The Piece Of Silver

Abstract

The Piece Of Silver by MILDRED HAUN Pa told folks George went back to the mine up in Virginia after Cathey Hancock died. When anybody asked him, that is what he said. But Ma, she never did say anything save that she didn't know. "I just don't know," she would say. And then say it another time to herself, "I don't rightly know." Even when I took the piece of silver to her she didn't say much. She just looked at it and said, nigh like she was saying it to herself and I wasn't there to hear her say it: "Hit is back in the shape of the neckpiece," and she took it, handling it gentle-like, as if it was a baby, and put it in the washstand drawer where George had kept it. The next day she asked me, in a low voice and anxious seeming, if that deer G seed looked fat and healthy. George, he was three years older than me. And him and Cathey Hancock played together more than me and him did, for she was tomboyish and rough, and tough as a pine knot, always. With this withered right side of mine, and one leg shorter than tother, I wasn't given to playing as hard as they did. They played a heap over there in the old hollow oak that shaded the big spring. Cathey liked it there, and George did too. He liked to set in the hollow of it and come out smelling of the doty wood and to hear Cathey brag on him for being a real woods man. That's why I went there looking. I recollected them spread-out limbs of the tree and the picture of George and Cathey in the clear water. I thought about it in the daytime and at night time I dreampt about it. And it come into my head to go look there for George Cathey did the climbing, the biggest part of it, she did, when they was playing. She would holler back to George from limb to limb. "Look how high up I am," she would say, for she was ever a better climber than George. And a better runner. She would climb, easy as a squirrel, to the topmost limb of the tree and sing back down to George, for he nigh always crawled into the hollow trunk and set—just set and looked at her like he would give his right hand to be like her, maybe. I would scramble up on the stump on the bluff close by and watch them and listen to them and wonder in my mind at Cathey's ways. Possum up a simmon tree Raccoon on the ground Raccoon says to the possum O, shake them simmons down. That's what Cathey would sing. And she would shake the spread-out limbs of the oak and George would crawl around the tree ducking his head down to make like he was picking up persimmons to eat them. I had seed him around the tree and in the trunk of it so much, when he was little, ducking his head up and down and leaping on his all fours, that it nigh seemed natural that morning when I thought I 5 seed his eyes a-shining. But somehow a queer feeling took holt of me and I stopped. Stopped and whistled when I got in good sight of it. And the buck jumped out. Jumped out of the trunk and looked at me and nigh started toward me. But then went running off up the hollow. I couldn't help but note the eyes—they were so gentle seeming, and almost spoke. I stood awhile. Then went on to the tree. George set a heap a store by Cathey. From the day she was born, he did. Ma named it often. "Tie just dotes on her," she would say and sometimes seem sad when she said it and hold her hands tight in her lap. Cathey's pa and ma lived on our place, off up the hollow there in the little log house, and Ma was...