The
last time any of us saw Minnie Pennywell she was chasing after the
5:10 Greyhound, scrambling and leaping over half-frozen mud holes in
her black high-button shoes, skirts hiked high above her knurly
knees.
Lockjaw
Summers, tipped back on his orange crate on the porch of Meyer's
Store, was the last to have words with her. Imagine, Lyle
“Lockjaw” Summers – who once spent three hours in the company
of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and afterwards when pressed for details
replied, "He's a nice enough fella.” – having the last words
with Minnie Pennywell! If there was any message for me, any hint that
she would be back, Lyle wasn't saying.
Minnie
spent a great deal of time in Lockjaw's company in those last few
weeks, hunkered down, elbows on her knees, in a cane-backed chair
she'd pulled up close to his crate. Those of us who walked by ... and
all of us did at one time or another, busily flitting in and out of
Meyers' for this and that ... could see Minnie's lips moving with
surprising speed. She paused only to take in great gulps of air as
she talked to Lyle in a low and hissing voice. Her chair has been put
into service propping open Meyers' door in this sweltering heat, but
Lyle sits, head cocked at a curious angle as if he is still hearing
her, still listening – she would say – as none of us ever did.
In
all fairness, to myself and the rest of the good people of Farrell,
we tried to listen to Minnie, tried to hear what she was really
saying.
"If
you would just listen," she bullied us, "you would hear the
pain all around you. If you would listen, you would hear your own
pain." Well, we were listening, I'm sure, but we heard nothing
unusual.
When
she said she was lonely, didn't we invite her to sing in the town
choir despite her squeaky soprano?
"Anything
that is too stupid to be spoken," Minnie replied to the
invitation, "is sung."
Minnie
spouts quotations and wears them like a fine chain around her neck.
The people of Farrell would have gladly hung her up by that chain
after that remark.
They
didn't, of course, but if they did seem to ignore her afterwards, who
could fault them? Ignoring her was a luxury I could ill afford,
though. The room we shared at Clayton's Boarding House echoed with
the distemper of her moods. Overflowing waste cans, great piles of
soiled laundry and grey, twisted sheets littered our small domain.
Minnie held forth from a cross-legged position upon her unmade bed
while I sat perched on the only chair in the room, her captive
audience of one.
Often,
as I sat there, I tried to imagine her as a young girl. Did she
always strut and preen so? What adult in her life taught her to smoke
in that way, cigarette dangling from her lips, smoke tearing her
right eye? Did the child that she was look into a mirror and say
"This face is angry and should be framed in black"?
I
made the mistake – which would have been a small one with anyone
else – of asking as she paused for breath, "Why do you wear
only black?"
She
choked on the smoke she'd inhaled, dislodging her cigarette onto her
bedspread. She sprang up, pressed her face so close to mine that I
could smell her tonsils and hissed, "I'm in mourning,
Charlotte. I am in mourning for all the words that have died, spoken
like prayers, evaporated into the thick air of indifference."
I
would have asked her what she meant by that, but behind her smoke
rose from the bed and though the word "indifference" hung
between us, I could not be indifferent to the reality of that.
She
moved out shortly thereafter and began spending her days with
Lockjaw. It was rumored that she took to peeking beneath the bonnets
of babies in their carriages to see if they had ears. She was
convinced, it was whispered, that people were breeding earless
children, so unnecessary those appendages had become.
On
the day Minnie left, people tell me that Lockjaw spoke to her.
Customers in Meyer's store were struck still by the rusty, whirring
sound of his voice. It was too low to hear, but it droned on and on
and the people who could see Minnie's face said she sat there
slack-jawed, listening. Apparently, though, he said something she
didn't want to hear and when the 5:10 bus lumbered past, she jumped
up from her chair, shouting, "Stop! Stop!"
The bus driver was not one of us. He heard her. He stopped
the bus and it carried her away.
