* * * * *
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 ... sitting with her at the red-heated kitchen stove,
I listened eagerly to her while she related tales to me of old settlers
in Pennsylvania ... stories of Indians ... ghost stories ... she curdled
my blood with tales of catamounts and mountain lions crying like women,
and babies in the dark, to lure travellers where they could pounce down
from branches on them.
And she told me the story of the gambler whom the Devil took when he
swore falsely, avowing, "may the Devil take me if I cheated."
She boasted of my pioneer ancestors ... strapping six-footers in their
stocking feet ... men who carried one hundred pound bags of salt from
Pittsburgh to Slippery Rock in a single journey.
The effect of these stories on me--?
I dreamed of skeleton hands that reached out from the clothes closet for
me. Often at night I woke, yelling with nightmare.
With a curious touch of folk lore Granma Gregory advised me to "look for
the harness under the bed, if it was a nightmare." But she upbraided
Granma Wandon, her mother, for retailing me such tales.
"Nonsense, it'll do him good, my sweet little Johnnie," she assured her
daughter, knocking her corncob pipe over the coal scuttle like a man.
* * * * *
There was a story of Granma Wandon's that cut deep into my memory. It
was the story of the man who died cursing God, and who brought, by his
cursing, the dancing of the very flames of Hell, red-licking and
serrate, in a hideous cluster, like an infernal bed of flowers, just
outside the window, for all around his death-bed to see!
In the fall of the next year Granma Wandon took sick. We knew it was
all over for her. She faded painlessly into death. She knew she was
going, said so calmly and happily. She made Millie and Granma Gregory
promise they'd be good to me. I wept and wept. I kissed her leathery,
leaf-like hand with utter devotion ... she could hardly lift it. Almost
of itself it sought my face and flickered there for a moment.
* * * * *
She seemed to be listening to something far off.
"Can't you hear it, Maggie?" she asked her daughter.
"Hear what, mother?"
"Music ... that beautiful music!"
"Do you see anything, mother?"
"Yes ... heaven!"
Then the fine old pioneer soul passed on. I'll bet she still clings
grimly to an astral corncob pipe somewhere in space.
* * * * *
A week before she died, Aunt Millie told us she was sure the end was
near. For Millie had waked up in the night and had seen the old lady
come into her room, reach under the bed, take the pot forth, use
it,--and glide silently upstairs to her room again.
Millie spoke to the figure and received no answer. Then, frightened, she
knew she had seen a "token" of Granma Wandon's approaching death.
* * * * *
In the parlour stood the black coffin on trestles; the door open, for we
had a fear of cats getting at the body,--we could glimpse the ominous
black object as we sat down to breakfast. And I laid my head on the
table and wept as much because of that sight as over the loss of my old
comrade and playmate.
Something vivid had gone out of my life. And for the first time I felt
and knew the actuality of death. Like a universe-filling, soft,
impalpable dust it slowly sifted over me, bearing me under. I saw for
the first time into all the full graves of the world.
* * * * *
To my great-grandmother's funeral came many distant relatives I had
never rested eye on before ... especially there came my Great-aunt
Rachel, Granma Gregory's sister,--a woman just as sweet-natured as she,
and almost her twin even to the blue rupture of a vein in the middle of
the lower lip. She, too, had a slightly protrusive stomach over which
she had the habit of folding her hard-working hands restfully, when she
talked ... and also there came with her my Great-uncle Joshua, her
husband ... and my second cousins, Paul and Phoebe, their children. The
other children, two girls, were off studying in a nurses' college ...
working their way there.
After the burial Josh and Paul went on back to Halton, where they worked
in the Steel Mills. They left Aunt Rachel and Phoebe to stay on and pay
us a visit.
Paul and Josh were "puddlers"--when they worked ... in the open furnaces
that were in use in those days ... when you saw huge, magnificent men,
naked to the belt, whose muscles rippled in coils as they toiled away in
the midst of the living red of flowing metal.
* * * * *
Phoebe was wild and beautiful in a frail way. She wore a pea green skirt
and a waist of filmy, feminine texture. We instantly took to each other.
