“Yes, I know.”
“Well, then, I’m a-going to tell you some things about myself—things I’ve never spoke to any one about. I expect you don’t know your Uncle Hank was married?”
“Yes, Mrs. Johnnie told me—that time she made the first dresses for me.”
Hilda spoke low, for Mrs. Johnnie was even then at the Sorrows, making the sewing machine hum while she got Hilda’s outfit ready. Mrs. Johnnie had stood out for one “party dress” and constructed it from some uncut silks Miss Valeria had. That party dress, and some things Mrs. Johnnie had tried on, seemed to make Uncle Hank’s warnings not unreasonable. He stroked the little hand he held with steady fingers.
“She died,” he repeated, “but it wasn’t that that broke my heart so; any man might lose his wife by death.” He was silent a long minute; then he began on a louder note, as though resolved to go through with a painful thing: “You see, Pettie, she was a girl that I knew back where I was raised, in the Tennessee mountains. It’s what happened to her that I want to tell you, so’s you get my meaning.”
He sat silent for a moment. Hilda waited breathlessly. Then he went on:
“Mattie’s folks was well to do. They sent her down to the valley school—sorta like our sending you over to the Alamositas; see, Pettie? She ran away with a feller, from the school. It was a boy we all knowed—Judge Moseley’s son. He was in school himself at the time. She was just a little thing, younger than you are now. I had my mother, and the farm and the raising of my younger brothers and sisters on my hands; hadn’t aimed to name marriage to Mattie at that time; but I never thought of any one else; and when she ran off with that Moseley boy, seemed to me my heart was broke smack in two. I got things settled for Ma and the young ’uns and lit out to Texas—that’s where a Tennessee boy goes usually to better himself. I done well. My part of it ain’t what I want you to notice, Pettie. It’s Mattie’s part that means something to a girl. It was seven years from that time I left Tennessee till I saw her again. And how do you think I saw her next time?”
He glanced up. Hilda was all eyes, all attention.
“Her and Alf came through my ranch—movers. You know what that means, Pettie. We don’t get so many of them on the Sorrows, being off the main line of travel, but you’ve seen ’em—a ramshackle old wagon, a ga’nted team, a man on the driver’s seat, looking out ahead of him, clear into the nevertheless, never noticing that the woman and children he’s dragging around with him from place to place—no home, no comforts, no nothing—are just about perishing on his hands. Yes, that’s what Alf Moseley had come to be—a mover. He had the itchy foot. You can’t do nothing for one of them fellers. And Mattie—at twenty-four or five—Mattie was an old, broke-down woman.
“They had but one child—and Mattie had named him for me—Henry Pearsall Moseley. They stayed at my place longer than movers usually stops. I offered Alf a partnership, but he was aimin’ to strike toward the Rio Grande, and what I could offer wouldn’t hold him. But they stayed long enough, even that time, for my heart to get just wrapped around that little feller that was named for me. He was four years old, and the finest boy of his age that I ever put my eyes on—bar none. Well, after that they come and went, as you may say. No harm to Alf, he didn’t think no more of his own comfort than he did of the horses he drove or poor Mattie. Except for the time they went into the bottom country, the baby, Harry, throve well. They’d use my ranch for a stopping place when they couldn’t git no further—had lost a horse or such. And finally, at the end of the Brazos bottom trip, when Alf was dead—climate in there killed him—and all but killed Mattie—she sent for me, and I went and got her and the boy.