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Show 94 We had always had the blessing on the food, though. They didn't at Annie Shelton's, even though we were invited to eat there when we went as a Sunday afternoon crowd when we were little girls. Charley, her father, for the first part of his life, was anti-God, and when we sat waiting for the blessing, he laughed uproariously. "What's you waiting for, the blessing? We don't have the blessing at our house. Pick up your forks and dig in. " In later years Charley began to see visions and attend church regularly. He bore his testimony that angels had shown him a gold mine, but everybody said he had lost his mind by then. His wife was not only a god-fearing woman, but a husband-fearing one-the latter more than the former, probably. Once, only once, we missed the blessing at our house. We were a family of gigglers. "A pack of damn laughing fools, " our neighbor labelled us when she saw us laughing after Grant had dazzled her eyes with a flashing mirror and she didn't know there was not a connection between that and our laughing because Revo had gotten even with Macel for starching her panties by filling the tub with water and calmly backing Macel into it. Often Macel and I would break up at the table for merely looking at each other, whereupon she would be sent to the front porch and I to the back until we could behave ourselves at the table. It worked until we were recalled simultaneously, whereupon we simultaneously broke again into laughter. Papa looked around the table, with all of us there, the food on the table and everything in readiness. |