I guess I never realized before just how wonderful a person I had for a baby sister until I thought I was going to lose her. As quick as I can, I will start telling you all about it. First though I have to tell you something else about her because some of the people who will read this story don’t know much about her and it will help them understand how come she got lost.
We always had more fun than you can shake a stick at, taking care of Charlotte Ann at our house, in spite of the times when she was a nuisance. Pop especially had a lot of bothersome fun because he nearly always had to put her to bed at night—that is, after she was a little bigger than being a little baby. Going to bed was one of the things Charlotte Ann didn’t like to do even worse than she didn’t like to do anything else—after she got to be about two years old. Before that we didn’t have to worry about her getting all the sleep she needed because she would go to sleep anywhere, any place and nearly any time, but all of a sudden she was a grown-up two-year-old and seemed to have ideas of her own about such things as going to bed at night and taking afternoon naps.
“That is because at two,” Mom said—she having been reading a book on how to take care of babies at that age—“they are great imitators. Whatever they see you do they want to do too. They like to do grown-up things before they are old enough or strong enough or have sense enough to.”
“Or sense enough not to,” Pop said and Mom agreed with him, both of them seeming to think it was funny, but I couldn’t understand what they meant.
“Also,” Mom said, “a two-year old has to have twelve hours of sleep at night and at least one hour in the afternoon of every day.” She was talking to me at the time. “You had to have it when you were a baby and we saw to it that you got it whether you wanted it or not—which you generally didn’t—and see what a wonderfully-fine, strong boy it made out of you!”
I got a mischievous streak when she said that and answered, “I can see how maybe I am a wonderful boy and very fine but I feel very weak right now.” She had just a jiffy before ordered me to carry in a couple of armfuls of wood for the wood-box, which never seemed to have sense enough to stay full and always managed to get itself empty at the very time I didn’t want to fill it and generally when I wanted to do something else.
“See,” I said to Mom, “before you asked me to get that wood I could swing both arms up over my head and still feel fine—just like this,”—holding my arms over my head like I was as strong as the imaginary man named Atlas who used to hold the world on his shoulders. “But now,” I went on to Mom, “I’m so weak I can’t lift my right arm more than this high, just about as high as my waist, I am so weak.”
I had heard Little Jim’s pop say and do that to Little Jim’s mom once and it had sounded cute so I had decided to try it on my parents the first chance I got.
Mom, who was getting dinner at the time, stopped stirring the gravy, turned and looked through the lower part of her bifocals at me and said, “Poor boy. That’s too bad. If you can’t lift your hand any higher than your waist how then can you carry in the wood! I’ll take care of the wood myself. Maybe you’d better go and lie down for an hour while your father and I have dinner because, your mouth being a little higher than your waist, you won’t be able to feed yourself,”—and for some reason I right away went out and carried in several armloads of wood without saying another word, getting it done about the same time Mom had dinner ready.
But let me get back to telling you about Charlotte Ann and how she got mixed up in our mystery. The worst trouble we had with her was that when we finally got her into bed at night or in the afternoon when it was her nap time she didn’t want to go to sleep. Sometimes she would call for a drink of water or something to eat and sometimes she would come toddling out in her bare feet to wherever Mom and Pop and I were, interrupt our reading or our talking or Pop’s evening nap on the davenport. She nearly always came out wide awake acting very friendly and like she felt more at home when she was up than when she was down.