Free The Gladstone Bag by Charlotte MacLeod Page B

your appendix or the little tailbone at the end of your spine. Everybody’s born with one but we don’t use it for anything, and most of us can’t even remember what we grew it for in the first place.”
    “If you say so.” Emma still wasn’t quite clear as to the relationship between the occult and the vermiform appendix.
    Mrs. Fath was quite willing to enlighten her. “Back when a tribe had just one big mind among ’em, as you might say, and hadn’t developed the concept of time as a kind of dressmaker’s tape measure, all the ideas and experiences would be kind of mixed in together like a pot of stew: your thoughts, my thoughts, past, present, and future. When you needed a point of information, you just dipped into the common pot and hauled it out for yourself. As life began to get complicated, more and more stuff got thrown into the pot and it got harder to fish out the piece you wanted, so you got somebody who hadn’t lost the knack to do it for you.”
    “Those would have been the oracles?”
    “Or shamans or medicine men or whatever you want to call ’em. We’ve all got a bit of the shaman in us still, but most of us don’t like to admit it to ourselves, so we squash it down and sit on it. You’d have been pretty good yourself, if you hadn’t been so well educated.”
    “Do you think so?” Emma felt oddly pleased by this rather backhanded compliment, if such it was meant to be. “One does get hunches now and then.”
    “And I’ll bet one’s learned to trust one’s hunches over one’s so-called logical thinking. Right, Mrs. Kelling?”
    “Well …” Emma couldn’t imagine what Cousin Mabel would think of this conversation. “I have to say I generally regret it if I don’t. Is that how you got started, trusting your hunches?”
    “Trouble with me was, I had ’em too often, and they were never wrong. My folks were real strict churchgoers and didn’t hold with what they called Devil’s work, so I had to either keep my mouth shut or darn well wish I had. They weren’t mean people, but they thought it was their bounden duty not to spare the rod. I never did care much for getting walloped, even when I knew it was well intended.”

SEVEN
    I SHOULDN’T THINK YOU WOULD .” Emma didn’t know why Alding Fath was telling her all this, but how did one manage to turn the woman off? And did one honestly want to? “But when you got out on your own …” she prompted.
    “I didn’t get out on my own. When I was fifteen, my parents were afraid I was getting worldly notions from too much schooling, so they took me out and married me off to the minister’s nephew. We hadn’t been hitched a week when I knew for a positive fact my new husband was having it off with his uncle’s wife and only took me for a cover-up because he thought I was too young and stupid to know any better. I stuck it out for a while. Having my own place to keep was better than being home, and she kept him so busy he didn’t bother me any about the married stuff. Finally, though, the hypocrisy began to get under my skin, so next time he told me he was going to choir practice, I told him a thing or two. He beat me up and threatened to kill me if I ever told on him.”
    “How dreadful! What did you do?”
    “I waited till he’d gone off, then I took a little money he didn’t know about that I’d made picking berries and went down to the bus station. There was just enough to buy me a ticket to Atlanta. My father had a sister there who didn’t like him much, so I figured Aunt Flossie’d be the one to go to, and she was. She put me up and got me a job clerking in a store. That meant I could pay my board and have a little over for myself, which was fine for a while. But then I got a feeling that my father had figured out I was with Aunt Flossie and was fixing to come after me. I lit out for Wilmington and slung hash in a diner till I could buy myself a few decent clothes and get a job in a bank. They had a training program