“This one’s Stringbean,” Pete told her.

“Oh,” Ruth said. “You’ve already named them?”

“No,” said Paul. “Just the one you’re holding. We tried to name the rest, but Pete here wouldn’t let us name ’em.”

“He wouldn’t?” said Ruth. “Why didn’t you let anyone else name them?”

Vern smiled big at Ruth. “Pete wanted you to name them.”

Fifty-Three
Girls of the Day

There was a small gathering near the porch of Cowikee’s. Seven people waited. A woman with her elderly husband. A middle-aged man holding a toddler. Two teenage blonde girls wearing rag dresses. And a man in a black overcoat and a white collar. They were waiting for Marigold to touch them.

And she obliged them. Over time, Marigold had learned how to make her hands become hot whenever she concentrated. And she had learned how to understand the feelings and signals she felt within the people who visited her. To her, those who visited had entire stories within them. Myriads of images, memories, and scenes from a life lived.

Sometimes she could see these stories in her mind. Sometimes people didn’t want her to see them, and then she couldn’t see anything. Some people wanted to be touched. Others were skeptics with hard faces. Marigold touched them all.

People came to her daily. Some came from as far away as Birmingham or Huntsville. One man came all the way from Atlanta to see her about a cancer in his stomach.

A woman came from Virginia whose husband was dying of consumption. Marigold touched her, and the woman went home. Weeks later, a letter came in the mail. The man’s health was improving, the letter read.

Hardly a day went by without at least one person coming to visit Marigold the Magnificent in the woods. Some tried to pay her. Others brought gifts in the form of food, jams, or baskets filled with dry goods.

Sometimes the girls at Cowikee’s would sit on the edge of the porch and watch with mouths open as Marigold touched the ones who visited. Often Helen would stand near the porch, watching Abe chase the cats through the nearby woods, while Marigold pressed her hands on any who stood before her.

She disappointed some, satisfied others. She offered no wisdom because she had none. And she always tried to make them smile, if at all possible. Marigold knew next to nothing of God, or the Bible, or his immense universe. But she knew that smiling was holy.

Claims had been surrounding Cowikee’s ever since Marigold began receiving guests. The rumors circulated around town, so that when they got back to Marigold, they were more grandiose than the truth.

Like the man who claimed he’d regained vision in his right eye that had been injured by an accident. By the time the rumor had circulated around the county, people were saying Marigold had healed a man born blind from birth.