Just For Fun
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The floor of the summer-house at Uncle Carter's was of lovely white
sand, and did not soil my clean pink gingham frock, although I sat down
flat upon it. Under one of the three benches that furnished it, I had
dug a vault yesterday. It was modelled upon the description given in
_The Fairchild Family_ of one belonging to a nobleman's estate. My
self-education was essentially Squeersian. When I read a thing, I
forthwith went and did it. The gardener had lent me a trowel, and I had
found a thin, flat stone that served as a cover. Digging was easy work
in the top-dressing of sand and the substratum of loose, dry soil.
There were eight niches in the vault--two on a side. When all was
finished, I sallied forth in quest of occupants. My vault was stocked by
nightfall. In one niche was a dead sparrow my cousin Burwell had shot by
mistake and thrown away. In a second was a frog on which a horse or cow
had trod, crippling it so badly that Uncle Carter mercifully killed it
with a blow of his stick. The poultry-yard and an epidemic of pip
supplied me with two more silent tenants. A mouse-trap strangled a
fifth, the gardener's mole-trap yielded up a sixth. Nos. 7 and 8 were
land-terrapins ("tar'pens," in negro dialect), which I knew must be dead
when I found them, although I could discern no sign of violence. Their
shells were shut so tightly that I could not force a straw between the
upper and lower, and no amount of kicking and thumping elicited any sign
of life.
An innovation upon the Fairchild pattern was the deposit in the bottom
of the vault of a tumbler full of flies which Aunt Eliza told the
dining room servant to throw into the kitchen fire. A primitive snare
for these destroyers of the housewife's peace was made by filling a
tumbler within an inch of the brim with strong soap-suds, and fitting
upon the top a round cover of thick "sugar-loaf paper," with a hole in
the middle. Molasses was smeared all around this hole upon the under
side of the paper, and an alluring drop or two on the top attracted
attention to the larger supply of sweets. At least a quart of flies, per
day, were caught in this way in the height of the season before window
and door screens were invented.
I waylaid the man and tumbler in the back porch.
"Are they dead, sure enough?" I whispered.
"Dead as a door-nail, little mistis."
"Give 'em to me, please! I'll bury them."
He complied, good-naturedly. I poured the contents of the glass into the
vault, and strewed fine dry sand over them an inch deep. Then I fitted
on the flat stone, and said nothing to anybody of my new branch of
industry.
I was tired of being called "an old-fashioned child!" My mother's oft
and resigned ejaculation--"What _next_, I wonder!" was to my ears a
covert reproach for not being "steady" and "a comfort," like Mary 'Liza.
Even my less critical father's shout of laughter at any unusual freak or
experiment abraded my moral cuticle sometimes. At home the colored
children would have entered heartily into my mortuary enterprise,--yes!
and kept my counsel. The reticence of the serf exceeds in dumb
doggedness that of a misunderstood child. But I did not play with Uncle
Carter's little negroes. Every Southern child comprehended the
distinction between "home-folks" and other people's servants.
Not that I was ever lonely. What I called "things" were an unfailing
resource to me. An ant-hill was entertainment for a whole forenoon; I
watched bees and their hives by the hour; my vault kept me busy and
happy all day. If Cousin Molly Belle suspected what I was about, she
asked no questions, and refrained from spying upon me. When dressed
clean in the afternoon, for the second time since breakfast,--the
manufacture of mud-pies, puddings, and cakes, and the baking of several
batches in the sun, having engrossed the morning,--I took _The Fairchild
Family_ out into the summer-house and reread, for the tenth time, the
account of the opening of the family vault.
Why, I reasoned within myself, should innocent dumb creatures be thrown
away like dead leaves, when they have stopped living? It would be kind
in me, or in anybody, to bury them in vaults, and to write Bible verses
and all that on their tombstones. I would dig another vault to-morrow
and look around for things to put into it,--and still another the next
day. I had, in imagination, honeycombed the space under the benches with
catacombs, and my book was clean forgotten, before I saw a movement in
the sandy flooring, close to the edge of the flat stone sealing the
mouth of the vault. I leaned forward to inspect it more nearly. The
stone had been undermined at one side, and a hole left there, through
which a line of flies, gray with dust, was feebly crawling into the
sunshine. There seemed to be a thousand of them, all dusty, but some
more active than others. As soon as they were quite clear of the hole,
they dispersed in various directions, some alighting upon twigs and
blades of grass, some flying up to the benches, where they sat cleaning
their bodies and wings with their feet and mouths.
