Where We Are Now by Carolyn Osborn Read Free Book Online Page A

Her hair was gray, her figure slack. She had on a loose brown shift. Miss Kate wouldn’t have given her the time of day if she’d seen her in the country or in town.
    â€œWhat about turnip greens, Ma’am? You got any turnip greens you’ll sell us?”
    â€œOut there in the garden if you’ll pick ’um. You won’t be wanting the eggs then?”
    â€œLet’s cut that to a dozen ’stead of two.”
    â€œHow you going to carry ’um?”
    It was a poor place, a tenant farmer’s shack with not a scrap of anything to waste, not a box, not a bit of paper.
    He wrapped the eggs in some turnip greens and put them in his hat. The sheriff stuck the rest of the greens under the buggy’s seat.
    â€œAin’t we dandies, by God!” Sog roared as they took off.
    â€œYou’re going to think so when one of them eggs breaks in your hat,” said the sheriff.

    â€œI wonder what Grandmother said when he got back?”
    â€œI don’t think she said anything much. They understood each other. He’d toe her mark just so long then he’d rip off,” Uncle Phillip said. He must have wished sometimes that he’d ripped more himself. Most of his life he worked for an insurance company and when he retired he kept on looking after anyone who needed looking after, which amounted to nearly all the Moores—Grandmother, Uncle George, Aunt Lucy and elderly cousins that everyone else had forgotten. He was a man naturally inclined toward benevolence, but can’t such an inclination become a burden too?
    â€œMiss Kate would leave when she pleased,” Fergus reminded me. “Don’t forget her hay fever.”
    Grandmother’s hay fever dictated a trip every fall. She got on a train and left the state for some other where ragweed wasn’t pollinating. Her family had scattered by then. She visited her sister in Pennsylvania once, her brother in the Texas Panhandle more often. Frequently she went to a spa like Saratoga or Red Boiling Springs. And she traveled alone. A few years after Grandpa died she announced she’d cured herself of hay fever by eating the local honey.
    Fergus’ comment was, “She would’ve of had to have eaten about fifty gallons of it. Miss Kate lost her reason forgoing. She didn’t have to get away from the farm anymore.
    â€œBut she usually spoke of Grandpa as if she adored him.”
    â€œSure she did. They admired each other. He did everything she wouldn’t have dared, and she … she was such a model of respectable behavior he couldn’t help but admire her.”
    â€œYou keep throwing the old opposites theory at me.”
    Fergus took a long puff on his cigar. He often used it to underline his opinions in the same way that pipe smokers point the stems of their pipes or make people wait while they puff and consider an importunate question.
    â€œHoney, I can’t come up with nothing no better.”
    This was another of Fergus’ tricks, to switch to bad English when he wanted to make a point. In the country music business to be able to “talk country” was a necessity. It was also an effective way of disparaging someone else’s opinion. By playing the ignoramus, he could at the same time play the sage, plainspoken hick. At times like this I thought I saw Grandpa’s influence coming through again, or maybe it was just the cigar that made me think of him and tobacco.
    Aunt Lucy floated back in just as I spoke of seeing tobacco in his field.
    â€œNow, you have that wrong. Papa only raised tobacco once. He said it was too much worry.”
    â€œIt wasn’t just worry about the crop,” Uncle Phillip interrupted. “He said it was too hard on his barn. Curing the way he did it required a hardwood fire burning slow on the floor of the barn and lasted nearly three weeks. You never saw that done did you, Marianne?”
    I hadn’t. I knew almost nothing about