Chapter 2

"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."