Viola Gwyn | Page 2

at all. What was the use of being

good all your life if the bad people could get into Heaven at the last
minute by telling God they were sorry and never would do anything
bad again as long as they lived? And was not God the wisest Being in
all the world? He knew EVERYTHING! He knew all about Rachel
Carter. She would go to the bad place and stay there forever, even after
the "resurrection" and the end of the world by fire in 1883, a calamity
to which he looked forward with grave concern and no little trepidation
at the thoughtful age of six.
At first they told him his father had gone off as a soldier to fight against
the Indians and the British. He knew that a war was going on. Men with
guns were drilling in the pasture up beyond his grandfather's house, and
there was talk of Indian "massacrees," and Simon Girty's warriors, and
British red-coats, and the awful things that happened to little boys who
disobeyed their elders and went swimming, or berrying, or told even
the teeniest kind of fibs. He overheard his grandfather and the
neighbours discussing a battle on Lake Erie, and rejoiced with them
over the report of a great victory for "our side." Vaguely he had
grasped the news of a horrible battle on the Tippecanoe River, far away
in the wilderness to the north and west, in which millions of Indians
were slain, and he wondered how many of them his father had killed
with his rifle,--a weapon so big and long that he came less than half
way up the barrel when he stood beside it.
His father was a great shot. Everybody said so. He could kill wild
turkeys a million miles away as easy as rolling off a log, and deer, and
catamounts, and squirrels, and herons, and everything. So his father
must have killed heaps of Indians and red-coats and renegades.
He put this daily question to his mother: "How many do you s'pose Pa
has killed by this time, Ma?"
And then, in the fall, his mother went away and left him. They did not
tell him she had gone to the war. He would not have believed them if
they had, for she was too sick to go. She had been in bed for a long,
long time; the doctor came to see her every day, and finally the
preacher. He hated both of them, especially the latter, who prayed so
loudly and so vehemently that his mother must have been terribly
disturbed. Why should every one caution him to be quiet and not make
a noise because it disturbed mother, and yet say nothing when that old
preacher went right into her room and yelled same as he always did in

church? He was very bitter about it, and longed for his father to come
home with his rifle and shoot everybody, including his grandfather who
had "switched" him severely and unjustly because he threw stones at
Parson Hook's saddle horse while the good man was offering up
petitions from the sick room.
He went to the "burying," and was more impressed by the fact that
nearly all of the men who rode or drove to the graveyard down in the
"hollow" carried rifles and pistols than he was by the strange solemnity
of the occasion, for, while he realized in a vague, mistrustful way that
his mother was to be put under the ground, his trust clung resolutely to
God's promise, accepted in its most literal sense, that the dead shall rise
again and that "ye shall be born again." That was what the preacher
said,--and he had cried a little when the streaming-eyed clergyman took
him on his knee and whispered that all was well with his dear mother
and that he would meet her one day in that beautiful land beyond the
River.
He was very lonely after that. His "granny" tucked him in his big
feather bed every night, and listened to his little prayer, but she was not
the same as mother. She did not kiss him in the same way, nor did her
hand feel like mother's when she smoothed his rumpled hair or
buttoned his flannel nightgown about his neck or closed his eyes
playfully with her fingers before she went away with the candle. Yet he
adored her. She was sweet and gentle, she told such wonderful fairy
tales to him, and she always smiled at him. He wondered a great deal.
Why was it that she did not FEEL the same as mother? He was deeply
puzzled. Was it because her hair was grey?
His grandfather lived in the biggest house in town. It had an
"upstairs,"--a real "upstairs,"--not just an attic.