"So I appreciate the invitation, sugar, but I guess I hadn't better disappoint the Reverend W. W. Poll. Not when he's just a short elevator ride as opposed to a long ordeal in an automobile. So you all bring that cake on over here. It'll do us old geezers good to see some kids." He tells me the cake's too big to move. I says "toobig?" and he says that they was having not only my party, see, but a whole day-long to-do with music and a service their ownselves and quite a few people expected. A sort of Worship Fair, he called it. "Al-so," he says, in that way he used to twist me around his finger, "the Sounding Brass are going to be here."
Grandkids always have your number worse than any of your own kids, and the first is the worst by a mile. "Don't you flimflam me, Bub! Not thee Sounding Brass." He says cross his heart; he picked them all up at the bus depot not three hours ago, swallowtails, buckteeth, and all, and they have promised to sing a special request for my birthday, even though they don't usually dedicate songs and haven't done it in years.
"And I will wager," he says, "you can't guess which one." His words some way more extravagant than's even usual for him. I don't answer. I heard it then. "They are going to sing that version of 'Were You There' that you used to like so much." I say "You remember that? Why, it's been twenty years since I had that record if it's been a day." "More like thirty," he says. He said al-so as far as the ride went they had a special bus with a full-size bed in it coming for me at four on the dot. "So don't give me any more of that bad back baloney. This is your day to party!"
I realized what it was then, to some extent. There was somebody else with him, standing near at the other end of the line so he was grooming his voice for more than just his granny. Not Betsy, nor Buddy. Somebody else.
"In fact it could be your night to party as well. Better throw some stuff in a sack."
After we hung up I was in a kind of dither to think who. I started to turn my program back up, but it was the ad for denture stickum where the middle-aged ninny is eating peanuts. So I just switched the wretched thing clean off and stood there by the window, looking down at Eugene's growing traffic situation. Zoom zoom zoom, a silly bunch of bugs. The Towers is the highest building in all Eugene unless you count that little one-story windowless and doorless cement shack situated on top of Skinner's Butte. Some kind of municipal transmitter shack is I guess what it is. It was up there just like it stands today the very first time Emerson T and me rode to the top of the butte. We drove if I'm not mistaken a spanking brand-new 1935 Terraplane sedan of a maroon hue that Emerson had bought with our alfalfa sales that spring. Eugene wasn't much more than a main street, just some notion stores and a courthouse and Quackenbush's Hardware. Now it sprawls off willy-nilly in all directions as far as a person can see, like some big old Monopoly game that got out of hand. That little shack is the only thing I can think of still unchanged, and I still don't know what's in it.
I picked up Emerson T's field glasses from my sill and took them out of their leather case. They're army glasses but Emery wasn't in the army; when they wouldn't let him be a chaplain he became a conscientious objector. He won the glasses at Bingo. I like to use them to watch the passenger trains arrive Monday nights, but there isn't much to watch of a Friday noon. Just that new clover-leaf, smoking around in circles and, O, whyever had I let him make me say yes? I could still hear my pulse rushing around his words in my ears. I turned the glasses rear-way-round and looked for a while that way, to try to make my heart slow its pit-a-pat (nope, it hadn't been Betsy or Buddy, nor none of his usual bunch that I could think of offhand), when, without so much as a by-your-leave or a kiss-my-foot, there, right at my elbow, sucking one of my taffy-babies and blinking those blood-rare eyes of hers up at me was that dadblessed Miss Lawn!
"Why Mrs. Whittier -"
Made me jump like a frog. Her eyes, mainly. Vin rose bloodshot. She puts away as much as a quart before lunch somedays; she told me so herself. "- don't you realize you are looking through the wrong end again?" She shuffles from foot to foot in those gum-rubber slippers she wears then, in a breath that would take the bristles off a hog, she coos "I heard your television go off, then when it didn't come back on I was worried something might be the matter…?"
She wears those things for just that purpose, too: slipping. I know for a fact that as soon as she hears my toilet flush or one of my pill bottles rattle she slips into her bathroom to see if my medicine cabinet is left open. Our bathrooms are back-to-back and the razor-blade disposal slot in her medicine cabinet lines right up with the razor-blade disposal slot on my medicine cabinet, and if she don't watch out one of these days I'm going to take a fingernail file and put one of those poor bloodshot eyeballs out of its misery. Not actually. We're old acquaintances, actually. Associates. Old maids and widows of a feather. I tell her if she must know I turned it off to talk over the telephone.
"I thought I heard it ring," she says. "I wondered if it might be Good Book Bob dialing you for dollars again."
Once KHVN phoned and asked me who it was said "My stroke is heavier than my groaning." I remembered it was Job because the Book of Job was the only book of the Bible Uncle Dicker ever read aloud to me (he claimed it was to help me reconcile my disfigurement but I personally think it was because of him constantly suffering from his rupture), and when I answered right and won forty dollars and a brass madonna of unbreakable Lucite, Miss Lawn never got over it. If I was in the tub or laid down napping and the phone rang more'n once she'd scoot all the way around from her place in time to answer the third ring, just in case it might be another contest. That's how she thinks of me and of what she refers to as my "four-leaf-clover life." Sometimes she comes in and waits for it to ring. She swears up and down that I must be hard of hearing because she always knocks before she comes in; all I say is it must be with a gum-rubber knuckle.
"Well, it was not Good Book Bob," I assure her, "it was my grandson."
"The famous one?"
I just nodded and snapped the field glasses away in their case. "He's coming in a special bus this afternoon to take his grandmother to a big surprise party everybody's giving her." I admit I was rubbing it in a bit but I swear she can aggravate a person. "I'll probably be away to the festivities all evening," I says.
"And miss Reverend Poll's special service? and the donuts and the Twylight Towers Trio? Mrs. Whittier, you must be delirious!"