Tramping on Life | Page 5

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