III
I was sick for a long time. I had my hair cut shorter in hopes of giving me back a more youthful look. The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after my father’s death they began the work. The construction company came with riggers and mules and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee–a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to hear him cuss the riggers, and the riggers singing in time to the rise and fall of picks. Pretty soon he knew everybody in town. Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the square, Homer Barron would be in the center of the group. He began taking me out for a ride on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable. I could tell that the many nosey ladies of the town were all too happy about my outings at first, it was even said that, “Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer.” But there were still others, older people, who said that even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige- – without calling it noblesse oblige. They just said, “Poor Emily. Her kinsfolk should come to her.” I had some kin in Alabama; but years ago my father had fallen out with them over the estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no communication between our two families. They were not even been represented at the funeral. And as soon as the old people said, “Poor Emily,” the whispering began. “Do you suppose it’s really so?” they said to one another. “Of course it is. What else could . . .” This behind their hands; rustling of craned silk and satin behind jalousies closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon as the thin, swift clop-clop-clop of the matched team passed with me in it: “Poor Emily.” I carried my head high enough–even when some believed that I had fallen. I demanded more than ever the recognition of my dignity as the last Grierson. Like when I bought the rat poison, the arsenic. That was over a year after they had begun to say “Poor Emily,” and while my two female cousins were down visiting me. “I want some poison,” I said to the druggist. I was over thirty then, still a slight woman, though I was thinner than usual, with cold, drained look about my face. “I want some poison,” I said. “Yes, Miss Emily. What kind? For rats and such? I’d recom–” “I want the best you have. I don’t care what kind.” The druggist named several. “They’ll kill anything up to an elephant. But what you want is–” “Arsenic,” I said. “Is that a good one?” “Is . . . arsenic? Yes, ma’am. But what you want–” “I want arsenic.” The druggist looked down at me. I looked back at him, erect, my face feeling like a strained flag. “Why, of course,” the druggist said. “If that’s what you want. But the law requires you to tell what you are going to use it for.” I just stared at him, and tilted back my head in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The Negro delivery boy brought me the package; the druggist didn’t come back. When I opened the package at home there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: “For rats.”
Worried 