Tramping on Life Part 2

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 a.s.sured 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 G.o.d, and who brought, by his cursing, the dancing of the very flames of h.e.l.l, red-licking and serrate, in a hideous cl.u.s.ter, 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 pa.s.sed on. I'll bet she still clings grimly to an astral corncob pipe somewhere in s.p.a.ce.

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 ash.o.r.e.

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.