Who Do You Think You Are

but old in bitter experience of life. In such a spirit she had said lung cancer .
    Billy Pope phoned the garage. It turned out that the car would not be fixed until suppertime. Rather than set out then, Billy Pope would stay overnight, sleeping on the kitchen couch. He and Rose’s father would go down to the hospital in the morning.
    “There don’t need to be any great hurry, I’m not going to jump for him, ” said Flo, meaning the doctor. She had come into the store to get a can of salmon, to make a loaf. Although she was not going anywhere and had not planned to, she had put on stockings, and a clean blouse and skirt.
    She and Billy Pope kept up a loud conversation in the kitchen while she got supper. Rose sat on the high stool and recited in her head, looking out the front window at West Hanratty, the dust scudding along the street, the dry puddle-holes.
Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers!
    A jolt it would give them, if she yelled that into the kitchen.
    At six o’clock she locked the store. When she went into the kitchen she was surprised to see her father there. She hadn’t heard him. He hadn’t been either talking or coughing. He was dressed in his good suit, which was an unusual color—a dark oily sort of green. Perhaps it had been cheap.
    “Look at him all dressed up,” Flo said. “He thinks he looks smart. He’s so pleased with himself he wouldn’t go back to bed.”
    Rose’s father smiled unnaturally, obediently.
    “How do you feel now?” Flo said.
    “I feel all right.”
    “You haven’t had a coughing spell, anyway.” Her father’s face was newly shaved, smooth and delicate, like the animals they had once carved at school out of yellow laundry soap.
    “Maybe I ought to get up and stay up.”
    “That’s the ticket,” Billy Pope said boisterously. “No more laziness.
    Get up and stay up. Get back to work.”
    There was a bottle of whiskey on the table. Billy Pope had brought it. The men drank it out of little glasses that had once held cream cheese. They topped it up with half an inch or so of water.
    Brian, Rose’s half brother, had come in from playing somewhere; noisy, muddy, with the cold smell of outdoors around him.
    Just as he came in Rose said, “Can I have some?” nodding at the whiskey bottle.
    “Girls don’t drink that,” Billy Pope said.
    “Give you some and we’d have Brian whining after some,” said Flo. “Can I have some?” said Brian, whining, and Flo laughed uproar- iously, sliding her own glass behind the bread box. “See there?”
    “T HERE USED TO BE people around in the old days that did cures,” said Billy Pope at the supper table. “But you don’t hear about none of them no more.”
    “Too bad we can’t get hold of one of them right now,” said Rose’s father, getting hold of and conquering a coughing fit.
    “There was the one faith healer I used to hear my Dad talk about,” said Billy Pope. “He had a way of talkin, he talked like the Bible. So this deaf fellow went to him and he seen him and he cured him of his deafness. Then he says to him, ‘Durst hear?’”
    “Dost hear?” Rose suggested. She had drained Flo’s glass while getting out the bread for supper, and felt more kindly disposed toward all her relatives.
    “That’s it. Dost hear? And the fellow said yes, he did. So the faith healer says then, Dost believe? Now maybe the fellow didn’t understand what he meant. And he says what in? So the faith healer he got mad, and he took away the fellow’s hearing like that, and he went home deaf as he come.”
    Flo said that out where she lived when she was little, there was a woman who had second sight. Buggies, and later on, cars, would be parked to the end of her lane on Sundays. That was the day people came from a distance to consult with her. Mostly they came to consult her about things that were lost.
    “Didn’t they want to get in touch with their relations?” Rose’s father said, egging Flo on as he liked to when she was telling a story. “I thought she could put you in touch with the dead.”
    “Well, most of them seen enough of their relations when they was alive.”
    It was rings and wills and livestock they wanted to know about; where had things disappeared to?
    “One fellow I knew went to her and he had lost his wallet. He was a man that worked on the railway line. And she says to him, well, do you remember it was about a week ago you were working along the tracks