“My children were sot on their own way from the jump,” she continued, “so contrary-minded that their hair grew upward, instead o’ downward. That’s a fact! Look at my Jack’s hair in the morning, and you’ll see it stands straight up. And babies are hard to raise in Texas; you don’t like to put them out o’ their way, it might be the death o’ them, for you can never call your child your own in Texas, until it has passed its second year.”
“And by that time they have got used to having their own way,” I commented.
“So they have, and they will scream you blind and deaf, until they get it. But you are feared to lose them. I’ve lost five outen my seven. That is so. I’ve only Jack and Mollie left, but they keep me considering day and night. They are not bad; they are real good, only they are sot on havin’ what is not good for them. And, nat’rally, I know what is best, or else 186 the Great Master above us has made a mistake in sending them to me. That’s how I look at it.”
By the time this sentence was finished, Lilly was so fast asleep that I lifted her from my visitor’s arms, and laid her upon the bed beside her sister. Then we continued the conversation about the natural inclination of all children to have their own way, until I was quite convinced the children of my companion had kept up a guerrilla fight with her, from their birth until the present hour.
“There’s Mollie,” she continued, “smart and pert as a cricket, and nothing would do her but a New York school. Her father was alive, then, and I asked him to interfere; what he said was, ‘Let her go to New York. I don’t see from the samples of New York women sent us, that they are a picayune cleverer than ours are, but, if Mollie wants to go, she’s going. I can back her with all the gold she needs.’ That’s the way her father interfered. He just let her go to aggravate and contradict me. His hair stood straight up. I have told Mollie ever since she put shoes on never to marry a man whose hair grows up, but I’ll just bet she does that same thing, even if she goes all the way to New York to find him.”
“Then she went to New York, I suppose?”
“Yes, she went, and she stayed more than two years, and got what they call a diploma. Mollie is always drawing people’s attention to it, but it kind o’ shames me. It looks like there was somebody better than Mollie that thought they could give her a character, or a certif’cate that she had done about right while at school. Now Mollie is as good a girl as breathes, and as smart as girls can be made, and there’s nobody better than Mollie on this planet, and I just can’t bear this certif’cate business. How would you like it?”
I made this matter clearer to her, and she said, “I wish you had come here ’fore Jake died. This same thing bothered him above a bit, and he used to say if any man thought his Mollie needed a certif’cate of doing well, he would tell him Mollie was the best woman God ever made, and, if he contradicted, he’d bore a few holes into him. I reckon he would have done it! Sure! But he took ill and died suddent one night, just after 187 Mollie came home. I miss Jake whiles, though he left me well-to-do, and a full sorrow is easier borne than an empty one.”
“What do you call well-to-do?” I asked.
“Jake had twelve thousand horned cattle, and a herd of eight hundred horses, land enough for horses and cattle to get lost in, and a very comfortable lump of spizerinctum in New Orleans Bank.”