Quiet-Crazy Read Online Free PDF Page A

come to get me, maybe I wouldn’t dread so that ride. I never have liked him, although Mama thinks he’s God’s gift to the world, and he thinks he’s God’s gift to the women. Daddy says the only reason he’s in office is because the women in the county voted him in. If they knew, he said, what Sheriff Tate was really like, they would have no part of him. But then, again, he says, maybe the women really do know what he’s like and that’s why they voted him in.
    Mama likes him because he gets up in church on Sunday morning and leads the singing. And that’s exactly why I don’t like him. One reason anyway, because he always looks real hard at me on Sunday mornings, just looks at me sitting there in the front row and then with a slight nod, as if it’s just me and him in the whole church and nobody else is around to see it, he commands me to go play the piano, as if I am at his beck and call. I also don’t like the way he sings—slow as cream rising on buttermilk. Me, I like to pick the songs up a little, like we have some spirit about us, but he keeps on walling his eyes around at me after nearly every stanzaand saying, “Now, let’s slow this down a bit this time.” So we end up singing “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow” like God was dipping his blessings out teaspoon by teaspoon instead of letting them flow out like the song says.
    I tried a little while back not going when Sheriff Tate called me, no matter if he did look at me for eternity, while I just sat there thinking he could get Mr. Palmer to play, and he did. I thought Mr. Palmer did quite well, considering how old he was and how long it had been since he had played. Anyway, Mr. Palmer plays more in the creep-along style that Sheriff Tate likes. But Mama had one of her fits once we got home.
    â€œWhat do you mean, child, sitting there like a bump on a log?” she raged. “Don’t you never act that way again, you hear? Never! No telling what Sheriff Tate thought of you!”
    I wonder now, as I climb into the backseat of the law enforcement car, what Mama would think of Sheriff Tate, if she knew what he had tried to do to me out at the graveyard one Sunday afternoon. I had gone out for Mama to carry a fistful of violets to put on Angela’s grave, when he drove up all rared back looking real proud in that shiny, brown car that has LITTLETON COUNTY SHERIFF in gold letters on its sides.
    All he had wanted to do, he said, after he saw he wasn’t getting anywhere with me, after I streaked my fingernails down across his old face, after I kicked him in the shins about four times, all he wanted to do, he said, was to showme a few things. I told him that nice girls don’t go around letting old men claw them all over, but he said, “You ain’t no girl, Lizzy-buth. You a woman and it’s time you’s acting like one. Flittin’ ’round here so sweet and childlike, you ain’t foolin’ nobody, you know, at least not me, you ain’t. Why, you’re burning hot inside, you know that. You got the fires of a woman eat up with desire.”
    Well, I know it’s time I was acting like a woman, and I also know I got fires in me, but they’re sure as heck not burning for Sheriff Tate, and right now they’re fires of a different color, for when the sheriff says to Daddy, “Don’t you worry none, I’ll take go-o-od care of Lizzy-buth,” the way he says it makes me shudder, and I wonder what else I could have done rather than let Mama run the whole show. That’s what I’ll be, and I can just see it now, a show that the whole town of Littleton will be talking about. “Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, get your tickets here to see the crazy lady. She talks, but not normal, she sings, although looney, she laughs like a wild woman, she cries. . ..”
    Oh, yes, does she ever cry. I thought I was too mad to cry,