Prose (29 page)

Oh, the moon shines tonight on pretty Red Wing,

    The breeze is sighing,

    The night bird's crying.

Oh, far beneath the sky her warrior's sleeping

    While Red Wing's weeping

    Her heart awa-a-y …

This song is still associated in my mind not with a disconsolate Indian maiden and red wings but with a red house, red hair, strong yellow laundry soap, and galvanized scrubbing boards (also sold in Uncle Neddy's shop; I forgot them). On other weekdays, Aunt Hat, as I have said, cleaned house: it was probably the cleanest house in the county. The kitchen linoleum dazzled; the straw matting in the upstairs bedrooms looked like new and so did the hooked rugs; the “cosy corner” in the parlor, with a red upholstered seat and frilled red pillows standing on their corners, was never disarranged; every china ornament on the mantelpiece over the airtight stove was in the same place and dustless, and Aunt Hat always seemed to have a broom or a long-handled brush in her hand, ready to take a swipe either at her household effects or at any child, dog, or cat that came her way. Her temper, like her features, seemed constantly at a high temperature, but on bad days it rose many degrees and she “took it out,” as the village said behind her back, in cleaning house. They also said she was “a great hand at housework” or “a demon for housework,” sometimes, “She's a Tartar, that one!” It was also remarked on that in a village where every sunny window was filled with houseplants and the ladies constantly exchanged “slips” of this and that desirable one, Aunt Hat had “no luck” with plants; in fact, nothing would grow for her at all.

Yes, she was a Tartar; it came out in her very freckles. She sunburned easily. When we went on a picnic, one hour in the northern sun and the vee of her neck was flaming. Uncle Neddy would say, almost as if he were proud of it, “Hat's neck looks as if I'd taken a flat iron to it!” Wearing a straw hat and a gray cardigan instead of his black work clothes, even in the sunlight he still looked dark. But instead of being like a dark snail, he was a thin, dark salamander, enjoying, for a moment, his wife's fieriness.

His married life was miserable, we all knew that. My girl cousins whispered to me about the horrible, endless fights that went on, nights, under the low, slanting ceiling of their parents' bedroom, papered all over with small, pained-looking rosebuds, like pursed mouths. When things got too bad he would come to see “Mother” and they would shut themselves in the front parlor, or even in the pantry, standing up, for a talk. At our house, my grandmother was the one who did all the complaining; my grandfather never complained. When she said things about her daughter-in-law that he felt were too harsh, he merely murmured, “Yes, temper … temper … too bad,” or maybe it was “too sad.” (To Billy and me, when we quarreled, he said, “Birds in their little nests agree,” a quotation I have never been able to place and even then didn't altogether agree with, from my observation of birds in their little nests.) There were days and weeks when these visits from a bedeviled-looking Uncle Neddy occurred often; dramas of which I knew nothing were going on; once in a while I made out that they concerned money, “deeds,” or “papers.” When Uncle Neddy had finally gone back to his shop, my grandmother would collapse into her kitchen rocking chair and announce: “
She
makes the balls and he fires them…” Then she would start rocking, groaning and rocking, wiping her eyes with the edge of her apron, uttering from time to time the mysterious remark that was a sort of chorus in our lives: “Nobody knows …
nobody knows
…” I often wondered what my grandmother knew that none of the rest of us knew and if she alone knew it, or if it was a total mystery that really nobody knew except perhaps God. I even asked her, “
What
do you know, Gammie, that we don't know? Why don't you tell us? Tell me!” She only laughed, dabbing at her tears. She laughed as easily as she cried, and one very often turned into the other (a trait her children and grandchildren inherited). Then, “Go on with you!” she said. “Scat!”

From the rocking chair by the window, she had a good view of all the green, the people on their way to the general store just around the corner, or on Sundays, to the tall white Presbyterian church opposite, and, diagonally to the right, of Uncle Neddy's shop and the red house. She disapproved of the way Aunt Hat fed her family. Often, around time for “tea,” Billy or one of the girls could be seen running across to the store, and a few minutes later running back with a loaf of bread or something in a paper bag. My grandmother was furious: “Store bread! Store bread! Nothing but store bread!” Or, “More canned things, I'll bet! More
soda crackers
…” I knew from direct observation that when he was far too big for the family high chair, Billy was squeezed into it and given what was called “pap” for
his
“tea.” This was a soup plate full of the soda crackers, swimming in milk, limp and adhesive, with a lot of sugar to make them go down. The “pap” would be topped off by two pieces of marble cake, or parkins, for dessert. Aunt Hat did bake those, if not bread, and her parkins were good, but, as if out of spite, hard enough to break the teeth.

