“Don’t bleeve him, mammy. He ’ain’t ever cried. He’d a cried, for sure, if his toe was sore.” At the age of five, little Judith, namesake of her aunt, was something of a doubting Thomas.
“Let mammy see, Jimmy,” and Alida bent over her son and heir.
“Doth Dimmy det any apple?” The wee man sometimes succeeded in making terms with his mother, when the other children were not present. Though feeling himself a trifle over-confident, he held the disputed toe with the air of one keeping back a trump card, and looked his mother squarely in the eyes.
She struggled with the temptation to give him the apple. He had lifted the horrors of her dream as nothing else could have done, but she answered him with quiet firmness.
“Jimmy must not tell stories.”
“Less see,” insisted Topeka.
“He dassent,” affirmed Judith, junior, of little faith.
“It hurths me,” and Jimmy tried to squeeze out a tear. “It hurths me, my tore toe!”
His mother tipped him over on his fat little back and opened the chubby hand that held the trump toe. It was white from the pressure applied by the infant dissembler, but there was no trace of the treacherous cactus thorn. She gave him an affectionate spank and went into the kitchen to make coffee.
“I with I had a tore toe,” he crooned, quite unabashed at the discovery of his deception. “I with I toud det a tore toe ’thout the hurt.”