Cold Sassy Tree Read Online Free PDF

in gold it said:
    GENERAL MERCHANDISE
Mr. E. Rucker Blakeslee, Proprietor

    Besides keeping the store's ledgers, my daddy took a lot of the buying trips to Atlanta and Baltimore and New York City. I went to New York with him one time when I was little bitty. I'd heard about damnyankees all my life and there I was in a city just full of them. It scared me to death.
    Granny's Uncle Lige Toy, who used to have a restaurant business feeding county prisoners, was in charge of Grandpa's cotton warehouse, one of the biggest in north Georgia, and also the store's cotton seed business. Uncle Lige was the one to talk to if you wanted to put your bales in storage till you could get a better price.
    A third cousin of Papa's, Hopewell Stump, from out in Banks County, clerked and took care of the chickens that folks brought to trade out for nails, flour, sugar, coal oil, coffee, and chewing tobacco. There used to be smelly chicken coops out on the board sidewalk in front of every store in town, but after Cold Sassy was incorporated in 1887, the Baptist missionary society ladies petitioned the town council to get rid of them. So when Grandpa built his brick store in 1892 he put a great big chickenhouse in back, and every Friday Cudn Hope shipped hens, roosters, and frying-size pullets to Athens or Atlanta on the train.
    Uncle Camp mostly swept the floor and put out stock, and in the wintertime broke up wooden shipping crates to burn in the stove. Grandpa called him "born tired and raised lazy." Said getting him to finish something was like pushing mud. "Money don't jump out at you, boy," he'd say. "You got to work for it."
    Campbell Williams was Uncle Camp's whole name. He was a pale thin fellow with pale thin yellow hair and a pale thin personality. He was always checking the time so he could show off his gold pocket watch.
    He wasn't but nineteen when he came to Cold Sassy from over near Maysville, Georgia. The day Camp walked into the store and asked for a job, Grandpa took one look and said he didn't need no hep right now. Camp got him a job at the tannery, working for Wildcat Lindsey, but soon lost it, and then worked a while at the gin. Grandpa didn't bring him into the store till after
he married Aunt Loma, and never did have any respect for him.

    Love Simpson was the first woman Grandpa ever hired. She grew up in Baltimore and had never married but didn't look or act like any other old maid in town. She was tall, plump, and big-bosomed, stood very straight, moved lively, and wore flouncy, fashionable clothes. Miss Love had a sparkly way of talking and she laughed a lot.
    I remember the first time I saw her. I had been standing in front of the store watching a flock of turkeys trot through town. If a turkey strayed, a man would snap a long whip around its neck and pull it back in line.
    When I went inside, there was the new milliner, seated at a table littered with feathers, bird wings, satin bows, stiff tape, bolts of velvet, linen, silk, and so on, and several life-size dummy heads. She had one of the heads in her lap, wrapping folds of pink velour around it and sticking pins here and there to hold the cloth in place. Looking up, she saw me, smiled and said, "What's all the commotion outside, honey?" She had two pins in the corner of her mouth and had to speak around them.
    "A turkey drive, ma'am. The men are rushin' to get'm through town before first dark, cause when it's time to roost, they go'n fly to the nearest tree and they ain't go'n budge till daybreak."
    I was only twelve then. It was before I got long-legged, so with her sitting down and me standing, my head was just about level with hers. I forgot all about the turkeys, I was so busy smelling her perfume and looking at her freckles. They were like brown pepper. She had gray-blue eyes, long black lashes, a tilted-up nose, a big smiley mouth, and thick wavy brown hair piled high and perky on her head.
    Miss Love took the pins out of her mouth. "I guess you live here in