I worked my hands into the hole and raised the stone. A cloud of
resurrected flies arose in my astonished face. The vault was quick with
them. The dry sand, warmed by the sun, that I had sifted over them, had
acted as a hot blanket upon the chilled body of a dying man. When I got
rid of the swarm I examined the vault. Both of the terrapins were
missing. The sapping and mining was their work. Through the tunnel thus
excavated they had regained their liberty, and released a mighty host of
fellow-captives.
"The rest of you are _dead_, anyhow!" said I, aloud, intensely chagrined
at the cheat practised upon my benevolent nature, and I shoved the stone
back over the violated vault.
A shadow fell upon the white sand. Looking up, I saw a young gentleman
in the door of the summer-house, smiling down at me. At the first glance
I took him for my cousin Burwell, who was at home on his vacation. A
second undeceived me. I scrambled to my feet and stared hard at the
stranger who stood with his hands behind him, still smiling, but not
saying a word. He was nattily dressed in a blue cloth coat and trousers,
and a white waistcoat. A white satin stock of the latest style encircled
a slender neck; he wore shiny boots, a leghorn hat was set jauntily
above a crop of black curls. I was never shy, having been accustomed
from my birth to meeting strangers and to "entertaining company" when
called upon to do so. Yet I was strangely embarrassed by the merry eyes
fixed silently upon me.
"How do you do, sir!" I said, dropping a little courtesy, as well-bred
children still did in that part of the civilized world.
Still without speaking, the stranger drew nearer and stooped to kiss me.
This was going several steps too far. I clapped one hand over my mouth
and pushed him away with the other.
"Cousin Molly Belle! _oh_, Cousin Molly Belle!" I screamed between my
fingers.
She was the only member of the family at home, my uncle, aunt, and their
two sons having gone on an all-day visit to a plantation some miles
away.
"Why, Namesake! don't you know me?"
Her voice answered in my very ear, her arm held me as I ceased
struggling.
I laughed like a mad thing in the excess of my relief and surprise, and
when she sat down, I climbed to her knee for a good look at her
disguise.
"Cousin Burwell's clothes!" I said analytically. "And his hat. But your
hair is black."
She lifted the hat to show that she had on a black wig.
"It belonged to poor Grandpapa when he was young. He had a fever and his
head was shaved. I found it in a box on the top shelf of mother's
closet, and tried it on just for fun. I liked myself so well in the
glass that I thought I'd see how I would have looked if Burwell had been
the girl, and I the boy. I know now that I ought to have been. I mean to
be--just for fun--until they all come home. I'm in exactly the humor to
do something outrageous. I'm tired to death of everyday doings and
everyday people, and my everyday self. You and I are going to have a
real spree, a glorious frolic, and nobody else is to know a single
thing about it. Flora" (her maid) "helped me on with this rig. She is as
close as wax, and you never tell tales,--Oh, yes! I know--" as I opened
my mouth eagerly--"you would have your tongue pulled out by the roots
before you would get me into trouble. And there would be all sorts of
trouble if I were found out."
She tied my sunbonnet, made of the same pink gingham as my frock, under
my chin, and we set forward gleefully upon our spree. To begin with, we
jumped over the yard palings, so that we should not have to pass in
sight of the house and kitchen, in order to get into the lane leading to
the public road. We called it "a lane." Now it would be an avenue, or
drive. The finest Lombardy poplars in Powhatan County bordered it; sheep
mint, pennyroyal, sweetbrier, and wild thyme grew up close to the
wheel-track and gave out a goodly smell as we brushed by and trod upon
them. I was in a high gale of spirits, and prattled as fast as my
tongue could run, flattered beyond expression by the choice of myself as
an accomplice in the frolic.
"It's a pity you _can't_ change places with Cousin Burwell!" I
regretted. "You'd be a heap handsomer gentleman than he is. And it must
be just fine not to have to hold up your frocks when you want to run
fast, and to climb trees and jump fences. Would it be sure-enough
wrong--I don't mean not lady-like--but would it be _sinful_ for you to
dress that way all the time?"
"People seem to think so, Namesake. They think so so much that it is
against the law for a woman to wear a man's clothes, or for a man to
wear a woman's. Though why any man with a grain of sense in his head
should ever want to put on _skirts_, I can't see. If I were to meet a
magistrate while I have on these--_things_,"--flicking her trousers with
a switch she had cut from a hickory sapling,--"he would have a right to
put me in jail."
