Free Prose by Elizabeth Bishop

died so quick. The day he died, he seemed pretty good. I thought he was going to go home the next day, he seemed so good. I had his bed out in the front room by the window to get the air. Then I went to push it back into his room; he didn’t weigh much. He was talking to me and, all of a sudden just as we got there, going through his door”—Miss Mamie cracked her finger—“it was his heart. Just stopped like that.” Bump, the bed went over the threshold and José Chacón died.
    Of course Miss Mamie could not have been the “Friend to the End” in the poem. If she read it in the paper, she wouldn’t understand its sentiments, of which she certainly would have disapproved wholeheartedly, especially its self-praise. I could not conceive of such a poem being written or read there in Mercedes Hospital. Among Miss Mamie’s saintly qualities, tenderness is lacking. In fact, it is the absence of tenderness that is the consoling thing about her.
    It is time for me to leave, and after a little conversation about the “Collector” and about finances, I put ten dollars into Miss Mamie’s hands, “for the Poor Box,” and say goodbye. As I leave, I begin to think, Why didn’t I put the money in the Poor Box myself? I know perfectly well that she won’t do it.
    It is a foolish as well as an unkind thought, because naturally Miss Mamie would have the key to the Poor Box; probably she wears it around her neck on a string. I realize my doubt is another proof of Miss Mamie’s saintliness, and therefore of her ability to arouse suspicion. I’ve always thought the reason we suspect saints is the ambiguous nature of all good deeds, the impossibility of ever knowing why they are being performed. But that reasoning fails to explain Miss Mamie. She does away with the feeling that possibly she may be a saint for the wrong reason, by convincing one that she is being a saint for no ulterior reason at all.
    There is no reason for or against her robbing the Poor Box, no more than there are reasons for or against her staying at the Mercedes Hospital, or being kind or cruel to the patients. St. Simeon Stylites probably thought he knew exactly what he was doing at the top of his pillar and rejoiced in it. Miss Mamie hasn’t any idea that what she is doing where she is needs explaining. She has managed to transfer the same feeling to her patients—giving them security from hopelessness. Simplicity of heart, never the vulgarity of putting two and two together.
    I go out, and the palm branches move slowly like prehistoric caryatids. The Mercedes Hospital seems so remote and far away now, like the bed of a dried-up lake. Out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse of the salty glitter at its bottom, a slight mica-like residuum, the faintest trace of joyousness.
    1941

The Farmer’s Children
    Once, on a large farm ten miles from the nearest town, lived a hard-working farmer with his wife, their three little girls, and his children by a former marriage, two boys aged eleven and twelve. The first wife had been the daughter of a minister, a plain and simple woman who had named her sons Cato and Emerson; while the stepmother, being romantic and overgenerous, to her own children at least, had given them the names of Lea Leola, Rosina, and Gracie Bell. There was also the usual assortment of horses, cows, and poultry, and a hired man named Judd.
    The farm had belonged to the children’s father’s grandfather, and although pieces of it had been sold from time to time, it was still very large, actually too large. The original farmhouse had been a mile away from the present one, on the “old” road. It had been struck by lightning and burned down ten years before, and Emerson’s and Cato’s grandparents, who had lived in it, had moved in with their son and his first wife for the year or two they had lived on after the fire. The old home had been long and