"They'd be damned ungrateful not to grow industriously, after the way
Dab and I have sprained our old backs spading and feeding them according
to spiritual direction that stood over us with a rake," answered
father, with proud if profane enthusiasm. There was a faint pink glow in
his haggard, thin cheeks, and he took from his pocket a huge knife I had
never seen him use before and began carefully to cut away a few dead
twigs from a budding rose vine.
"Your mother always put a rose from this vine at my plate for breakfast,
and you got yours from that pink bush over there by the sun dial," he
said, with a softness in his voice that I had not heard since my tenth
summer, in which my mother had died. I tingled all over, but held on to
myself.
"You go tell that old black lazybones to come here with his spade this
minute. I told him about digging in this mulch yesterday before the
dahlias sprouted, and he hasn't done it. I'm not going to do it for him,
like I put the fertilizer around the lilacs, just to save him from
Goodloe. Tell him to come right here to me, and not to let grass grow in
his shoe tracks," and father picked up a hoe from the walk beside the
neglected dahlias and began doing the work he had just declared against.
I fled around to the kitchen, and something lent wings to my feet.
"Oh, Dab, what does it mean that father is really taking an interest in
the garden?" I demanded of the faithful old black friend, whom I found
enveloped in a kitchen apron helping his wife bring the dinner to a
serving head.
"Praise God, his salvation am commenced, if it don't kill me before he
gits it," answered Dab, as he put his hand to his back and groaned.
"They has been jest one-half a demijohn of devil heart whisky ordered up
outen that cellar in over a month, and I b'lieve this here no account
nigger drunk a pint of that," Mammy added to his answer. "Last month it
was two demijohns they had up, and before that it was three or four.
That parson done it with readin' and talkin' and hoein'. Glory! I wants
to hold my breath and shout at the same time, and I would if I could
trust this pullet in the skillet to either you or Dabney whilst I did
it. The Lord wouldn't listen to no shoutin' from a cook whose chicken
was frying black while she did her praisin'," and as she spoke Mammy
began a low humming, swaying from table to stove with a rhythm in the
swing of her fat body that had a certain dignified beauty to it. It was
crude emotion, and I knew it, but I felt it work in my own body as I
let the significance of what she had told me about the lessening amount
of whiskey father had been consuming add itself to the scene upon the
back porch and sink fully into my consciousness. I don't know what might
have happened to my shouting Methodist grandmother's worldly though
emotional descendant if father's voice, sharp and clear, with a note of
command I had forgotten it possessed, had not interrupted me.