and watched them suspiciously from a distance.
They were fourteen—two years older than she was—but neither of them was bright, which was why they had been sent to the convent. If they had gone to a regular school, they wouldn’t have done anything but think about boys; at the convent the sisters, her mother said, would keep a grip on their necks. The child decided, after observing them for a few hours, that they were practically morons and she was glad to think that they were only second cousins and she couldn’t have inherited any of their stupidity. Susan called herself Su-zan. She was very skinny but she had a pretty pointed face and red hair. Joanne had yellow hair that was naturally curly but she talked through her nose and when she laughed, she turned purple in patches. Neither one of them could say an intelligent thing and all their sentences began, “You know this boy I know well one time he…”
They were to stay all week end and her mother said she didn’t see how she would entertain them since she didn’t know any boys their age. At this, the child, struck suddenly with genius, shouted, “There’s Cheat! Get Cheat to come! Ask Miss Kirby to get Cheat to come show them around!” and she nearly choked on the food she had in her mouth. She doubled over laughing and hit the table with her fist and looked at the two bewildered girls while water started in her eyes and rolled down her fat cheeks and the braces she had in her mouth glared like tin. She had never thought of anything so funny before.
Her mother laughed in a guarded way and Miss Kirby blushed and carried her fork delicately to her mouth with one pea on it. She was a long-faced blonde schoolteacher who boarded with them and Mr. Cheatam was her admirer, a rich old farmer who arrived every Saturday afternoon in a fifteen-year-old baby-blue Pontiac powdered with red clay dust and black inside with Negroes that he charged ten cents apiece to bring into town on Saturday afternoons. After he dumped them he came to see Miss Kirby, always bringing a little gift—a bag of boiled peanuts or a watermelon or a stalk of sugar cane and once a wholesale box of Baby Ruth candy bars. He was bald-headed except for a little fringe of rust-colored hair and his face was nearly the same color as the unpaved roads and washed like them with ruts and gulleys. He wore a pale green shirt with a thin black stripe in it and blue galluses and his trousers cut across a protruding stomach that he pressed tenderly from time to time with his big flat thumb. All his teeth were backed with gold and he would roll his eyes at Miss Kirby in an impish way and say, “Haw haw,” sitting in their porch swing with his legs spread apart and his hightopped shoes pointing in opposite directions on the floor.
“I don’t think Cheat is going to be in town this week end,” Miss Kirby said, not in the least understanding that this was a joke, and the child was convulsed afresh, threw herself backward in her chair, fell out of it, rolled on the floor and lay there heaving. Her mother told her if she didn’t stop this foolishness she would have to leave the table.
Yesterday her mother had arranged with Alonzo Myers to drive them the forty-five miles to Mayville, where the convent was, to get the girls for the week end and Sunday afternoon he was hired to drive them back again. He was an eighteen-year-old boy who weighed two hundred and fifty pounds and worked for the taxi company and he was all you could get to drive you anywhere. He smoked or rather chewed a short black cigar and he had a round sweaty chest that showed through the yellow nylon shirt he wore. When he drove all the windows of the car had to be open.
“Well there’s Alonzo!” the child roared from the floor. “Get Alonzo to show em around! Get Alonzo!”
The two girls, who had seen Alonzo, began to scream their indignation.
Her mother thought this was funny too but she said, “That’ll be about enough out of you,” and changed the subject. She asked them why they called each other Temple One and Temple Two and this sent them off into gales of giggles. Finally they managed to explain. Sister Perpetua, the oldest nun at the Sisters of Mercy in Mayville, had given them a lecture on what to do if a young man should—here they laughed so hard they were not able to go on without going back to the beginning—on what to do if a young man should—they put their heads in their laps—on what to do if—they finally managed to shout it out—if he should “behave in an ungentlemanly manner with them in the back of an automobile.” Sister Perpetua said they were to say, “Stop sir! I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost!” and that would put an end to it. The child sat up off the floor with a blank face. She didn’t see anything so funny in this. What was really funny was the idea of Mr. Cheatam or Alonzo Myers beauing them around. That killed her.
Her mother didn’t laugh at what they had said. “I think you girls are pretty silly,” she said. “After all, that’s what you are—Temples of the Holy Ghost.”
The two of them looked up at her, politely concealing their giggles, but with astonished faces as if they were beginning to realize that she was made of the same stuff as Sister Perpetua.
Miss Kirby preserved her set expression and the child thought, it’s all over her head anyhow. I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost, she said to herself, and was pleased with the phrase. It made her feel as if somebody had given her a present.
After dinner, her mother collapsed on the bed and said, “Those girls are going to drive me crazy if I don’t get some entertainment for them. They’re awful.”
“I bet I know who you could get,” the child started.
“Now listen. I don’t want to hear any more about Mr. Cheatam,” her mother said. “You embarrass Miss Kirby. He’s her only friend. Oh my Lord,” and she sat up and looked mournfully out the window, “that poor soul is so lonesome she’ll even ride in that car that smells like the last circle in hell.”
And she’s a Temple of the Holy Ghost too, the child reflected. “I wasn’t thinking of him,” she said. “I was thinking of those two Wilkinses, Wendell and Cory, that visit old lady Buchell out on her farm. They’re her grandsons. They work for her.”
“Now that’s an idea,” her mother murmured and gave her an appreciative look. But then she slumped again. “They’re only farm boys. These girls would turn up their noses at them.”
“Huh,” the child said. “They wear pants. They’re sixteen and they got a car. Somebody said they were both going to be Church of God preachers because you don’t have to know nothing to be one.”
“They would be perfectly safe with those boys all right,” her mother said and in a minute she got up and called their grandmother on the telephone and after she had talked to the old woman a half an hour, it was arranged that Wendell and Cory would come to supper and afterwards take the girls to the fair.
Susan and Joanne were so pleased that they washed their hair and rolled it up on aluminum curlers. Hah, thought the child, sitting cross-legged on the bed to watch them undo the curlers, wait’ll you get a load of Wendell and Cory! “You’ll like these boys,” she said. “Wendell is six feet tall ands got red hair. Cory is six feet six inches talls got black hair and wears a sport jacket and they gottem this car with a squirrel tail on the front.”
“How does a child like you know so much about these men?” Susan asked and pushed her face up close to the mirror to watch the pupils in her eyes dilate.
The child lay back on the bed and began to count the narrow boards in the ceiling until she lost her place. I
