Alan Sincic

A person of no account is what she was, and proud of it. She cared not a whit for what the talkers made of her, not the small talkers in a huddle above a bowl of punch or a mailbox or a bunting of undies in the sun, not the big talkers at the bar and the pier and the poker table, not even the silent talker who, with a tilt of the head at the sight of her, a sideward glance, a shade of a smile, obliterates her in the eyes of the others.

Into the center of town she clattered, that first day, at the head of a cart she pulled herself. It was out of nothing she scratched out that little bivouac, up out the ruins of the Royster Feed and Seed a block south of Main. Moved in. Just up and – no. Broke in. Slept in the rubble. Raised her own chickens, gathered her own eggs, baked her own pies. Peddled them door to door, and at the train depot, and off the front porch of the shamble with a towel for a table and overhead a (beaten to a crisp at the edge like the hide of a buffalo) canvas top.

The attention the menfolk thrust upon her she deflected onto – with a word or a look or a smile – her wares. Maggie the fencer. Maggie the foil. And nobody’s fool. She knew why the men gathered and the wives and the wives-to-be whispered about a woman without a past or a name to portage her over the border and into the land of the elect. There was no way around it, they’d say, no two ways about it: such a woman was not (the poor dear, and not a very Christian thing to say) a good fit.

True enough. There was no way around it. You’d never see her of a Sunday in the fold of the congregation. It was afterwards she would appear, at the foot of the steps, the basket beside her all a-tremor with a tower of pie, mini-pies the size of barroom coasters, a dime a pie and hot from out the oven and sweet in the shade of the maple and to hell, to hell with the wafer sacramental.

At word of a death she’d send to the family a pie, send a boy with a pie with a note, patch of clean cardboard off a hatbox, and across the expanse of white she would ink, in a delicate hand, the elegy: To everything a season. At the funeral she’d stand apart, outside, at the lip of the window where the crack in the glass liberates the voice of the preacher, there, in the glow of the leaded glass, and up at the red and the green and the gold of the Mother Mary she’d look, Mary the Mild, Mary the Misbegotten, who cradles in the crook of the arm a God no bigger than a loaf of bread.