Creatures of Habit by Jill McCorkle

Author:Jill McCorkle
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2000-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

Monkeys

EVERYBODY IN TOWN knew who Rommy Whitfield was. She was the woman with the monkey cage out on her front porch and a spider monkey named Mister Simmy inside it shaking the bars like a crazed convict and baring his sharp little yellow teeth. She was the woman with the most beautiful garden in town. She grew flowers and she grew vegetables. On late summer afternoons you would see her sitting in the glider on the shady end of her porch shelling field peas and butter beans into a big shiny colander on her lap.

Children came to spy on her, the mission being to creep close enough to hear the peas falling from their shells, close enough to hear what she was saying because her mouth was always moving, her head shaking from side to side. One boy had reported that she was cussing up a storm but he couldn’t quite make out the words because Mister Simmy spotted him hiding in the shrubbery and started screeching and throwing his crap.

She knew the children came to look at her; a lot of adults who didn’t know any better did, too. Her husband had killed himself. He had taken the sash from the silk robe he bought for her one Christmas and used it to hang himself. That was the attraction. They came to see what the woman who was married to the man who killed himself looked like. What was she doing there all alone with the monkey? Even people who had known her since she first came to town kept a somewhat cool distance after the death. Oh they came to the viewing down at the Cape Fear Mortuary and they came to the funeral; they whispered back and forth, speculating on why he had done this. Some of them knew things. That much was clear to Rommy sitting there in a hard metal chair and staring into the damp earth where Albert lay in his padded box. She could feel their tidbits of knowledge, their memories of this time or that, burning into her back. She kept her eyes open during the prayer, half hoping that Albert might rise up from the ground and break into hilarious laughter. He loved to trick people; he loved to go to birthday parties and pull coins from children’s ears and flowers from his own sleeves. He loved to throw his voice so that it seemed as if Mister Simmy was singing “Red River Valley.” Simmy would wear a little tiny cowboy hat strapped to his head and a bandanna around his neck so that he looked just like Albert. Yes, Albert loved nothing better than a trick. The fine art of deception.

ROMMY HAD LOTS of fruit trees heavy with fruit: apples and pears and hard sour cherries. She had a muscadine grapevine that had completely taken over the old car shed, where Albert used to sneak out for what he called his meditation. She knew he went out there to smoke

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