Sometimes I inadvertently brought on my grandmother's tears myself, by repeating things Billy told me. Perhaps he, too, was firing the balls made on the other side of the green, or pebbles, suited to the verbal slingshot of his tender years. “Is it true that Nimble (the one horse—later there were two horses, the second unfortunately named Maud, the name, straight from Tennyson, of one of my aunts)—is it true that Nimble belongs to Uncle Neddy? Billy says he does. And that Nelly and Martha Washington do, too?” (The cow and her calf; I had named the calf myself.)

My grandmother grew indignant. “I
gave
your Uncle Edward that horse on his tenth wedding anniversary! Not only that, but he sold him back to me two years afterwards and he still keeps saying I haven't finished paying him yet! When I have! And he uses that horse all the time, much more than we do!”

“Oh pshaw, mother,” said my grandfather. “That's an old story now.”

“Oh yes,” said my grandmother. “Nimble, and the buffalo robe, and the dinner service, and
pew rent
—they're all old stories now.
You'd
never remember anything. But
I
won't forget.
I
won't forget.” And she set the rocking chair rocking as if it were, as it probably was, a memory machine.

I have a few more memories of Uncle Neddy at this period in his life when the tinsmith business was still going on, and the furnace business, flourishing or not, I don't know, but before the obvious decline had set in and before I went away to Boston and saw him at less and less frequent intervals. One memory, brief but poignant, like a childhood nightmare that haunts one for years, or all one's life, the details are so clear and so awful, is of a certain Christmas. Or maybe it was a Christmas Eve, because it takes place after the lamps were lit—but of course it grew dark very early in the winter. There was a large Christmas tree, smelling overpoweringly of fir, in the parlor. It was rather sparsely decorated with colored paper chains, strings of tinsel and popcorn, and a very few glass balls or other shiny ornaments: a country-fied, home-made tree, chopped down and brought fresh from the snow-covered “commons.” But there were a few little silver and gold baskets, full of candies, woven from strips of metal by “the blind children,” and clips holding twisted wax candles that after many warnings were finally lit. One of my aunts played “Holy Night” on the piano and the candles flickered in time to our singing.

This was all very nice, but still I remember it as “the Black Christmas.” My other grandparents, in the States, had sent a large box of presents. It contained woolen caps and mufflers for Billy and me, and I didn't like them at all. His set was dark blue but mine was
gray
and I hated it at sight. There were also mittens and socks, and some of these were red or blue, and the high black rubber boots I'd wanted, but my pair was much too big. Laid out under the tree, even by flickering candlelight, everything looked shapeless and sad, and I wanted to cry. And then Santa Claus came in, an ordinary brown potato sack over his shoulder, with the other presents sagging in it. He was terrifying. He couldn't have been dressed in black, but that was my impression, and I did start to cry. He had artificial snow sprinkled on his shoulders, and a pointed red cap, but the beard! It wasn't white and woolly at all, it was made of rope, a mass of frayed-out rope. This dreadful figure cavorted around the room, making jokes in a loud, deep, false voice. The face that showed above the rope beard looked, to me, like a Negro's. I shrieked. Then this Santa from the depths of a coal mine put down his sack that could have been filled with coal, and hugged and kissed me. Through my sobs, I recognized, by touch and smell and his suddenly everyday voice, that it was only Uncle Neddy.

This Christmas, so like a nightmare, affected me so that shortly afterward I had a real nightmare about Uncle Neddy, or at least about his shop. In it, I crossed the road and was about to go into the shop when the door was blocked by a huge horse, coming out. The horse filled the doorway, towering high over me and showing all her big yellow teeth in a grin. She whinnied, shrill and deafening; I felt the hot wind coming out of her big nostrils; it almost blew me backward. I had the presence of mind to say to the horse, “You are a nightmare!” and of course she was, and so I woke up. But awake, I still felt uncomfortable for a long time about Uncle Neddy's possibly having been inside, his escape cut off by that fearful animal.

