75 лучших рассказов / 75 Best Short Stories

My grandchildren all laugh at me for thinkin’ so much o’ Miss Penelope’s singin’, but then they never heard her, and I have: that’s the difference. My grandchild Henrietta was down here three or four years ago, and says she, “Grandma, don’t you want to go up to Louisville with me and hear Patti sing?” And says I, “Patty who, child?” Says I, “If it was to hear Miss Penelope sing, I’d carry these old bones o’ mine clear from here to New York. But there ain’t anybody else I want to hear sing bad enough to go up to Louisville or anywhere else.

And some o’ these days,” says I, “I’m goin’ to hear Miss Penelope sing.”’

Aunt Jane laughed blithely, and it was impossible not to laugh with her.

�Honey,’ she said, in the next breath, lowering her voice and laying her finger on the rosebud piece, �honey, there’s one thing I can’t git over. Here’s a piece o’ Miss Penelope’s dress, but where’s Miss Penelope? Ain’t it strange that a piece o’ caliker’ll outlast you and me? Don’t it look like folks ought �o hold on to their bodies as long as other folks holds on to a piece o’ the dresses they used to wear?’

Questions as old as the human heart and its human grief! Here is the glove, but where is the hand it held but yesterday? Here the jewel that she wore, but where is she?

�Where is the Pompadour[80 - Pompadour – Marquise de Pompadour (1721–1764), the mistress of Louis XV, king of France; she was a well-educated woman and a patron of art and literature.

] now?

This was the Pompadour’s fan!’

Strange, that such things as gloves, jewels, fans, and dresses can outlast a woman’s form.

�Behold! I show you a mystery’ – the mystery of mortality. And an eery feeling came over me as I entered into the old woman’s mood and thought of the strong, vital bodies that had clothed themselves in those fabrics of purple and pink and white, and that now were dust and ashes lying in sad, neglected graves on farm and lonely roadside.

There lay the quilt on our knees, and the gay scraps of calico seemed to mock us with their vivid colors. Aunt Jane’s cheerful voice called me back from the tombs.

�Here’s a piece o’ one o’ my dresses,’ she said; �brown ground with a red ring in it. Abram picked it out. And here’s another one, that light yeller ground with the vine runnin’ through it.