Cannot Wait to Get to Heaven - Fannie Flagg [29]
Elner let him talk on and on, and then said, “All right, Luther, if that’s what you want, but don’t say you don’t have anything, because you do.”
“What? I don’t have a damn thing.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, you have something nobody on this entire earth has except you.”
“What? A daddy that’s a no-good bastard from hell?”
“No, honey.”
“What, then?”
“I’ll show you,” she said. She then opened up a drawer in the kitchen and pulled out a piece of paper and an ink pad. “Give me your hand,” she said. She took his thumb and pressed it down on the pad, and then pressed his thumb on the piece of paper and held it up. “Look at that, your fingerprint is one of a kind. Never has been one like it before and there never will be another.”
He looked at the paper. “So what?”
“So what? You are a one of a kind, put here for some purpose. Now me, I couldn’t kill myself, I want to see what’s going to happen to me next. Besides,” she said, as she poured him more coffee, “you can’t kill yourself today, you have to help me pull all my Christmas things out of the attic and decorate the house before you do.” Luther stayed with her that Christmas, and on and off up until he graduated from high school.
And he might not have graduated if it had not been for her. He had been failing every subject but shop. One day she said, “I want you to bring me your grades and let me have a look at them. OK?”
Nobody had ever asked to see his grades before, and it had made him want to do better for her.
He never did make anything higher than a C minus average, but at least he went every day. He had made her a birdhouse in shop, and now that he thought back on it, it wasn’t a very good birdhouse, but she had put it right in the front yard for everyone to see, and she had bragged on him.
In high school Luther had been two years behind Elner’s great-niece Linda Warren. Besides being cute and having perfect skin and beautiful teeth, Linda was an all A student, head majorette, president of her senior class, and dated only football players. Not only was Luther a big nobody, he also had to have a tooth missing, and the worst case of acne of anybody in school, or at least it seemed so to him. On the high school pecking order scale, Linda and her crowd of clean-cut preppy-looking kids probably never would have even noticed him, but because Aunt Elner was a friend of his, whenever she passed him in the hall, she always smiled and said, “Hi, Luther,” and all the other misfits and losers he hung out with would be impressed out of their minds. Just the fact that someone from the top echelon of high school royalty like herself spoke to him in the hall made high school at least bearable. He had even gotten a few dates with a couple of the halfway decent loser girls that weren’t whacked out on dope, because they thought he was Linda’s cousin. Secretly he even began to believe it himself, and when he’d heard Dwayne Whooten Jr. make some sexual comment about Linda, he had hit him in the face and broken his nose for it.
After his senior year he had joined the army, and Elner was the first person to see him in his uniform. When he came home after serving four years in the tank division, he went straight to her house where she had fixed him a “welcome home” breakfast. Miss Elner’s house was the only real home he had ever known. He wondered what direction he might have gone had he not had her. “Don’t get on that old dope, honey,” she had said. “You don’t want to grow up and be like your daddy, you need to be real careful, will you promise me that?” All he had needed was someone to check in with, to give him a clue how to be a human being. She had even taken him down to Dr. Weiser’s and bought him a front tooth.
Across town, Mr. Barton Sperry Snow had heard the announcement over the radio at the exact time Luther Griggs did. He had been on his way to visit one of his company managers in Poplar Springs, to discuss revamping the entire district. When he heard the name Elner Shimfissle, he suddenly wondered if she was the same Elner Shimfissle he had met so many years ago.