Tramping on Life | Page 9

ate. I handled my food delicately by instinct. If I found a fly in anything it generally made me sick to my stomach.
Feeling warm, I suppose, in her heart toward me, because I was different in my ways, and frail-looking, and spoke a sort of book-English and not the lingua franca that obtained as speech in the Middle West, my Aunt Rachel heaped my plate with griddle cakes, which she made specially for me.
"You're goin' to be diff'rent from the rest, the way you read books and newspapers," she remarked half-reverentially.
* * * * *
A foamy bend in a racing brook where an elbow of rock made a swirling pool about four-foot deep. Phoebe took me there.
We undressed.
How smooth-bodied she was, how different from me! I studied her with abashed, veiled glances. The way she wound her hair on the top of her head, to put it out of the way, made her look like a woman in miniature.
She dove first, like a water-rat. I followed on her heels.
We both shot to the surface immediately. For all the warmth of the day, the water was deceptively icy. We crawled out. We lay on the bank, in the good sun, gasping....
* * * * *
As we lay there, I spoke to her of her difference ... a thing which was for the first time brought home to me in clear eyesight.
Phoebe proceeded to blaze her way into my imagination with quaint, direct, explanatory talk ... things she had picked up God knows where ... grotesque details ... Rabelaisan concentrations on seldom-expressed particulars....
I learned many things at once from Phoebe ... twisted and childish, but at least more fundamental than the silly stories about storks and rabbits that brought babies down chimneys, or hid them in hollow stumps ... about benevolent doctors, who, when desired by the mothers and fathers, brought additions to the family, from nowhere!...
The house-cat ... kittens and the way they came ... surely I knew, but had not lifted the analogy up the scale....
A furtive hand touched mine, interwove itself, finger with thrilling finger ... close together, we laughed into each other's eyes, over-joyed that we knew more than our elders thought we knew....
Girls, just at the gate of adolescence, possess a directness of purpose which, afterwards, is looked upon as a distinct, masculine prerogative....
Phoebe drew closer to me, pressing against me ... but a fierce, battling reluctance rose in my breast....
* * * * *
She was astonished, stunned by my negation.
Silently I dressed,--she, with a sullen pout on her fresh, childish mouth.
"You fool! I hate you! You're no damn good!" she cried passionately.
With a cruel pleasure in the action, I beat her on the back. She began to sob.
Then we walked on a space. And we sat down together on the crest of a hill. My mood changed, and I held her close to me, with one arm flung about her, till she quietened down from her sobbing. I was full of a power I had never known before.
* * * * *
I have told of the big, double house my grandmother had for renting, and how she might have made a good living renting it out, if she had used a little business sense ... but now she let the whole of it to a caravan of gypsies for their winter quarters,--who, instead of paying rent, actually held her and Millie in their debt by reading their palms, sometimes twice a day ... I think it was my Uncle Joe who at last ousted them....
* * * * *
When I came back from Aunt Rachel's I found a voluble, fat, dirty, old, yellow-haired tramp established in the ground floor of the same house. He had, in the first place, come to our back door to beg a hand-out. And, sitting on the doorstep and eating, and drinking coffee, he had persuaded my grandmother that if she would give him a place to locate on credit he knew a way to clear a whole lot of money. His project for making money was the selling of home-made hominy to the restaurants up in town.
* * * * *
I found him squatted on the bare floor, with no furniture in the room. He had a couple of dingy wash-boilers which he had picked up from the big garbage-dump near the race-track.
Day in, day out, I spent my time with this tramp, listening to his stories of the pleasures and adventures of tramp-life.
I see him still, wiping his nose on his ragged coat-sleeve as he vociferates....
When one day he disappeared, leaving boilers, hominy and all, behind, I missed his yarns as much as my grandmother missed her unpaid rent.
* * * * *
It appears that at this time my grandfather had a manufacturing plant for the terra cotta invention