Tramping on Life | Page 7

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