She was always up and off, skimming swallow-like in all directions, now
this way, now that, as if seeking for some new flavour in life, some
excitement that had not come to her yet.
We made expeditions together over the country. She joined me in my
imaginary battles with Indians ... my sanguinary hunts for big game....
It was she who first taught me to beg hand-outs at back doors--one day
when we went fishing together and found ourselves a long way off from
home.
Once Phoebe fell into a millpond from a springboard ... with all her
clothes on ... we were seeing who dared "teeter" nearest the end.... I
had difficulty in saving her. It was by the hair, with a chance clutch,
that I drew her ashore.
The picture of her, shivering forlornly before the kitchen stove! She
was beautiful, even in her long, wet, red-flannel drawers that came down
to her slim, white ankles. She was weeping over the licking her mother
had given her.
* * * * *
"I'm afraid your cousin Phoebe will come to no good end some day, if she
don't watch out," said my grandmother to me, "and I don't like you to
play with her much.... I'm going to have Aunt Rachel take her home
soon" ... after a pause, "as sure as I have ten fingers she'll grow up
to be a bad woman."
* * * * *
"Granma, what is a bad woman?"
* * * * *
Aunt Rachel and Cousin Phoebe returned home. Uncle Josh, that slack old
vagabond with his furtive, kindly eye-glances, came for them with a
livery rig.
* * * * *
I think I read every dime novel published, during those years of my
childhood ... across the bridge that Elton had helped build, the new
bridge that spanned the Hickory River, and over the railroad tracks,
stood a news-stand, that was run by an old, near-sighted woman. As she
sat tending counter and knitting, I bought her books ... but for each
dime laid down before her, I stole three extra thrillers from under her
very eye.
From my grandfather's library I dug up a book on the Hawaiian Islands,
written by some missionary. In it I found a story of how the natives
speared fish off the edges of reefs. Straightway I procured a pitchfork.
I searched the shallows and ripples of Hickory River for miles ... I
followed Babson's brook over the hills nearly to its source.
One day, peering through reeds into a shallow cove, I saw a fish-fin
thrust up out of the water. I crept cautiously forward.
It was a big fish that lay there. Trembling all over with excitement, I
made a mad thrust. Then I yelled, and stamped on the fish, getting all
wet in doing so. I beat its head in with the haft of the fork. It rolled
over, its white belly glinting in the sun. On picking it up, I was
disappointed. It had been dead for a long time; had probably swam in
there to die ... and its gills were a withered brown-black in colour,
like a desiccated mushroom ... not healthy red.
But I was not to be frustrated of my glory. I tore the tell-tale gills
out ... then I beat the fish's head to a pulp, and I carried my capture
home and proudly strutted in at the kitchen door.
"Look, Granma, at what a big fish I've caught."
"Oh, Millie, he's really got one," and Granma straightened up from the
wash-tub. Millie came out snickering scornfully.
"My Gawd, Ma, can't you see it's been dead a week?"
"You're a liar, it ain't!" I cried. And I began to sob because Aunt
Millie was trying to push me back into ignominy as I stood at the very
threshold of glory.
"Honest-to-God, it's--fresh--Granma!" I gulped, "didn't I just kill it
with the pitchfork?" Then I stopped crying, absorbed entirely in the
fine story I was inventing of the big fish's capture and death. I stood
aside, so to speak, amazed at myself, and proud, as my tongue ran on as
if of its own will.
Even Aunt Millie was charmed.
* * * * *
But she soon came out from under the spell with, "Ma, Johnnie means well
enough, but surely you ain't going to feed that fish to the boarders?"
"Yes, I am. I believe in the little fellow."
"All right, Ma ... but I won't eat a mouthful of it, and you'd better
drop a note right away for Uncle Beck to drive in, so's he'll be here on
time for the cases of poison that are sure to develop."
* * * * *
Cleaned and baked, the fish looked good, dripping with sauce and basted
to an appetizing brown.
As I drew my chair up to the table and a smoking portion was heaped on
my plate, Aunt Millie watched me with bright, malicious eyes.
"Granma, I want another cup o' coffee," I delayed.
