CHAPTER I The Family Tree
I seem always to have lived a life apart from the obvious one, seeing the strange contrasts, the incongruities, the dramatic moments, though always these things were unexpressed. Those about me had no inkling of what was passing in my mind. Perhaps it is so with all children. One can only know one’s self, and that so vaguely.
I was born near the foot of a drumlin. Their smooth level crests broke the horizon line of my native village. Amid the drumlins I shared in all the little world they bounded. On the summit of a drumlin my kindred lie buried, and back to the drumlins I shall one day turn—back to the commonplace little village where my life began. The village has not grown in all the years, either in population or importance; on the contrary, it seems to have dwindled to tiny dimensions. Whenever I go back there now, the houses and the prominent buildings look smaller, the drumlins lower, and all the distances are lessened to a surprising degree. I look at the one handsome residence the village boasts and ask, Is that the house I used to think so imposing? Are those the grounds so illimitable to my childish eyes? And is this the same hill near Grandfather’s barn that was so steep when three happy children clambered over it in search of sorrel leaves? What a paltry patch of ground Grandmother’s garden now is! yet there was a time when, engaged in one of the tasks of my childhood (that of picking Grandma’s raspberries and currants), her garden bounded my little world which then did not seem little at all. Nor was it; for while moving among the currant bushes, my fingers busy, my thoughts roamed far afield—out past the hop vines in the rear; out past the clump of big red “pineys” in front, and the corner where the smallage grew; past the snowball bush, even past the oxheart cherry tree; through the little blue gate, and out into the big wonderful world beyond. No, it was not a little garden; it was a very big garden then; some unkind trickery has been at work these later years to make it the poor cramped little enclosure which I viewed last summer through blinding tears.
And Grandma’s old house, too. How low the rooms are now! There was a time when, caught up in the arms of an uncle, and seated on his shoulder, the laughing faces below me seemed remote indeed to my half-pleased, half-frightened eyes. How tall I feel, almost stately, as I enter the rooms now; and what a chill and gloom strike to the marrow of my being to find no longer the dear old wrinkled face to greet me! To see the same paper on the walls, the same clock on the mantel, the same familiar things at every turn, worn and faded, but still there, while that cherished face, and those beneficent, toil-worn hands, and the tired, pain-racked heart are gone forever!
No one was ever so hospitable as Grandpa and Grandma. “Just sit by and have a bite of something,” Grandma would urge, unaware that she was dispensing a blessing instead of asking a boon. Their meals were frugal—no recollection of bounty comes to me, except at Thanksgiving or other family reunions; but Grandma’s bread and butter, her warmed-up potatoes, and her sugar cookies (with caraway seeds in them), touched the spot as no other food ever did or can. Then she used to place a cup of tea (green tea, it always was) slyly by my plate, saying: “I guess your Ma won’t care this time if you take a little.” I can see the little brown tea-pot now as she brings it from the back of the stove; the silver lustre sugar-bowl with its ribbed sides, and the nick on the knob of the cover; the blue dishes; the Britannia spoons—no one but Grandma had Britannia spoons—and the thin, pointed silver ones; the yellow-handled knives; and the funny little two-tined fork that Grandma herself used—the rest of us had forks with three tines.
There’s the Boston rocker in which Grandpa sat of a winter evening and peeled apples for drying. I wonder where his little old “shoe-knife” is. “What makes your hands tremble so, Grandpa?” Sister would ask; but in spite of the tremor he peeled a heaping pile of an evening.
“Eunice, fetch me a bigger pan,” he would call to Grandma, busy in kitchen or buttery; and how testy he got if she didn’t understand, or brought the wrong pan! I shuddered when he spoke that way to her, and wondered why it was; and her meek face and humble silence made me love and pity her the more. I never learned not to mind Grandpa’s angry tones. It was “his way” with her. His voice, as I remember it, was almost always harsh to her, but never to me, never to me. He was always indulgent with me, and with all of us children—except when we hung around the barn at milking-time—then he would forget himself, and one would have thought he was shouting to Grandma or to the cows instead. We learned not to put his temper to this strain very often—his hospitality did not extend that far. I don’t know how much an incident of my babyhood engendered this feeling: Grandpa had a white cow, a gentle, well-behaved “critter,” but one day when they took her calf away, maddened, she made a dash at me, playing near; caught me on her horns, and ran up the bank of the tow-path, while Mother looked on paralyzed with fear. As Grandpa and a neighbour ran up the bank, the cow ran faster, then tossed me wildly in the air.
“I didn’t know whether you would fall in the water or on her horns,” Mother used to say; “I expected to see you drowned in the canal or horribly wounded; but Mr. Mintline caught you in his arms—Grandpa sold the cow the next day.” Mother’s voice always trembled in recounting the incident.
Since then I have always been afraid of cows. If the peaceable creatures come slowly toward me, try as I will I cannot walk slowly away. I breathe freely only when the fence is between them and me. By some childish twist of the imagination, so vivid was the impression made upon me by hearing of being caught on the horns of that old white cow, I believed myself to have been injured by the act, and was quite a big child before I learned that certain anatomical mark on my body—the little deep dimple in the abdomen—was not made by the horns of that angry cow. It needed the confirmation given by seeing my sister’s and other children’s bodies similarly marked to disabuse my mind of that belief.
I remember when in my early ’teens I would meet that neighbour—Mintline—an unkempt man, who had long since forgotten his share in my life, I would think, “He caught you in his arms,” and would smile to myself at the incongruity as, fluttering past him on the street in my pretty muslin gown, I was acutely conscious of the contrast with his rough, untidy clothes. Turning and looking after him I would say under my breath, “You don’t know, but I do, and I’m grateful to you, even if you have forgotten it all.”