The Ponder Heart Read Online Free Page B

feelings?" I calls up. De Yancey is just his grandson—young, and goes off on tangents.
    "Come one thing more, I'll turn him over," Judge Tip bawls down to the street. "Where are we going to call the halt? Look where I'm having to send after Sam, none too sure to get him. I can't make a habit of that."
    I left the whole array down there and climbed straight up those hot stairs and said to his face, "You ought to be ashamed, Judge Clanahan. I do mind out, everybody living minds out for Uncle Daniel, the best they can; it's you and Grandpa go too far with
discipline.
Just try to remember Uncle Daniel's blessed with a fond and loving heart, and two old domino cronies like you and Grandpa can't get around that by marrying him off to"—I made him a face like a Sistrunk—"and then unmarrying him, leaving him free for the next one, or running off with him to another place. That's child-foolishness, and I don't like to be fussed at in public at this time of the afternoon."
    "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