But the big, fine, grey-haired mill boss, our star boarder, who liked me
because I always listened to his stories--he sailed into his helping
nose-first. That gave me courage and I ate, too ... and we all ate.
"Say, but this fish is good! Where did it come from?"
"The kid here caught it."
"Never tasted better in my life."
None of us were ever any the worse for our rotten fish. And I was
vindicated, believed in, even by Aunt Millie.
* * * * *
Summer vacation again, after a winter and spring's weary grind in
school.
Aunt Rachel wrote to Granma that they would be glad to have me come over
to Halton for a visit.
Granma let me, after I had pleaded for a long while,--but it was with
great reluctance, warning me of Phoebe.
* * * * *
Aunt Rachel, Uncle Joshua, Cousin Phoebe and cousin Paul lived in a big,
square barn-like structure. Its unpainted, barren bulk sat uneasily on
top of a bare hill where the clay lay so close to the top-soil that in
wet weather you could hardly labour up the precipitous path that led to
their house, it was so slippery.
As I floundered upward in the late spring rain, gaining the bare summit
under the drizzly sky, a rush of dogs met me. They leaped and slavered
and jumped and flopped and tumbled and whined all about me and over me
... ten of them ... hound dogs with flop-ears and small, red-rimmed eyes
... skinny creatures ... there was no danger from them; but they planted
their mud-sticky paws everywhere in a frenzy of welcome.
"A hound ain't got no sense onless he's a-huntin'," drawled Paul, as his
great boot caught them dextrously under their bellies and lifted them
gently, assiduously, severally, in different directions from me....
Aunt Rachel's face, ineffably ignorant and ineffably sweet, lit up with
a smile of welcome. She met me in the doorway, kissed me.
And she made me a great batch of pancakes to eat, with bacon dripping
and New Orleans molasses ... but first--
"Josh, where on earth is them carpet slippers o' yourn?"
Josh yawned. He knocked the tobacco out of his pipe leisurely ... then,
silent, he began scraping the black, foul inside of the bowl ... then at
last he drawled.
"Don't know, Ma!"
But Phoebe knew, and soon, a mile too wide, the carpet slippers hung on
my feet, while my shoes were drying in the oven and sending out that
peculiar, close smell that wet leather emanates when subjected to heat.
Also, I put on Phoebe's pea-green cotton skirt, while my knee britches
hung behind the stove, drying. The men chaffed me.
* * * * *
In the industrial Middle West of those days, when the steel kings'
fortunes were in bloom of growth, these distantly related kinsfolk of
mine still lived the precarious life of pioneer days. Through the bare
boards of the uneven floor whistled the wind. Here and there lay a
sparse, grey, homemade rag rug. And here and there a window pane,
broken, had not been replaced. And an old pair of pants, a ragged shirt,
a worn out skirt stuffed in, kept out the draft,--of which everybody but
Phoebe seemed mortally afraid. Incidentally these window-stuffings kept
out much of the daylight.
Aunt Rachel, near-sighted, with her rather pathetic stoop, was
ceaselessly sewing, knitting, scrubbing, washing, and cooking. She took
care of her "two men" as she phrased it proudly--her husband and her
great-bodied son--as if they were helpless children.
* * * * *
"We're going a-huntin' to-day, Johnny,--wan' ter come along?"
"Sure!"
"Wall, git ready, then!"
But first Paul fed the hounds out in the yard ... huge slabs of white
bread spread generously with lard. This was all they ever got, except
the scraps from the table, which were few. They made a loud, slathering
noise, gulping and bolting their food.
* * * * *
But we started off without the hounds.
"Ain't you going to take the dogs along?"
"Nope."
"Why not--ain't we going to hunt rabbits?"
"Yep."
"Then why not take them?"
"Put your hand in my right hand pocket an' find out!"
I stuck my hand down, and it was given a vicious bite by a white,
pink-eyed ferret Paul was carrying there. I yelled with pain and
surprise. I pulled my hand up in the air, the ferret hanging to a
finger. The ferret dropped to the ground. Paul stooped and picked it up,
guffawing. It didn't bite him. It knew and feared him. That was his idea
of a joke, the trick he played on me!
