The Complete Stories of Truman Capote by Truman Capote Page B

Then Eunice climbs up on the piano stool and how that rickety contraption survived a monster like her I’ll never be the one to tell.
    “Come down from there, you yellow coward, before I run you through,” says she and takes a whack and I’ve got a half-inch cut to prove it.
    By this time Bluebell has recovered and skittered away to join Olivia-Ann holding services in the front yard. I guess they were expecting my body and God knows it would’ve been theirs if Marge hadn’t passed out cold.
    That’s the only good thing I’ve got to say for Marge.
    What happened after that I can’t rightly remember except for Olivia-Ann reappearing with her fourteen-inch hog knife and a bunch of the neighbors. But suddenly Marge was the star attraction and I suppose they carried her to her room. Anyway, as soon as they left I barricaded the parlor door.
    I’ve got all those black and olive plush chairs pushed against it and that big mahogany table that must weigh a couple of tons and the hat tree and lots of other stuff. I’ve locked the windows and pulled down the shades. Also I’ve found a five-pound box of Sweet Love candy and this very minute I’m munching a juicy, creamy, chocolate cherry. Sometimes they come to the door and knock and yell and plead. Oh, yes, they’ve started singing a song of a very different color. But as for me—I give them a tune on the piano every now and then just to let them know I’m cheerful.

P REACHER’S L EGEND

(1945)
    A south-moving cloud slipped over the sun and a patch of dark, an island of shadow, crept down the field, drifted over the ridge. Presently it began to rain: summer rain with sun in it, lasting only a short time; long enough for settling dust, polishing leaves. When the rain ended, an old colored man—his name was Preacher—opened his cabin door and gazed at the field where weeds grew profusely in the rich earth; at a rocky yard shaded by peach trees and dogwood and chinaberry; at a gutted red-clay road that seldom saw car, wagon, or human; and at a ring of green hills that spread, perhaps, to the edge of the world.
    Preacher was a small man, a mite, and his face was a million wrinkles. Tufts of gray wool sprouted from his bluish skull and his eyes were sorrowful. He was so bent that he resembled a rusty sickle and his skin was the yellow of superior leather. As he studied what remained of his farm, his hand pestered his chin wisely but, to tell the truth, he was thinking nothing.
    It was quiet, of course, and the coolness made him shiver so that he went inside and sat in a rocker and wrapped his legs in a beautiful scrap quilt of green-rose and red-leaf design and fell asleep in the still house with all the windows wide while the wind stirred bright calendars and comic strips he had plastered over the walls.

    In a quarter of an hour he was awake, for he never slept long and the days passed in a series of naps and wakings, sleep and light, one hardly different from the other. Although it was not cold he lit the fire, filled his pipe and began to rock, his glance wandering over the room. The double iron bed was a hopeless confusion of quilts and pillows and scaly with flecks of pink paint; an arm flapped desolately from the very chair in which he sat; a wonderful poster-picture of a golden-haired girl holding a bottle of NE-HI was torn at the mouth so that her smile was wicked and leering. His eyes paused on a sooty, charred stove, squatting in the corner. He was hungry, but the stove, piled high with dirty pans, made Preacher tired even to consider it. “Can’t do nothin’ ’bout it,” he said, the way certain old people quarrel with themselves; “sick to death of collards an’ whatevahelse. Just sit here an’ stahve, that be my fate.… Bet yo’ bottom dollah ain’t nobody gonna grieve on dat account, nawsuh.” Evelina had always been so clean and neat and good, but she was dead and buried two springs ago. And of their children there was left only Anna-Jo, who had