Slippy McGee | Page 6

yellow Clélie over one fence, with coy and delicate love-gifts of sugar-cane and sweet-potato pone in season; and Miss Sally Ruth's roosters and ours can wholeheartedly pick each other's eyes out through the other all the year round. These are fowls with so firm a faith in the Mosaic code of an eye for an eye that when Miss Sally Ruth has six blind of the right eye we have five blind of the left. We are at times stung by the Mayne bees, but freely and bountifully supplied with the Mayne honey, a product of fine flavor. And our little dog Pitache made it the serious business of his life to keep the Mayne cats in what he considered their proper bounds.
Major Appleby Cartwright, our neighbor to the other side of Miss Sally Ruth, has a theory that not alone by our fruits, but by our animals, shall we be known for what we are. He insists that Pitache wags his tail and barks in French and considers all cats Protestants, and that Miss Sally Ruth's hens are all Presbyterians at heart, in spite of the fact that her roosters are Mormons. The Major likewise insists that you couldn't possibly hope to know the real Judge Hammond Mayne unless you knew his pet cats. You admire that calm and imperturbable dignity, that sphinxlike and yet vigilant poise of bearing which has made Judge Mayne so notable an ornament of the bench? It is purely feline: "He caught it from his cats, suh: he caught every God-blessed bit of it from his cats!"
As one may perceive, we have delicious neighbors!
When we had been settled in Appleboro a little more than a year, and I had gotten the parish wheels running fairly smooth, we discovered that by my mother's French house-keeping, that exquisitely careful house-keeping which uses everything and wastes nothing, my salary was going to be quite sufficient to cover our modest ménage, thus leaving my mother's own income practically intact. We could use it in the parish; but there was so much to be done for that parish that we were rather at a loss where to begin, or what one thing to accomplish among so many things crying aloud. But finally, tackling what seemed to us the worst of these crying evils, we were able to turn the two empty rooms upstairs into what Madame pleasantly called Guest Rooms, thus remedying, to the best of our ability, the absolute lack of any accommodation for the sick and injured poor. And as time passed, these Guest Rooms, so greatly needed, proved not how much but how little we could do. We could only afford to maintain two beds on our small allowance, for they had to be absolutely free, to help those for whom they were intended--poor folks in immediate and dire need, for whom the town had no other place except an insanitary room in the jail. You could be born and baptized in the Guest Rooms, or shriven and sent thence in hope. More often you were coaxed back to health under my mother's nursing and Clélie's cooking and the skill of Doctor Walter Westmoreland.
No bill ever came to the Parish House from Dr. Walter Westmoreland, whom my poor people look upon as a direct act of Providence in their behalf. He is an enormous man, big and ruddy and baldheaded and clean-shaven, with the shoulders of a coal-heaver and legs like a pair of twin oaks. He is rather absent-minded, but he never forgets the down-and-out Guest Roomers, and he has a genius for remembering the mill-children. These are his dear and special charge.
Westmoreland is a great doctor who chooses to live in a small town; he says you can save as many lives in a little town as a big one, and folks need you more. He is a socialist who looks upon rich people as being merely poor people with money; an idealist, who will tell you bluntly that revelations haven't ceased; they've only changed for the better.
Westmoreland has the courage of a gambler and the heart of a little child. He likes to lay a huge hand upon my shoulder and tell me to my teeth that heaven is a habit of heart and hell a condition of liver. I do not always agree with him; but along with everybody else in Appleboro, I love him. Of all the many goodnesses that God has shown me, I do not count it least that this good and kind man was sent in our need, to heal and befriend the broken and friendless waifs and strays who found for a little space a resting place in our Guest Rooms.
And when I look back I know now that not lightly nor fortuitously was I uprooted from