"Yew might git blood-pisen from that bite!" teased Josh, to scare me.
But I remained unscared. I sucked the blood from the tiny punctures,
feeling secure, after I had done it. I remembered how Queen Eleanore had
saved the life of Richard Coeur de Lion in the Holy Land, when he had
been bitten by an adder, by sucking out the venom. I enjoyed the thrill
of a repeated historic act.
"If we got ketched we'd be put in jail fer this!" remarked Josh with
that sly, slow smile of his; "it ain't the proper season to hunt
rabbits in, an' it's agin the law, in season or out, to hunt 'em with
ferrets," and he chuckled with relish over the outlawry of it.
We came to a hole under a hollow tree. Paul let the ferret go down,
giving him a preliminary smack.
"Mind you, Jim,--God damn you,--don't you stay down that hole too long."
"Think he understands you?"
"In course he does: jest the same es you do."
"And why would Jim stay down?"
"He might corner the rabbit, kill him, an' stay to suck his blood ...
but Jim knows me ... I've given him many's the ungodly whipping for
playing me that trick ... but he's always so greedy and hongry that
sometimes the little beggar fergits."
"And then how do you get him out again?"
"Jest set an' wait till he comes out ... which he must do, sometime ...
an' then you kin jest bet I _give_ it to him."
We waited a long time.
"Damn Jim, he's up to his old tricks again, I'll bet," swore Josh,
shifting his face-deforming quid of tobacco from one protuberant cheek
to the other, meditatively....
The ferret appeared, or, rather, a big grey rabbit ... squealing with
terror ... coming up backward ... the ferret clinging angrily to his
nose ... and tugging like a playing pup.
Paul took Jim off and put him back in his pocket ... he had to smack him
smartly to make him let go--"hongry little devil!" he remarked fondly.
A crack of the hand, brought down edgewise, broke the rabbit's neck, and
he was thrust into a bag which Josh carried slung over his shoulder.
We caught fifteen rabbits that afternoon.
We had a big rabbit stew for supper. Afterward the two men sat about in
their socks, chairs tilted back, sucking their teeth and picking them
with broom straws ... and they told yarns of dogs, and hunting, and
fishing, till bed-time.
* * * * *
The morning sun shone brightly over me through three panes of glass in
the window, the fourth of which was stopped up with an old petticoat.
I woke with Phoebe's warm kiss on my mouth. We had slept together, for
the older folks considered us too young for it to make any difference.
We lay side by side all night ... and like a little man and woman we lay
together, talking, in the morning.
We could smell the cooking of eggs and bacon below ... an early
breakfast for Paul, for he had been taken by a whim that he must work in
the mine over the hill for a few weeks in order to earn some money ...
for he was a miner, as well as a puddler in the mills ... he worked in
coal mines privately run, not yet taken into the trust. He often had to
lie on his side in a shallow place, working the coal loose with his
pick--where the roof was so close he couldn't sit up straight....
* * * * *
"What shall we do to-day?" asked Phoebe of me, as we lay there, side by
side, "I say let's go swimming?"
"You and me together?" I demurred.
"In course!"
"And you a girl?"
"Can't I swim jest as well as you can?"
"Phoebe, git up, you lazy-bones," called Aunt Rachel, from the bottom of
the stairs.
"All right, Ma!"
"Johnnie, you git up, too!"
"Coming down right now, Aunt Rachel!"
"Hurry up, or your breakfast'll git cold ... the idea of you children
laying in bed like this ... what on earth are you doing up there,
talking and talking? I kin hear you buzzing away clear down here!"
I had been rapt in telling Phoebe how, when I grew to be a man, I was
going to become a great adventurer, traveller, explorer.
Phoebe sat up on the edge of the bed, lazily stretching for a moment, as
a pretty bird stretches its leg along its wing. Then, her slim, nubile
body outlined sharply in the brilliant day, she stood up, slipped off
her flannel nightgown with a natural, unaffected movement, and stood
naked before me.