"Oh, Cousin Molly Belle!" squeezing her hand hard. "S'pose we should!"
"I'm Cousin Burwell until we get home. No 's'pose,' you little goosie!
If we did, we'd take to the woods, and outrun him. Or, we'd climb a
tree."
We were in the highroad, striding the ruts and skipping over stones like
two boys on the way home from school. There was pleasanter walking in
bridle-paths and wood-roads branching off from the thoroughfare every
few rods. I think the madcap chose the rutty and mud-holey route because
there was, at least, a chance that we might have to plunge into the
bushes to hide, or to brave the scrutiny of strangers and acquaintances.
The sauce of danger made the escapade the more attractive.
Half a mile from home a creek, shallow, but broad, crossed the road. We
could not pass over dry-shod and had to go up the bank into the low
grounds to find a long log laid from side to side of a narrower part of
the stream. My companion hoisted me upon her back and ran along the
uncertain bridge as fleetly as a squirrel.
"How far are we going?" I asked, as she set me down.
"Around by Tom's Hill, and then cut across the field home. It's more
than a mile. Can you walk so far?"
"I walked two miles at a time, once!" I boasted.
"You are a brave little lightwood knot!"
She was "fey"--_exaltee_--in the state of lighthearted-and
lightheadedness for which sober, literal, decorous English has no
synonym. As we went, she danced and sang, and laughed out joyously at
everything and at nothing, and talked the most fascinating nonsense--all
in the role of "Cousin Burwell." She could imitate him to perfection;
her strut and swagger and slang threw me into paroxysms of delight. We
picked huckleberries, and dived into the woods to feast upon wild plums
that had ten drops of syrupy juice between tough skins and flinty
stones encased in the pulp of bitterness, and gathered handfuls of wild
flowers because their beauty tempted sight and touch, and with no
intention of taking them home with us. Two of Pan's dryads turned loose
for a holiday could not have sported more irrationally.
We met neither man nor beast until we had climbed Tom's Hill, a stony
eminence from the top of which, as the neighbors were proud of saying,
one could see six dwelling-houses, each with its group of outbuildings,
representing six fine plantations. A saddle-horse was tied to a
persimmon tree a hundred yards or so down the other side. He whinnied at
sight of us, and Cousin Molly Belle ran up to him.
"Well done, Snap! old fellow! clothes don't make any difference to
you--do they?"
It was Mr. Frank Morton's riding horse, and the fence by which he stood
bounded an extensive tobacco field belonging to Mr. Frank Morton's
brother. About the middle of the field was a tobacco barn, and by
climbing upon the top rail of the fence so as to overlook a row of
sassafras saplings, I could see a group of men about the door. Their
backs were toward us, and if they had looked our way they could not have
seen us, when I got down.
Cousin Molly Belle's eyes were two dancing stars. She clapped her hands
in riotous glee. Without a word she untied the bridle from the tree,
vaulted into the saddle, drew me up in front of her, and before I could
put a question we were pacing briskly down the hill. At the bottom we
struck into a cross-road leading to Uncle Carter's plantation. Cousin
Molly Belle was laughing too heartily to speak distinctly, and I joined
in with all my heart, with a very imperfect appreciation of the extent
of the practical joke. Mr. Frank Morton would not have to walk home. He
had only to go to his brother's house when he missed Snap and borrow a
horse, and Snap would be sent back safely to him in good time.
"What d'you s'pose he'll say when he comes to the fence and Snap isn't
there?" queried I, at length.
"Oh, _don't_ I wish I were hiding somewhere near enough to hear and see
him!" another and yet more infectious outburst. "That would be the best
part of the joke. I'm going to turn Snap loose when we get to our outer
gate, and hit him a crack with my switch and start him toward home.
He'll not tell tales out of school--will you, old boy?" slapping his
neck affectionately. "Mr. Frank Morton will never guess why the horse
thief let such a fine animal get away from him, when once he had got
him. I can hear him now, telling me the story, and I'll look as grave as
a dozen judges, and wonder as hard as he does--and--_Hark!_"
We were, perhaps, half a mile from the place where we had found Snap,
but, as I have said, Tom's Hill was a stony ledge, running like a sharp
backbone between fertile fields, and we heard from afar off the
clattering hoofs of a horse pressed to his utmost speed.
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