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Show 64 the door closed, and tell himself jokes, most of them about old maids. "There was an old maid praying for a man and an owl up in the tree said: 'Hoo! Hoo!' and the old maid said: 'Oh, Lord, anybody will do!" His hand slowly raised as he told the story and came down to smack his knee at the end of the story. His laugh was a three-syllable Ha, HA! ha, in a high, soft voice. His hand accented the second Ha. We knew all his jokes because there was a pane out of one of his windows, which somehow never seemed to get fixed. He told his jokes over and over. His phenomenal memory included such items as: "On the twenty-second day of March, 1895, the old brindle cow kicked the bucket all over Will's head. " "On the eighteenth of September, 1904, them boys stole a melon from our patch. " He had been a source of exasperation to Mama when he periodically took the wages Papa paid him for his work, sunk them into alcohol, which in turn he sunk into himself. On these occasions he sang in a high nasal voice, or got laid out on the bathroom floor, kept the door shut against us with his feet and was otherwise obnoxious. Once in winter he got into the canal at the upper bridge and couldn't get out, so came wading down it in water up to his armpits. The canal wound its way through the back yard of Lydia Wells' residence, so Robert fished him out and guided him home. Mama's patience reached a literal end when she came home from |