* * * * *
It was a custom of mine to swing my feet as I ate; "just like a little
calf wags its tail when it sucks its mother's tit," my grandmother would
say. I swung my feet vigorously that morning, but did not eat noisily,
as my uncles, all my male relatives, in fact, did. I never made a noise
when I 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 he had stolen from his comrade-in-arms, in
Virginia somewhere, and that, during all these years, he had had Landon
working with him,--and now word had come to us that Landon was leaving
for Mornington again.
My grandmother was mad about him, her youngest ... always spoke of him
as "her baby" ... informed me again and again that he was the most
accomplished, the handsomest man the Gregory family had ever produced.
* * * * *
Landon arrived. He walked up to the front porch from the road. He came
in with a long, free stride ... he gave an eager, boyish laugh ... he
plumped down his big, bulged-to-bursting grip with a bang.
"Hello, Ma!... hello, Millie!... well, well, so this is Duncan's kid?...
how big he's grown!"
Landon's fine, even, white teeth gleamed a smile at me.
Granma couldn't say a word ... she just looked at him ... and looked at
him ... and looked at him ... after a long while she began saying his
name over and over again....
"Landon, Landon, Landon,"--holding him close.
Landon began living with us regularly as one of the family. He went to
work in the steel mills, and was energetic and tireless when he worked,
which he did, enough to pay his way and not be a burden on others. He
performed the hardest kinds of labour in the mills.
But often he laid off for long stretches at a time and travelled about
with a wild gang of young men and women, attending dances, drinking,
gambling.
Nothing seemed to hurt him, he was so strong.
At most of the drinking bouts, where the object was to see who could
take down the most beer, Landon would win by drinking all he could
hold, then stepping outside on another pretext ... where he would push
his finger down his throat and spout out all he had drunk. Then he would
go back and drink more.
Sunday afternoons were the big gambling and card-playing times in our
semi-rural neighbourhood.
The "boys" spent the day till dusk in the woods back of Babson's Hill.
They drank and played cards. Landon taught me every card game there was.
He could play the mouth-organ famously, too ... and the guitar and
banjo. And he had a good strong voice with a rollick in it. And he was
also a great mimic ... one of his stunts he called "the barnyard," in
which he imitated with astonishing likeness the sounds every farm-animal
or bird makes ... and by drumming on his guitar as he played, and by the
energetic use of his mouth-organ at the same time, he could also make
you think a circus band was swinging up the street, with clowns and
camels and elephants.
* * * * *
His great fault was that he must have someone to bully and domineer. And
he began picking on me, trying to force me to model my life on his
pattern of what he thought it should be.
One day I saw him eating raw steak with vinegar. I told him it made me
sick to see it.
"Well, you'll have to eat some, too, for saying that." And he chased me
around and 'round the table and room till he caught me. He held me,
while I kicked and protested. He compelled me, by forcing his finger and
thumb painfully against my jaws, to open my mouth and eat. He struck me
to make me swallow.
Everything I didn't want to do he made me do ... he took to beating me
on every pretext. When my grandmother protested, he said he was only
educating me the way I should go ... that I had been let run wild too
long without a mastering hand, and with only women in the house. He must
make a man out of me....
My reading meant more to me than anything else. I was never so happy as
when I was sitting humped up over a book, in some obscure corner of the
house, where Uncle Landon, now grown the incarnate demon of my life,
could not find me.
It was a trick of his, when he surprised me stooping over a book, to hit
me a terrific thwack between the shoulder-blades, a blow that made my
backbone tingle with pain.
"Set up straight! Do you want to be a hump-back when you grow big?"
His pursuit drove me from corner to corner, till I lost my mischievous
boldness and began to act timid and fearful.
Whenever I failed to obey Granma, that was his opportunity. (Millie
would cry triumphantly, "_Now_ you have someone to make you be good!")
The veins on his handsome, curly forehead would swell with delight, as
he caught me and whipped me ... till Granma would step in and make him
stop ... but often he would over-rule her, and keep it up till his right
arm was actually tired. And he would leave me to crawl off, sobbing dry
sobs, incapable of more tears.
A black hatred of him began to gnaw at my heart ... I dreamed still of
what I would do when I had grown to be a man ... but now it was not any
more to be a great traveller or explorer, but to grow into a strong man
and kill my uncle, first putting him to some savage form of torture ...
torture that would last a long, long while.
