Yeah, Mam was on a tear this morning. Grandpap Ed had evidently done something to displease her, and she was lettin’ him and everybody else in the store know it. In his younger days, Grandpap Ed was evidently quite a dandy, a ladies’ man, plus he had the wanderlust, which meant he went off and left Mam and the kids for weeks at a time, supposedly searchin’ for and findin’ work elsewhere. I reckon Mam never forgave him for that, since it meant a lot of extra work for her.
And she ruled that store and post office and her kids and grandkids with a fist of iron — tried to rule the rest of us, too, and right now she was bemoaning the loafers around the stove, drinkin’ her coffee, and forgettin’ to put a few pennies in the old pickle jar for the cheese and crackers they ate along with it. They didn’t pay her much mind, because their attention was on the everlastin’ rain we been havin’ this fall, plus the man that rode through yesterday, the second stranger we’ve seen in a week.
It was rainin’ this mornin,’ too, probably accountin’ a little for Mam’s mad, since the place kinda steamed, and the smell of wet wool and bodies that coulda stood a bath sooner rather than later was pretty potent. The stove sizzled when the occasional stream of tobacco juice would miss the old coffee tin and hit the fire instead. And the talk swirled about who the man was, and did he have somethin’ to do with “that woman,” who hadn’t been seen since, even though Grandpap Ed just happened to let slip that a letter for Suze Campion had come in and was waitin’ for her.
It seems nobody had really talked to the man who rode through, nor seen where he went. There was a lot of talk, though. Tall, lanky, no, short and kinda stout, no, a big feller, looked like Paul Bunyan, mebbe, with a big ole silver nugget on a strip of leather around his neck.
That silver was the interestin’ part, ’cause there’d been rumors forever about how the Indians that used to live here had talked about silver down in the mines. And the zinc that we mined there had about played itself out, and not a bit of silver had ever been spotted.
But that don’t mean folks didn’t look. Times bein’ so hard, and rumors about the mine havin’ to shut down, left a lot of folks scared about what the future held. And since the present was already gettin’ hard, that was tough. Some folks was already talkin’ about havin’ to move on, while others couldn’t imagine leavin’ the farms they’d been on for generations.
So you can see how talk about a silver nugget, “big as a fist, mebbe,” around a man’s neck would arouse a lot of interest.