Ma Pettengill

by Harry Leon Wilson

What we reached at last were small mountains rather than big hills; vast exclamatory remnants of shattered granite and limestone, thickly timbered, reckless of line, sharp of peak. One minute cañon we viewed from above was quite preposterous in its ambitions, having colour and depth and riot of line in due proportions and quite worthy of the grand scale. It wasn't a Grand Cañon, but at least it was a baby grand, and I loitered on its brink until reminded sharply that I'd better pour leather into that there skate if I wanted to make home that night.

I devoutly did wish to make home that night, for the spot we were on was barren of those little conveniences I am accustomed to. Moreover, the air was keen and a hunger, all day in the building, called for strong meats. So I not too reluctantly passed on from this scenic miniature of parlour dimensions—and from the study of a curious boulder thereby which had intrigued me not a little.

Now we were home and relaxed by the Arrowhead fireside, after a moving repast of baked young sage hens. The already superior dynamics of the meal, moreover, had been appreciably heightened by a bottle of Uncle Henry's homemade grape wine, which he warmly recommends for colds or parties, or anything like that. It had proved to be a wine of almost a too-recent crû. Ma Pettengill said that if Uncle Henry was aiming to put it on the market in quantity production he had ought to name it the Stingaree brand, because it was sure some stuff, making for malevolence even to the lengths of matricide, if that's what killing your mother is called. She said, even at a Polish wedding down across the tracks of a big city, it would have the ambulances and patrol wagons clanging up a good half hour quicker than usual.

Be that as it may, or is, when I had expected sleep to steal swiftly to the mending of the day's ravages I merely found myself wakeful and wondering. This stuff of Uncle Henry's is an able ferment. I wondered about a lot of things. And at the same time I wondered interminably about that remarkable boulder at the side of the Tom Thumb Grand Cañon. I was even wakeful enough and discursive enough—my hostess had taken but one glass from the bottle—to wonder delightedly about all rocks and stones, and geology, and that sort of thing. It was almost scientific, the way I wondered, as I sat there idly toying with my half-filled glass.

Take this particular boulder, for example. It had once been mere star dust, hadn't it? Some time ago, I mean, or thereabouts. But it had been star dust; and then, next thing it knew, it got to be a kind of cosmic stew, such as leisurely foreigners patch out highways with, and looking no more like a granite boulder than anything.

Then something happened, like someone letting the furnace fire go out the night of the big freeze; and this stuff I'm talking about grew cold and discouraged, and quit flat, apparently not caring a hoot what shape it would be found in years and years later, the result being that it was found merely in the general shape of rocks or boulders—to use the more scientific term—which is practically no shape at all, as you might say, being quite any shape that happens, or the shape of rocks and boulders as they may be seen on almost every hand by those of us who have learned to see in the true sense of the word.

I have had to be brief in this shorter science course on the earth's history before the time of man, because more important matters claim my attention and other speakers are waiting. The point is that this boulder up there by the dwarf cañon had survived from unremembered chaos; had been melted, stewed, baked, and chilled until it had no mind of its own left; then bumped round by careless glaciers until it didn't care where it came to rest; and at last, after a few hundred million years of stony unconcern for its ultimate fate, here it had been drawn by the cunning hand of man sprang into the complex mechanism of our industrial human scramble.

That is to say, this boulder I speak of, the size of a city hall, lying there in noble neglect since long before wise old water animals were warning their children that this here fool talk about how you could go up out of the water and walk round on dry land would get folks into trouble, because how could a body breathe up there when there wasn't any water to breathe in? And the fools that tried it would soon find out; and serve 'em right! Well, I mean to say, this boulder that had lain inert and indifferent while the ages wrought man from a thing of one cell—and not much of a cell at that—bore across that face of it nearest the winding trail, a lettered appeal, as from one man to another. The letters were large and neatly done in white paint and the brushwork was recent. And the letters said, with a good deal of pathos, it seemed to me:

WAGNER'S SYLVAN GLEN, ONLY THIRTY-TWO MILES. HERMAN WAGNER, SOLE PROP.

Let this teach us, one and all, this morning, that everything in Nature has its use if we but search diligently. I mean, even big rocks like this, which are too big to build homes or even courthouses of. May we not, at least, paint things on them in plain letters with periods and commas, and so on, and so give added impetus to whatever is happening to us?