He would often see it in my eyes.
"Don't you look at me that way!" with a swipe of the hand.
* * * * *
Out in the woods I caught a dozen big yellow spiders, the kind that make
pretty silver traceries, like handwriting with a flourish--on their
morning webs.
I brought these spiders home in a tin can and transferred them to some
empty fruit jars in the cellar, keeping them for some boyish reason or
other, in pairs, and putting in flies for them.
Aunt Millie came upon them and set up a scream that brought Uncle "Lan,"
as we called him, down to see what was the matter....
I took my beating in silence. I would no longer beg and plead for mercy.
After he had finished, I lay across the sloping cellar door, lumpish and
still, inwardly a shaking jelly of horror.
I was wanting to die ... these successive humiliations seemed too great
to live through.
* * * * *
The grey light of morning filtering in.
Lan stood over my bed.
"--want to go hunting with me to-day?... shootin' blackbirds?"
"Yes, Uncle Lan," I assented, my mind divided between fear of him and
eagerness to go.
In the kitchen we ate some fried eggs and drank our coffee in silence.
Then we trudged on through the dew-wet fields, drenched to the knees as
if having waded through a brook.
Lan bore his double-barrelled shotgun over his shoulder. He shot into a
tree-top full of bickering blackbirds and brought three down, torn,
flopping, bleeding. He thrust them into his sack, which reddened
through, and we went on ... still in silence. The silence began to make
me tremble but I was glad, anyhow, that I had gone with him. I
conjectured that he had brought me a-field to give me a final
whipping--"to teach me to mind Granma."
"--had to bring you out here ... the women are too chicken-hearted--they
stop me too soon...."
"--Pity your pa's away ... don't do to leave a kid alone with women
folks ... they don't make him walk the chalk enough!"
It was about an hour after sunrise. We had come to an open field among
trees. Lan set down his gun against a tree-trunk.
"--needn't make to run ... I can catch you, no matter how fast you go."
He cut a heavy stick from a hickory.
"Come on and take your medicine ... I'm goin' away to-morrow to Halton,
and I want to leave you something to remember me by--so that you'll obey
Ma and Millie while I'm gone. If you don't, when I come back, you'll
catch it all over again."
My heart was going like a steam engine. At the last moment I started to
run, my legs sinking beneath me. He was upon me with my first few steps,
and had me by the scruff of the neck, and brought down the cudgel over
me.
Then an amazing thing happened inside me. It seemed that the blows were
descending on someone else, not me. The pain of them was a dull,
far-away thing. Weak, fragile child that I was (known among the other
children as "Skinny Gregory" and "Spider-Legs") a man's slow fury was
kindling in me ... let Lan beat me for a year. It didn't matter. When I
grew up I would kill him for this.
I began to curse boldly at him, calling him by all the obscene terms I
had ever learned or heard. This, and the astounding fact that I no
longer squirmed nor cried out, but physically yielded to him, as limp as
an empty sack, brought him to a puzzled stop. But he sent me an extra
blow for good measure as he flung me aside. That blow rattled about my
head, missing my shoulders at which it had been aimed. I saw a shower
of hot sparks soaring upward into a black void.
I woke with water trickling down my face and all over me. I heard, far
off, my uncle's voice calling, cajoling, coaxing, with great fright
sounding through it....
"Johnnie, Johnnie ... I'm so sorry ... Johnnie, only speak to me!" He
was behaving exactly like Aunt Millie when she had St. Vitus' dance.
He began tending me gently like a woman. He built a fire and made some
coffee over it--he had brought coffee and some lunch. I crouched white
and still, saying not a word.
Landon squatted with his back turned, watching the coffee. His shotgun,
leaning against the tree-trunk, caught my eye. I crept toward that
shotgun. I trembled with anticipatory pleasure. God, but now I would pay
him back!...
But it was too heavy. I had struggled and brought it up, however, half
to my shoulder, when that uncanny instinct that sometimes comes to
people in mortal danger, came to Uncle Lan. He looked about.
He went as pale as a sheet of paper.
"--God, Johnnie!" he almost screamed my name.