Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger by Lee Smith

Author:Lee Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2010-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

Between the Lines

Peace be with you from Mrs. Joline B. Newhouse” is how I sign my columns. Now I gave some thought to that. In the first place, I like a line that has a ring to it. In the second place, what I have always tried to do with my column is to uplift my readers if at all possible, which sometimes it is not. After careful thought, I threw out “Yours in Christ.” I am a religious person and all my readers know it. If I put “Yours in Christ,” it seems to me that they will think I am theirs because I am in Christ, or even that they and I are in Christ together, which is not always the case. I am in Christ, but I know for a fact that a lot of them are not. There’s no use acting like they are, but there’s no use rubbing their faces in it either. “Peace be with you,” as I see it, is sufficiently religious without laying all the cards right out on the table in plain view. I like to keep an ace or two up my sleeve. I like to write between the lines.

This is what I call my column, in fact: Between the Lines, by Mrs. Joline B. Newhouse. Nobody knows why. Many people have come right out and asked me, including my best friend, Sally Peck, and my husband, Glenn. “Come on, now, Joline,” they say. “What’s this Between the Lines all about? What’s this Between the Lines supposed to mean?” But I just smile a sweet mysterious smile and change the subject. I know what I know.

And my column means everything to folks around here. Salt Lick community is where we live, unincorporated. I guess there is not much that you would notice, passing through — the post office (real little), the American oil station, my husband Glenn’s Cash ‘N’ Carry Beverage Store. He sells more than beverages in there, though, believe me. He sells everything you can think of, from thermometers and rubbing alcohol to nails to frozen pizza. Anything else you want, you have to go out of the holler and get on the interstate and go to Greenville to get it. That’s where my column appears, in the Greenville Herald, fortnightly. Now there’s a word with a ring to it: fortnightly.

There are seventeen families here in Salt Lick — twenty, if you count those three down by the Five Mile Bridge. I put what they do in the paper. Anybody gets married, I write it. That goes for born, divorced, dies, cele brates a golden wedding anniversary, has a baby shower, visits relatives in Ohio, you name it. But these mere facts are not what’s most important, to my mind.

I write, for instance: “Mrs. Alma Goodnight is enjoying a pleasant recuperation period in the lovely, modern Walker Mountain Community Hospital while she is sorely missed by her loved ones at home. Get well soon, Alma!” I do not

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