She asked me if I was planning to stay for supper.
She told me Pop would be home in about an hour, so it would a good idea for me to go down to the employment office.
That way, she said, I would have something to talk about at the table besides jail.
I saw she wasn’t asking. I started to get mad.
I’d only just been released.
I didn’t exactly expect a hero’s welcome, but her to start in nagging?
But when I looked into her face I saw something else.
It was fear.
That hurt worse than anything.
The old woman don’t think she’s superstitious.
Careful is what she calls it.
I know what I know, she usually adds.
The winding vine around the left post of the front gate is five-leaf akebia, planted in summer ashes to ward off disease.
The wreath on the door entwined with sweetleaf and wolfbane, a combination she says pleases the house-spirits who guard against evil mists.
In the kitchen, she hangs strings of garlic woven together with wrenfetch and chalmsy, sprigs of rosemary and dried bishop’s hat.
Scoff if you like, but she has never been sick in all these years.
The old lady ain’t crying.
Maybe she’s worried about the sheriff standing there. Maybe she’s counting herself lucky that all she’s losing this time is the apartment.
“You don’t pay, you can’t stay,” the Greek landlord says to her like it’s some kind of philosophy.
Me, I don’t say nothing, but I try not to look at the drawings on the empty refrigerator, nor at the framed family photos on the TV, the ratty stuffed animals in the jam-packed kids’ rooms.
Joe and me work solid and quiet, getting it done while the old lady just stands there not crying.
Charlotte quickened her pace, for she knew the rumor was true.
A blockade runner had slipped through the phalanx of Union ships, run right up the Cape Fear and was even now at dock.
First come, first serve, the man had said.
She’d riven her secret hideaway pillow and disgorged its coin and bullion saved for just such a day, fastened her bonnet and set out, Old George walking apace with the handcart.
Sugar, she thought, now spying the masts over the rooftops, and perhaps even tea and coffee.
But disappointment set in as soon as she saw the crowds.
The curtains in his mind between remembered past and observed present grew thinner with each passing year, a diaphanous membrane of inconsistent transparency.
The world began to seem as a dream, the long-dead stopping by for conversation or advice, the not-yet-born asking to be named. Places too, for his mind held no fixed geography.
Passages between far-flung cities connected them like rooms in a house, so moment to moment he would be standing in his boyhood Glasgow and then in Greenwich Village.
To onlookers he was a smiling old man sitting on a bench, but his inward life was limitless.
