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back in about twelve days now. Last couple of years she’s been stayin’ away three weeks each time. Before that she always came home in ten days.”
    “How’s that?” Pop asked.
    Uncle Sagamore scratched his leg with his toenail again and started to pucker up his lips like he was going to sail out some more tobacco juice. Booger and Otis watched him and kind of pulled back on each side like sliding doors opening. He didn’t spit for a minute and they relaxed and straightened up a little, and then he spit and they had to jerk back real fast.
    “Well, it’s like this,” Uncle Sagamore says.
    “Every once in a while, maybe twice a year, Bessie gets all galled under the britchin’ about something and starts faunchin’ around here sayin’ she’s takened all she can take, she just ain’t goin’ to put up with me no longer, ain’t nobody could live with me. Usually over some triflin’ little thing that don’t amount to a hill of beans, like I won’t wash my feet or something, but she gets all swole up like a snakebit pup and says she’s leavin’ me for good this time. So she packs her suitcase and gets her egg money and walks down to Jimerson’s which is on the party line and calls Bud Watkins that runs the taxi in town, and Bud comes after her. She gets on the bus and goes down to Glencove to stay with her Cousin Viola, the one that married Vergil Talley.
    “Well, I don’t know if you recollect Cousin Viola, but you can’t take too much of her at one time. She’s kind of delicate and refined, only she’s got this rumblin’ in her stummick, an’ every time her stummick rumbles she pats herself on the mouth with three fingers an’ says, “Excuse me.” Well, something like this all day long is bad enough, but on top of that she’s got this damn gallstone.”
    “Gallstone?” Pop asked.
    “That’s right,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Six, eight years ago she had it takened out at the hospital, an’ this fool doctor didn’t have no better sense than to tell her it was the biggest one he ever seen, outside of one somebody takened out of a giraffe. Well, Viola was all set up about that, so she brought it home with her and put it in a little jar on the mantel an’ took to tellin’ people about it. One time, Vergil says, some people’s car got stuck in the mud in front of the house an’ they couldn’t get away, an’ Viola talked about that gallstone for thirteen hours and twenty minutes without stoppin’. Man finally give Vergil the keys to the car and said he’d be back for it in the summer when the roads dried out. People took to movin’ out of the community rather than havin’ to dodge her all the time, so when Bessie’d leave me an’ go down there Viola’d be all primed and loaded for her. If Bessie was real mad at me she could hold out for ten days.”
    Uncle Sagamore stopped talking and looked at Booger and Otis. They was shifting around on the step like they couldn’t get comfortable anywhere.
    “I ain’t borin’ you boys with all this, am I?” he asked.
    “Why, no,” Booger says. “—uh—that is—” He looked kind of funny. Pale, sort of, and sweating pretty heavy. His face was all slick and white. Otis was the same way. It didn’t seem to be the smell that was bothering them, though, because they wasn’t fanning with their hats any more. They just seemed to be kind of restless.
    “Sure wouldn’t want to get tiresome an’ bore you boys,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Especially after what you done, rushin’ down here to save us from that typhoid an’ all.”
    “But how does it happen Bessie stays away three weeks now?” Pop asked. “Is Viola beginning to run down, or something?”
    “Oh,” Uncle Sagamore says. He sailed out some more tobacco juice, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “No. It was like this. Couple of years ago, I reckon it was, Vergil made a pretty good cotton crop, an’ they could see there was goin’ to be money ahead even after