to look like a senator. But that day his hair wasn't much longer than the fuzz of a peach. Uncle Daniel still keeps it like that—he loves himself that way.

Oh, but he was proud of her. "She's a natural-born barber," he said, "and pretty as a doll. What would I do without her?" He had the hardware salesman bring her a whole line of scissors and sharp blades. I was afraid she'd fringe everything in the house.

Well! Ignorance is bliss.

Except Bonnie Dee, poor little old thing, didn't know how to smile.
Yawned,
all the time, like cats do. So delicate and dainty she didn't even have any heels to speak of—she didn't stick out anywhere, and I don't know why you couldn't see through her. Seventeen years old and seemed like she just stayed seventeen.

They had that grand Narciss—had her and never appreciated her. It didn't seem to me they ate out there near enough to keep her happy. It had turned out Narciss could sit at a wheel and drive, of course —her and Grandpa's Studebaker both getting older by the minute, but she could still reach the pedals and they'd still catch, a little. Where they headed for, of course, was right here—a good safe place to end up, with the hitching post there to catch them at the foot of the walk. They sashayed in at the front—Narciss sashayed in at the back—and all ate with me.

That's how everybody—me and whoever was in here at the time, drummers, boarders, lawyers, and strangers—had to listen to Uncle Darnel mirate and gyrate over Bonnie Dee. With her right there at the table. We had to take on over her too, every last one of lis, and tell him how pretty and smart we thought she was. It didn't bother her one whit. I don't think she was listening to amount to a row of pins. You couldn't tell. She just sat and picked at the Beulah food like a canary bird, and by the time Uncle Daniel was through eating and talking and pulled her up, it would be too late for the show for everybody. So he'd holler Narciss out of the back and they'd all three hop back in the car and go chugging home.

Now the only bad thing about the Ponder place is where it is. Poor Grandpa had picked him a good high spot to build the house on, where he could see all around him and if anybody was coming. And that turned out to be miles from anywhere. He filled up the house with rooms, rooms, rooms, and the rooms with furniture, furniture, furniture, all before he let Grandma in it. And then of course she brought her own perfectly good rosewood in right on top of it. And he'd trimmed the house inside and outside, topside and bottom, with every trimming he could get his hands on or money could buy. And painted the whole thing bright as a railroad station. Anything to outdo the Beulah Hotel.

And I think maybe he did outdo it. For one thing he sprinkled that roof with lightning rods the way Grandma would sprinkle coconut on a cake, and was just as pleased with himself as she was with herself. Remarkable. I don't think it ever occurred to either one of
them
that they lived far out: they were so evenly matched. It took Grandpa years to catch on it was lonesome. They considered
town
was far.

I've sometimes thought of turning that place
into
something, if and when it ever comes down to me and I can get the grass out of it. Nobody lives in the house now. The Pepper family we've got on the place don't do a thing but run it. A chinchilla farm may be the answer. But that's the future. Don't think about it, Edna Earle, I say. So I just cut out a little ad about a booklet that you can send off for, and put it away in a drawer—I forget where.

So the marriage trial—only it had completely left our minds it was one—went on for five years and six months, and Bonnie Dee, if you please, decided No.

Not that she said as much to a soul: she was tongue-tied when it came to words. She left a note written in a pencil tablet on the kitchen table, and when Narciss went out to cut up the chicken, she found it. She carried it to Uncle Daniel in the barn, and Uncle Daniel read it to her out loud. Then they both sat down on the floor and cried. It said, "Have left out. Good-by and good luck, your friend, Mrs. Bonnie Dee Peacock Ponder." We don't even know which one of them it was
to.

Then she just traipsed out to the crossroads and flagged down the north-bound bus with her little handkerchief—oh, she was seen. A dozen people must have been in the bushes and seen her, or known somebody that did, and they all came and told me about it. Though nobody at all appeared to tell me where she got off.

It's not beyond me. You see, poor, trusting Uncle Daniel carried that child out there and set her down in a big house with a lot of rooms and corners, with Negroes to wait on her, and she wasn't used to a bit of it. She wasn't used to keeping house at all except by fits and starts, much less telling Negroes what to do. And she didn't know what to do with herself all day. But how would she tell him a thing like that? He was older than she was, and he was good as gold, and he was prominent. And he wasn't even there all the time—
Uncle Daniel
couldn't stay home. He wanted her there, all right, waiting when he got back, but he made Narciss bring him in town first, every night, so he could have a little better audience. He wanted to tell about how happy he was.

The way I look back at Bonnie Dee, her story was this. She'd come up from the country—and before she knew it, she was right back in the country. Married or no. She was away out yonder on Ponder Hill and nothing to do and nothing to play with in sight but the Negroes' dogs and the Peppers' cats and one little frizzly hen. From the kind of long pink fingernails she kept in the ten cent store, that hadn't been her idea at all. Not her dream.

I think they behaved. I don't think they fought all over the place, like the Clanahan girls and the Sistrunk boys when they marry. They wouldn't know how. Uncle Daniel never heard a cross word in his life. Even if Bonnie Dee, with her origins, could turn and spit like a cat, I hardly think she would around Uncle Daniel. That wouldn't be called for.