Sissy's Got a Killer Hand
for Mildred Dolores Orr

[intro]

[verse]
Down in Houma, Louisiana, where the heat won't ever break,
there's a girl behind the counter of a little flower shop.
Cellophane and green wire and a cooler full of roses —
she made 'em up for weddings and she made 'em up for wakes.

[chorus]
Somebody took the picture and they wrote across the back:
"Sissy at the Flower Shop" — four little words, that's that.
But four words on a photograph don't tell you where she'd go.
Set down here a minute, Sissy. This is how it goes.

[verse]
Her sister Deanna had gone out there ahead of her,
to Shoshoni, Wyoming, on the Wind River plain.
Folks ask what makes a woman leave the only world she's known —
her sister was on the other end. That's all it ever takes.

[verse]
She'd drive the twenty-two miles out to Lost Cabin to work,
keeping books for a man who made his living working bronze —
cowboys, busts and horses, all them hard old Western men.
Come Sunday she was in a Baptist pew, same as back home.

[verse]
Now most folks get a gold watch when they finally quit a job.
Sissy walked out with John Wayne and toted him on home.
They put that cowboy on a magazine — there's twenty in the world,
all numbered. Hers ain't one of 'em. Hers is out there on its own.

[bridge]
Now here's the part I want you to hear right:
for a while out in Wyoming, they went and made her judge.
That girl from the flower shop, sitting up behind the bench,
hearing out her neighbors, laying down the law —
them same hands that tied the ribbons on a funeral spray.

[chorus]
There's another one they took of her and wrote across the back:
"Sissy's got a killer hand" — nineteen eighty-three, that's that.
And that's the other half of it, if you want it in a line:
they dealt her what they dealt her, and she played it every time.

[verse]
Well, now it's Texas, and it's ninety-four years down the road.
The Orr girls all wound up in the same state after all,
with five kids and their kids and their kids out in the hall —
and Grandmother, not a one of 'em was in that photograph at all.

[outro]
You made 'em up for strangers — every wedding, every wake —
and you handed every one across the counter, kept not one.
They dealt you what they dealt you, and you played it all the way.
Now look around this room, Sissy. Look at what you arranged.
Grandmother — this one's yours.

