Read Cold Sassy Tree for Free Online Page A

when she and her cousin were young, they walked by the harness shop one day and chanced to hear an old man say what nice girls they were. Another man said, "Yeah, but one of'm shore is strange around the eyes."
    "We never knowed which'n he meant," Granny said, laughing.
    I knew which'n. It was Granny. Her eyes were the farthest apart I ever saw. She had big ears, too, and the last few months a peculiar knot came on one side of her throat. It wasn't a goiter. Doc Slaughter said blamed if he knew what it was. Grandpa teased her about it. "You look like you done swallered a goose aigg, Miss Mattie Lou, and it got stuck in yore goozle."
    She just laughed. She was kind of worried about the knot, but really didn't care how it looked, and Grandpa didn't either.
    Her not having a boy baby was the only thing Grandpa ever threw up to her. Once I saw tears come in her eyes when he mentioned it.
    Granny used to say she never did see why Mr. Blakeslee married her. "When he come back to Cold Sassy after the War, he
was the handsomest man you ever seen and I was a old maid. Twenty-one year old and never had a beau in my life. I was fixin' to go in to church one Sunday mornin' when this good-lookin' feller, he tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Ain't you Miss Mattie Lou Toy? You don't need no sermon today. Stay out here and le's talk.' I ain't seen him since the fourth grade but I knowed it was Rucker Blakeslee. So we stayed in the churchyard, like a reg'lar courtin' couple, and talked one another's ears off. Afterwards it was dinner on the grounds, and we talked some more. Fore that day was over Mr. Blakeslee said he was a-go'n marry me, soon as he come back from peddlin' in the mountains." I remember she laughed about how quick Grandpa could make up his mind. "Maybe he thought I was rich," she added, laughing again.

    There were those in Cold Sassy who had the same idea. They said the land Mattie Lou's daddy owned was why Ruck Blakeslee was so taken with her. She knew they said that, but it never worried her.
    She always called him Mr. Blakeslee, and I never heard him call her anything but Miss Mattie Lou. Once when I was little bitty and Papa and Mama went to Atlanta on the train to buy for the store, I stayed at Grandpa's house and slept on the daybed in the back hall. About daybreak I heard him stand up to use the pot. The bed creaked as he flopped back down, and I heard him say, "Turn over, Miss Mattie Lou, so I can put my feet up to yore stomach. They's cold."
    At the time, I wondered how Grandpa could get his feet up that high, tall as he was and short as she was. Only when I was older did I think how funny for a man to call his wife Miss Mattie Lou when it was just the two of them in bed. Papa called my mother Miz Tweedy in front of Queenie or neighbors, and Mama in front of me and Mary Toy, but I knew she was "hon" or Mary Willis when they were by themselves.
    Everybody in Cold Sassy admired my grandmother. At her funeral, I heard somebody say, "Miss Mattie Lou just reeked of re-fine-ment, didn't she?" and I knew what was meant.
    Her refinement wasn't like Aunt Carrie's. Granny didn't sit on the porch reading Greek and Latin and Shakespeare, or get up lectures for children, or recite poetry. She didn't think she always
knew best, the way Aunt Carrie did, and didn't throw off on people who said "I seen" or "I taken," like Aunt Loma, and didn't make children practice manners, like Mama. But Granny was a fine lady anyway, never mind her grammar or her country ways and never mind how plain she was.

    To my thinking, it was refined that she didn't fuss at Grandpa about not having the house wired for electricity. When Mr. Sheffield, the mill-owner, bought a Delco generator for the mill and contracted with the town to install twenty street lights and run wires to all the houses and stores on both sides of the railroad tracks, practically everybody got electricity except Grandpa and the mill workers and the colored folks in Pigfoot