Aunt Jimmy's Will

by Mabel Osgood Wright

If it had not been rather pathetic to Mrs. Lane, this breaking up of a house where she had been so much at home, the day of the division would have been one of unalloyed merriment.

In the first place, owing to the way in which Aunt Jimmy had directed the drawing should be managed, the articles were not valued in the usual way and divided so that each of the three women shared alike, but merely numbered, the duplicate slips being shaken up in a basket and drawn by Probate Judge Ricker for Lauretta Ann, the others drawing for themselves, as Joshua preferred that there should be no possible chance of his wife being criticised. While she, cheerful and thoughtful as ever of the comfort of others, prepared a nice lunch on the afternoon appointed, which she and Lammy carried to the fruit farm, and had a cheerful fire in the kitchen stove, with a big pot of fragrant coffee purring away on top of it, when Jason and Henry Lane, the younger brothers, following each other closely, drove into the yard with their wives.

Mrs. Henry Lane was a delicate, sad-looking little woman, quite above the average. She had been one of the teachers in the Milltown public school at the time of her marriage, but the struggle to wrest a living from a small hillside farm, coupled with ill health, had broken her spirit, and she sank into a rocking-chair and began to jiggle the baby that she carried to and fro.

Mrs. Jason, on the contrary, was tall and gaunt, with high cheek-bones. Life had not been very kind to her either, but still she looked as if she could hold her own; and her husband, who only reached her shoulder, fairly quaked and fell away before her like ill-made jelly.

“Do draw up to the table, sisters-in-law both,” cried Lauretta Ann, after greeting each heartily. “You must have hurried dinner to get down here by now, and I always do feel hungrier the first cool days than when winter has set square in.”

“I should feel better for a cup of coffee,” said Mrs. Henry, in a plaintive voice; “we haven’t had any for more than two weeks. Henry forgot it when he went to the store, and he doesn’t get there as often as he used, now that the mail is delivered around the country by wagon. I’ve been using tea right along, and I think it’s made me nervous; besides, the last I bought from the travelling spice-and-sugar man tasted more like buckwheat shucks and musty hay than anything else.”

At this Henry Lane’s head sank still farther into the collar of his coat, which was three sizes too big anyway, and he began whittling recklessly at a hard-wood clothespin with a broken knife, which quickly caused a deeply cut finger and much consternation, as the sight of blood always made his wife faint away, and the present occasion was no exception to the rule.

After Lauretta Ann had bathed and bound up the finger, and sent Lammy home for a little of the cherry cordial for which she was famous, she made another effort to serve the lunch, and finally succeeded in cheering the mournful company by sheer force of good temper.

“I do hope you’ll draw Grandma Lane’s canopy-top cradle and the big rocker that matches, they’d be such comforts to you as you are fixed,” Mrs. Joshua said to Mrs. Henry, as putting a friendly arm about her, they went into the sitting room, where Judge Ricker was busy kneading up the numbered papers in the basket as carefully as if he was working lard into flour for tea biscuits, and seated themselves in a semicircle.

“Do you begin, sister-in-law Jason, and you follow next, sister-in-law Henry,” said Mrs. Joshua, laying her hand, which would tremble in spite of herself, on Lammy’s shoulder. Lammy, by the way, had grown broader and stronger and lost much of his timidity of manner during the two months past. Whether it was the sense of responsibility that working with the college men had given him, or his determination to have Bird come back, his mother could not decide, while his father chuckled whenever the matter was referred to, saying, “’Tain’t neither; it was squarin’ up at ’Ram Slocum that made a man of him;” and though Lauretta always said, “Sho, pa! ain’t you ashamed of aidin’ and abettin’ a fight?” her smiling expression belied her words.