Can't Wait to Get to Heaven

A Surprise

11:59 AM

After Tot had gone home, Ruby stayed at Elner’s house to answer the phone in case anyone called. While she waited, she decided to just go ahead and wash the sheets and towels and all the dirty clothes in Elner’s dirty-clothes basket, so Norma wouldn’t have to be bothered, and it was when she opened it and started pulling all the clothes out that she made a startling discovery.

Hidden at the very bottom of the clothes basket was a .38 revolver handgun, large enough to blow someone’s head off. Ruby stood there with her arms full of clothes, staring at it and wondering why in the blazes Elner Shimfissle would be hiding a gun at the bottom of her clothes basket. Ruby assumed there was probably a perfectly good explanation for its being there, but on the other hand, she also was aware that even though you may think you know someone, you can never really be sure about people, it’s always the quiet ones you have to watch out for. They can surprise you.

This unexpected and sudden discovery of a handgun in Elner Shimfissle’s dirty-clothes basket presented a major dilemma for Ruby. What should she do? After running the thing around in her mind for a few minutes and considering the situation from every angle, she made a decision. “Oh well,” she thought. A neighbor is a neighbor, and Ruby would have wanted Elner to do the same for her if the situation were reversed. So she reached down and picked the gun up, and wiped it off with one of Elner’s nightgowns, in case there were incriminating prints. She then wrapped it up in a pillowcase, took it into the kitchen and looked under the sink for a paper bag, carried it back over to her house, and hid it in her cedar chest in the hall. Norma was going to be upset enough, without having to find a loaded .38 in her dead aunt’s clothes basket.

When she walked back over to do the washing, she noticed Elner’s birdbath and thought, “Somebody’s going to have to keep that filled with water.” And then she suddenly remembered something else. “Who’s going to feed that blind raccoon his dish of ice cream and vanilla wafers every night?” Then she remembered something else. Every afternoon Elner had fixed an old black Labrador named Buster a cheese sandwich. “Lord,” Ruby thought, she would do the sandwich, but Merle was going to have to feed the raccoon. She was scared the thing might bite. Elner had not been scared of anything and had let those squirrels come into her kitchen and jump right up on her counter where she kept food. As her friend and as a health professional Ruby had warned her, “Elner, squirrels are nothing but big rats with furry tails and carry all kinds of diseases,” but Elner never seemed to worry about germs. “Come to think of it,” thought Ruby, “right up until this morning when she was killed by wasps, she had never been sick a day in her life.”