APPROXIMATING THE ULTIMATE WITH AUNT SARAH
By Charles Earl Gaymon
Aunt Sarah was sixty-three years old. Uncle John was sixty-four years old.
If you spoke to Aunt Sarah about any new fringe on the tapestry of the intellectual loom she would say:
“Oh, yes, we ’proximated that line of thought in 1893. It is near, but not quite the ultimate.”
If you spoke to Uncle John about Schopenhauer he would reply:
“I don’t take much stock in them new-fangled cultivators.”
Uncle John and Aunt Sarah had lived together in the old homestead for thirty-eight years.
Aunt Sarah always had intellectual curiosity: she had left the old Baptist church in her girlhood to join a joy cult; she had followed with her mental telescope the scintillating trajectory of William James’s flight through the philosophic heavens of America; she had known about eugenics long before the newspapers had made the subject popular knowledge, and she had played in the musty, rickety garret of occultism at a time when the most daring minds in science were sitting tight in the seats of the scornful. But there was a shadow in the sunlight of Aunt Sarah’s mental advancement, an opaque spot in the crystal of her mysticism, an unresolved seventh in the harmony of her simple life in the Wisconsin backwoods—
She was married.
She was married to Uncle John!
At six o’clock in the evening of June 1, 1915, Aunt Sarah glanced up from reading Bennett’s “Folk Ways and Mores” as Uncle John entered the kitchen door. Uncle John had just come from performing the vespertime chores.
“Pa, we shall have to get a divorce!” said Aunt Sarah, shutting Bennett with determination. “Marriage is a worn-out convention; it is only one of the thousand foolish folk ways that hinder the advancement of science among the masses.”
“Very well, ma.”
“We will get a divorce.”
“I quite agree, ma.”
“Don’t attempt logic with me, John. I said that we would get a divorce.”
Uncle John shook his head. “When will it be?” he asked.
“To-morrow.”
Uncle John smiled, dropped his armful of kindling into the wood box behind the kitchen range, and began to lay the Brobdingnagian bandana handkerchief that served them for a tablecloth.
Aunt Sarah finished the preparation of the bacon and onions and set the coffee pot back when it began to boil.
After supper Uncle John read the seed catalogue and Aunt Sarah resumed her Bennett.
The following afternoon Judge Thompson, who lived in the biggest and best house in the little county seat, was surprised to see from his chair in the big bay window an antiquated carriage drawn by a retired farm horse draw up before his cast-iron negro hitching post. In the carriage were Aunt Sarah and Uncle John.
Judge Thompson was on the porch in time to receive his guests.
“We’ve come to get a divorce,” said Aunt Sarah, with a direct gaze; then she added, with the sang froid of one who is wise, “What’ll it cost?”
The judge motioned them to seats in the wicker chairs on the porch, and then replied:
“But you must have grounds——”
“Everybody knows it. Incompatibility of temperament.”
And the judge, smiling, humoured Aunt Sarah, for he knew her and the community in which she lived. “It will cost you just ten dollars,” he said.
“Make out the paper,” Aunt Sarah replied.
One hour later Uncle John and Aunt Sarah left the judge’s house together, separated for life.
Moses, their horse, looked at them out of the corner of his good eye as they approached the carriage.
Uncle John paused, but Aunt Sarah stepped firmly into the vehicle.
Uncle John followed her and took up the reins.
Moses knew the way home by a clairvoyant sense, and he took that way at his own pace of prophet-like dignity.
At the door of the old homestead Uncle John handed Aunt Sarah down from her seat in silence. Then he put Moses into his stall. And when he returned to the house he found Aunt Sarah beaming upon him through her gold-rimmed spectacles from her place at the table, which was loaded with a supper such as she alone could cook.
Aunt Sarah was jubilant. She was living at last with a man to whom she was not married; no longer was there a blot on the scutcheon of her intellectual progress; no longer did a black beetle mar the pellucid amber of her simple life of Advanced Ideas; no longer could the acolytes, in off moments when they were not engaged in trundling the spheres through the macrocosm, gaze sternly down upon her through interstellar space and say:
“Aunt Sarah is nearly, but not quite, an intellectual.”