Tramping on Life. Harry 1883-1960 Kemp
gaunt, raw-boned Millie.
At night, after his day's work, he and Millie would sit silently for hours in the darkened parlour—silent, except for an occasional murmur of voices. I was curious. Several times I peeked in. But all I could see was the form of my tall aunt couched half-moonwise in Elton Reeve's lap. I used to wonder why they sat so long and still, there in the darkness. …
Once a grown girl of fourteen named Minnie came to visit a sweet little girl named Martha Hanson, whose consumptive widower-father rented two rooms from my grandmother. They put Minnie to sleep in the same bed with me. …
After a while I ran out of the bedroom into the parlour where the courting was going on.
"Aunt Millie, Minnie won't let me sleep."
Millie did not answer. Elton guffawed lustily.
I returned to bed and found Minnie lying stiff and mute with fury.
Elton left, the bridge-work brought to completion. He had a job waiting for him in another part of the country.
It hurt even my savage, young, vindictive heart to see Millie daily running to the gate, full of eagerness, as the mail-man came. …
"No, no letters for you this morning, Millie!"
Or more often he would go past, saying nothing. And Millie would weep bitterly.
I have a vision of a very old woman walking over the top of a hill. She leans on a knobby cane. She smokes a corn-cob pipe. Her face is corrugated with wrinkles and as tough as leather. She comes out of a high background of sky. The wind whips her skirts about her thin shanks. Her legs are like broomsticks.
This is a vision of my great-grandmother's entrance into my boyhood.
I had often heard of her. She had lived near Halton with my Great-aunt Rachel for a long time … and now, since we were taking in boarders and could keep her, she was coming to spend the rest of her days with us.
At first I was afraid of this eerie, ancient being. But when she dug out a set of fish-hooks, large and small, from her tobacco pouch, and gave them to me, I began to think there might be something human in the old lady.
She established her regular place in a rocker by the kitchen stove. She had already reached the age of ninety-five. But there was a constant, sharp, youthful glint in her eye that belied her age.
She chewed tobacco vigorously like any backwoodsman (had chewed it originally because she'd heard it cured toothache, then had kept up the habit because she liked it).
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 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 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