Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns Page B

captured. Said the Yankees would hang you by your heels and split you down the middle like a dang pig. Grandpa claimed he never believed that. But he believed starving. They got so hungry, one night his daddy roasted a rat and parched some acorns, "and we was glad to git it. But right then I made up my mind, if'n I got home alive, I never was go'n eat nothin' I didn't like agin. And I ain't."
    One time when my mother complained about him being so hard to please about food, Papa said, "Hon, what if you'd had to eat a rat?"
    Besides losing his appetite and his drum, Grandpa always said the War cost him half his left arm. He claimed a damnyankee shot it off. Granny told me it happened in a sawmill accident after the War. "But they ain't a bit of use mentionin' that in front of your granddaddy," she said. "For one thang, it don't matter. For another, you know how he is. He tells a thang a few times, he believes it hisself. For another, when that-air arm goes to hurtin' on a cold winter night, it's a comfort to him to cuss the Yankees. A man cain't hardly cuss no sawmill."

    Be that as it may, 1906 was the first and only year we've ever celebrated the Glorious Fourth. Usually nobody even mentions it.
    Cold Sassy is the kind of town where schoolteachers spend two months every fall drilling on Greek and Roman gods, the kings and queens of England, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, Marco Polo, Magellan, Columbus, the first Thanksgiving, Oglethorpe settling Georgia, and how happy the slaves were before the War. A good teacher could cover the history of the whole world in two months and spend the rest of the school year on the War of the Sixties and how the Union ground its heel in our faces after it knocked us down. Seems like we never got much past the invasion of Yankee carpetbaggers before school let out for the summer.
    The Declaration of Independence and the Revolution were mentioned at school, of course, but just barely. In Cold Sassy, nobody under forty had ever made or waved an American Flag. Even today, in 1914, there's not but one United States flag in the whole town. The post office being in one corner of the drug store, Dr. Clark is required to fly a U.S. flag. On July 4, 1906, he put it down to half-mast.
    Just the way Grandpa planned it, all the stores closed that day, and folks white and colored lined North Main and South Main, waving their Confederate flags. The parade was led by the town band and the Negro band, which rode in a mule-drawn wagon. Both bands were playing "Dixie," but not in the same style.
    Our cook's husband, a giant, tar-black Negro named Loomis Toy, blew the alto horn in the Negro band. His trick was to sit with the horn in his lap for the first half of a piece, then start at the beginning and, tooting double time, hit the last note right with the others.
    Behind the bands came a big cotton wagon draped with Confederate bunting and pulled by a double team of mules. It carried Cold Sassy's disabled veterans and the moldy old ones. Most were in uniform, sitting up there stiff and proud in rows of chairs. As the wagon rolled slowly along, grown men and women watched silent, with tears in their eyes.

    Next came old Ab Pulliam in his goat cart, the pants of his gray uniform folded under his thigh stubs. He had a double sign hung across the goat's back that said, WE LOST THE WAR BUT WE AINT ON OUR LAST LEGS!
    Behind him walked Miss Love Simpson and Aunt Carrie, Cold Sassy's only suffragettes. The banner stretched between them read, "Ladies, How Long Must We Wait for Liberty? Demand the Right to Vote!"
    Grandpa Blakeslee was supposed to be next, leading the column of younger, gun-toting veterans who were to charge up North Main Street, playing like this was the Battle of Gettysburg. He had planned on riding a bicycle, just to be funny, and even went so far as to order one from Sears, Roebuck and Co. But him never having ridden anything smaller than a horse, buggy, or train, the bicycle scared him to