I said that Uncle Neddy was a great fisherman; it was the thing he did best of all, perhaps the only thing he did perfectly. (For all I know, his tin-ware, beautiful and shiny as it was, may have been badly made.) He could catch trout where no one else could and sometimes he would go off before daybreak and arrive at our house at seven o'clock with a string of rose-speckled trout for his mother's breakfast. He could cast into the narrowest brooks and impossibly difficult spots and bring out trout after trout. He tied beautiful flies, for himself and friends, and later for customers by mail.

Our uncle, innocent of books,

Was rich in lore of fields and brooks …

Whittier wrote of his, and it was true of mine.

But he was not altogether innocent of books. There had been all that childhood Bible-reading that had left the supply of texts from which he still quoted. And also, in his parlor, on a shelf above the “cosy corner” and in a small bookcase, there was an oddly assorted collection of books. I wasn't familiar with them the way I was, with the outsides, at least, of every single book on the shelves in the upstairs hall at my grandmother's (
Inglesby's Legends;
Home Medicine; Emerson's Essays;
and so on), but this was only because of Aunt Hat. Every time I managed to be alone in the parlor with Uncle Neddy's books, she soon found me and shooed me off home. But I did get to look at them, or some of them, usually the same ones over and over. It was obvious that Uncle Neddy had been strongly affected by the sinking of the
Titanic;
in his modest library there were three different books about this catastrophe, and in the dining room, facing his place at the table, hung a chromograph of the ship going down: the iceberg, the rising steam, people struggling in the water, everything, in full color. When I was left alone in the parlor, an ear cocked for Aunt Hat, I could scarcely wait to take out the
Titanic
books—one very big and heavy, red, with gilt trimmings—and look at the terrifying pictures one more time. There were also
The Tower of London;
a book about Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee;
Advice to Young Men
(“Avoid lonely walks…”); and several of a religious nature. Also some little fat books about a character named “Dolly Dimples” that looked nice, and were pleasant to hold, but proved boring to read. But the
Titanic
books with their pictures, some of them actual photographs, were the best.

The other chief attraction in Uncle Neddy's parlor was an Edison phonograph, very old, that still worked. It had a flaring, brown-and-gold horn and played thick black cylinders. My girl cousins were allowed to play it. I remember only two out of the box of cylinders: a brief Sousa march that could have marched people about fifty yards, and “Cohen on the Telephone,” which I loved. I knew that it was supposed to be funny, and laughed, although I hadn't any idea who or what a Cohen was or what I was laughing at, and I doubt that Uncle Neddy entirely understood it, either.

I suppose that Uncle Neddy's situation in life, his fortune and prospects, could never have been considered happy, even in his small world, but I was very young, and except for an occasional overheard, or eavesdropped-on remark and those private conversations in the parlor or pantry that always upset my grandmother, nothing untoward came to my knowledge, consciously that is, for years. Then even I began to hear more about Uncle Neddy's drinking, and the shop began its long deterioration. There was no place to buy liquor in the village; the nearest government liquor store was in a town fifteen miles away. At first this meant a daylong drive behind Nimble or Maud; sometimes an overnight stay at the house of a relative, niece or cousin, of my grandfather's. Probably when Uncle Neddy went to town he brought back a supply of rum, the usual drink, heavy, dark, and strong. All I knew of alcohol at that time was the homemade wines the ladies sometimes served each other, or the hot toddy my grandfather sometimes made himself on freezing winter nights. But finally phrases like “not himself,” “taken too much,” “three seas over,” sank into my consciousness and I looked at my poor uncle with new eyes, expectantly. There was one occasion when he had to be taken away from the home funeral of Mrs. Captain McDonald, an old woman everyone was very fond of. What at first passed for Uncle Neddy's natural if demonstrative grief had got “out of hand.” My grandmother moaned about this; in fact, she moaned so loudly in her bedroom across the hall from mine that I could hear almost every word. “He'll disgrace us all; you'll see. I've
never
 … There's
never
been a drunkard in
my
family …
None
of my brothers…” This time my grandfather remained quite silent.