Cannot Wait to Get to Heaven - Fannie Flagg [21]
Merle had tried sneaking over into her yard and sprinkling Suggs Slug and Snail Poison in her garden, but she had caught him and had come running out of the house. “Don’t you be killing my snails, Merle Wheeler,” she had said. Every year the birds got most of her fruit and the ants got the rest, but she didn’t care. She said the only insects she felt OK about killing were mosquitoes, ticks, and fleas, and an occasional spider, if it bit her first. Then something dawned on Merle; after all the years of Elner loving insects, going out of her way to save them, it had been insects that had killed her. “So much for being nice,” he thought. Tomorrow he would go over to her house and kill every damn last one of them, snails and all. Slowly he got up off of his chair and went inside to call Verbena down at the cleaners and let her know the latest bad news.
When Tot and Ruby got to Elner’s back porch, Sonny was scratching on the kitchen screen door trying to get in and have his breakfast. Tot opened the door and said, “Poor old Sonny is an orphan now and he doesn’t even know it.” As they walked in the kitchen, the smell of coffee was still in the room. The coffeepot was turned on, and so was her oven. They turned off the pot and the oven and removed the pan of biscuits that were now black and hard as a rock, and threw them out. Her frying pan, with several pieces of burned bacon in it, was still sitting on the gas burner. There were a few dirty dishes from the night before in the sink, so Tot walked over and started washing them while Ruby went in the pantry and found the cat food and fed Sonny, who was sitting by his dish meowing.
After she fed the noisy cat, Ruby went into Elner’s bedroom and found the bed unmade and the radio on, tuned in to Elner’s favorite station. Ruby made the bed, and tidied up the bathroom. She picked up a few things off the floor and put them back in the drawer. She tried to straighten out all the things Elner had sitting on her bedside table, her hearing aid, an old photograph of her late husband, Will Shimfissle, standing by their old farmhouse, a glass paperweight with the Empire State Building inside, a sixth grade school picture of her friend Luther Griggs, and the small clear glass snail figurine Luther had bought her. Ruby wanted everything to look a little neater when Norma came back. She dusted off the top of the table and emptied a glass of water and closed her small Bible. When Ruby went back into the kitchen, Tot was still at the sink. She turned and said, “I wonder what they will do with Sonny?”
Ruby looked over at the orange striped cat, who at the moment was sitting by his dish, cleaning his whiskers, and said, “I don’t know, but if nobody else wants him, I’ll take him, I guess, Elner thought the world of that old ugly thing.”
“She did,” said Tot. “I’d take him if my cat wouldn’t have a fit. You know, now that I think about it, it was Elner who gave me my first cat, after I had my breakdown, when I told her the doctor said I needed Prozac. She said, ‘Tot, sometimes what you need is a kitten,’ and you know, she was right.”
“Oh yes, she’s pretty smart about mental health matters,” said Ruby. “Look at how she was able to turn Luther Griggs around.”
“That’s right. She had the patience of Job with that boy.”
Ruby looked out the window at all of Elner’s birdfeeders. “Somebody is going to have to keep feeding her birds, you know she would want that.”
“Oh yeah, I’ll do it, I guess.”
“It’s a big job. She feeds them three times a day.”