Our state geographies tell us that thousands of years ago the valley in which our town is located was the channel of a gigantic river that carried off the huge overflow of the Great Lakes. As I understand it Niagara Falls wasn’t doing business in those dim and distant days. It would be interesting to know just why the overflow stream got tired of the old channel and started a new one. And, to that point, what a bully sight the old stream must have been. Certainly, if it were as deep as our sandstone bluffs are high it was some river.
To-day the farmers raise corn on what used to be the bed of the big river. It is from this rich “bottom land,” as we call it, that the Tutter Canning Company gets the most of its sweet-corn supply. And it was into this farming section, so familiar to us, that Poppy and I now turned our noses to see about buying cucumbers.
Going south on River Street as far as the river itself, a sluggish shrunken stream as compared to what it used to be, we turned to the right into a dirt road. The river on one side of us and the cornfields on the other side were mostly hidden by horse weeds three times our height. Pretty tall horse weeds, huh? Well, if you ever come to Tutter in the summer time I’ll show you some pretty tall corn, too.
After a walk of two miles or more on the dusty dirt road we came within sight of a two-story stone house. Not only was it a very old house, with walls two feet thick, as I very well knew, but it was queer-shaped, with a steep roof. High above everything else was a chimney that for size had it on any house chimney for miles around. It was six sizes too big for the work it had to do, but, of course, having been built when the house was put up it never had been changed.
It was to this lonely country place that Mrs. Cora O’Mally had moved when her Tutter house burned down, which fire I remember well, for that was the night I swallowed a button that had gotten into my bag of peppermint candy by mistake. As the insurance had run out on her house, the widow couldn’t rebuild. But when the Tutter people heard that she was planning to move into the old Weir house in the river bottoms, a place that had been deserted for years and, in consequence, was almost a wreck, money was quickly raised with which the house had been fixed up. I might say here that a certain young gink by the name of Jerry Todd had helped to smash the old doors and windows. For an old-time deserted house always attracts boys. And of this particular house a lot of queer stories were told. Holdups; bloody battles; even murder. In fact, a number of superstitious people, believing in ghosts, said at the time Mrs. O’Mally moved into the old house that she was foolish. It was no place to live, they declared.
To show you how a hard-working woman can fix up a place, the yard, as we saw it to-day, was grassy instead of weedy, with beds of blooming flowers sprinkled here and there. Vines performed on strings at the two porches. And another larger vine with sharp fingers had clawed its way up the stone wall to the roof.
Mrs. O’Mally was in her big cucumber patch back of the house. We could see her broad-brimmed straw hat. There were smaller bobbing hats, too, which told us that the pickle woman, as she was called in Tutter, had already put a number of young pickers to work.
“Unfortunate indeed is the aged body who has to raise cucumbers for a livin’,” she straightened and drained the sweat from her blistered face as we stopped beside her. “’Tis hard work,” she added, with a deep, weary sigh. “An’ the wonder to me is that me ould back doesn’t give out entirely.”
“You surely have enough of them,” laughed Poppy, looking over the big patch, now in its third year.
“Enough, did ye say? Sure,” came the tired smile, “I could fill all the pickle jars in New York City an’ Chicago put together. There’s hundreds of bushels. An’ with the job of pickin’ ’em, ’tis mighty glad I am,” she beamed at us in her kindly way, “to have the help of two more b’ys of your size.”