As these kindly memories surged over me I could not but feel like a traitor to my old companion, as he lay thus hairless and pallid before my eyes. But then I would remember how good he was going to be to eat—and straightway return with a light heart to the work of kicking up more chips from the ice.
From the living-room in the rear of our little house came the monotonous incessant clatter of Aunt Susan’s carpet loom. Through the window I could see the outlines of her figure and the back of her head as she sat on her high bench. It was to me the most familiar of all spectacles, this tireless woman bending resolutely over her work. She was there when I first cautiously ventured my nose out from under the warm blanket of a winter’s morning. Very, very often I fell asleep at night in my bed in the recess, lulled off by the murmur of the diligent loom.
Presently I went in to warm myself, and stood with my red fingers over the stove top. She cast but one vague glance at me, through the open frame of the loom between us, and went on with her work. It was not our habit to talk much in that house. She was too busy a woman, for one thing, to have much time for conversation. The impression that she preferred not to talk was always present in my boyish mind. I call up the picture of her still as I saw her then under the top bar of the cumbrous old machine, sitting with lips tight together, and resolute, masterful eyes bent upon the twining intricacy of warp and woof before her. At her side were piled a dozen or more big balls of carpet rags, which the village wives and daughters cut up, sewed together and wound in the long winter evenings, while the men-folks sat with their stockinged feet on the stove hearth, and read out the latest “news from the front” in their Weekly Tribune.
I knew all these rag balls by the names of their owners. Not only did I often go to their houses for them, upon the strength of the general village rumor that they were ready, and always carry back the finished lengths of carpet; but I had long since unconsciously grown to watch all the varying garments and shifts of fashion in the raiment of our neighbors, with an eye single to the likelihood of their eventually turning up at Aunt Susan’s loom. When Hiram Mabie’s checkered butternut coat was cut down for his son Roswell, I noted the fact merely as a stage of its progress toward carpet rags. If Mrs. Wilkins concluded to turn her flowered delaine dress a third year, or Sarah Northrup had her bright saffron shawl dyed black, I was sensible of a wrong having been done our little household. I felt like crossing the street whenever I saw approaching the portly figure of Cyrus Husted’s mother, the woman who dragged everybody into her house to show them the ingrain carpet she had bought at Tecumseh, and assured them that it was much cheaper in the long run than the products of my aunt’s industry. I tingled with indignation as she passed me on the sidewalk, puffing for breath and stepping mincingly because her shoes were too tight for her.
Nearly all the knowledge of our neighbors’ sayings and doings which reached Aunt Susan came to her from me. She kept herself to herself with a vengeance, toiling early and late, rarely going beyond the confines of her yard save on Sunday mornings, when we went to church, and treating with frosty curtness the few people who ventured to come to our house on business or from social curiosity. For one thing, this Juno Mills in which we lived was not really our home. We had only been there for four or five years—a space which indeed spanned all my recollections of life—but left my Aunt more or less a stranger and a new-comer. She spared no pains to maintain that condition. I can see now that there were good reasons for this stern aloofness. At the time I thought it was altogether due to the proud and unsociable nature of my Aunt.
In my child’s mind I regarded her as distinctly an elderly person. People outside, I know, spoke of her as an old maid, sometimes winking furtively over my head as they did so. But she was not really old at all—was in truth just barely in the thirties.
Doubtless the fact that she was tall and dark, with very black hair, and that years of steady concentration of sight, upon the strings and threads of the loom, had scored a scowling vertical wrinkle between her near-sighted eyes gave me my notion of her advanced maturity. And in all her ways and words, too, she was so far removed from any idea of youthful softness! I could not remember her having ever kissed me. My imagination never evolved the conceit of her kissing anybody. I had always had at her hands uniformly good treatment, good food, good clothes; after I had learned my letters from the old maroon plush label on the Babbitt’s soap box which held the wood behind the stove, and expanded this knowledge by a study of street signs, she had herself taught me how to read, and later provided me with books for the village school. She was my only known relative—the only person in the world who had ever done anything for me. Yet it could not be said that I loved her. Indeed she no more raised the suggestion of tenderness in my mind than did the loom at which she spent her waking hours.
“The Perkinses asked me why you didn’t get the butcher to cut up the pig,” I remarked at last, rubbing my hands together over the hot stove griddles.
“It’s none of their business!” said Aunt Susan, with laconic promptness.
“And Devillo Pollard’s got a new overcoat,” I added. “He hasn’t worn the old army one now for upward of a week.”