Tramping on Life | Page 4

three Indians, one after the other." (The funny part of it was that I believed this, actually, as soon as the words left my mouth.)
A silence....
"Granma, don't you believe me?"
"Yes, of course, I believe you."
Aunt Millie would strike in with--"Ma, why do you go on humouring Johnnie while he tells such lies? You ought to give him a good whipping."
"The poor little chap ain't got no mother!"
"Poor little devil! If you keep on encouraging him this way he'll become one of the greatest liars in the country."
A colloquy after this sort took place more than once. It gave me indescribable pleasure to narrate an absurd adventure, believe it myself in the telling of it, and think others believed me. Aunt Millie's scorn stung me like a nettle, and I hated her.
In many ways I tasted practical revenge. Though a grown girl of nineteen, she still kept three or four dolls. And I would steal her dolls, pull their dresses for shame over their heads, and set them straddle the banisters.
* * * * *
We took in boarders. We had better food. It was good to have meat to eat every day.
Among the boarders was a bridge builder named Elton Reeves. Elton had a pleasant, sun-burnt face and a little choppy moustache beneath which his teeth glistened when he smiled.
He fell, or pretended to fall, in love with gaunt, raw-boned Millie.
At night, after his day's work, he and Millie would sit silently for hours in the darkened parlour,--silent, except for an occasional murmur of voices. I was curious. Several times I peeked in. But all I could see was the form of my tall aunt couched half-moonwise in Elton Reeve's lap. I used to wonder why they sat so long and still, there in the darkness....
* * * * *
Once a grown girl of fourteen named Minnie came to visit a sweet little girl named Martha Hanson, whose consumptive widower-father rented two rooms from my grandmother. They put Minnie to sleep in the same bed with me....
After a while I ran out of the bedroom into the parlour where the courting was going on.
"Aunt Millie, Minnie won't let me sleep."
Millie did not answer. Elton guffawed lustily.
I returned to bed and found Minnie lying stiff and mute with fury.
* * * * *
Elton left, the bridge-work brought to completion. He had a job waiting for him in another part of the country.
It hurt even my savage, young, vindictive heart to see Millie daily running to the gate, full of eagerness, as the mail-man came....
"No, no letters for you this morning, Millie!"
Or more often he would go past, saying nothing. And Millie would weep bitterly.
* * * * *
I have a vision of a very old woman walking over the top of a hill. She leans on a knobby cane. She smokes a corn-cob pipe. Her face is corrugated with wrinkles and as tough as leather. She comes out of a high background of sky. The wind whips her skirts about her thin shanks. Her legs are like broomsticks.
This is a vision of my great-grandmother's entrance into my boyhood.
I had often heard of her. She had lived near Halton with my Great-aunt Rachel for a long time ... and now, since we were taking in boarders and could keep her, she was coming to spend the rest of her days with us.
At first I was afraid of this eerie, ancient being. But when she dug out a set of fish-hooks, large and small, from her tobacco pouch, and gave them to me, I began to think there might be something human in the old lady.
She established her regular place in a rocker by the kitchen stove. She had already reached the age of ninety-five. But there was a constant, sharp, youthful glint in her eye that belied her age.
She chewed tobacco vigorously like any backwoodsman (had chewed it originally because she'd heard it cured toothache, then had kept up the habit because she liked it).
Her corncob pipe--it was as rank a thing as ditch digger ever poisoned the clean air with.
Granma Wandon was as spry as a yearling calf. She taught me how to drown out groundhogs and chipmunks from their holes. She went fishing with me and taught me to spit on the bait for luck, or rub a certain root on the hook, which she said made the fish bite better.
And solemnly that spring of her arrival, and that following summer, did we lay out a fair-sized garden and carefully plant each kind of vegetable in just the right time and phase of the moon and, however it may be, her garden grew beyond the garden of anyone else in the neighbourhood.
* * * * *
The following winter--and her last winter on earth--was a time of wonder and marvel for me