He always brought something pretty and useless for Maw too. And she always scolded and loved him for buying it. Then he'd go over to the creaky chair where Aunt Ellen rocked slowly, pat her plump shoulder and hold out a shell comb, a cheap ring or a handkerchief. And Aunt Ellen would look away from the mirror—for the first time that day, perhaps—take the thing in her plump white hand, and smile.
I should have mentioned Aunt Ellen before but I forgot. In fact, everybody forgot Aunt Ellen. She wanted it so. She had been deeply in love when she was a girl, they said. But her young man had had to see the world before he settled down. So he set out for that strange half-mythical land called Europe. And he never returned.
After she was sure he would not come back Aunt Ellen stopped speaking to people. She took her seat and just looked into the mirror. I remember the rockers of that chair were worn almost through from constant use.
The mirror fascinated Annette and me. It was big—big as our front door and placed against the wall directly across from the entrance, so that if you didn't look closely you thought it was another door. And it had a great deeply-polished frame carved with intricate lacelike patterns that hurt your eyes if you looked at them too long.
I now know that it was the only thing of real value in the draughty log cabin. Maw said it was a "hear-loom," brought from Virginia by her parents, the Whites, who had been "quality" in the Old Dominion before they migrated after the war of 1812, were stampeded by land agents into "locating" in the wrong part of the state and rapidly dissipated their means on an unproductive wilderness.
Maw had made up a song about that mirror. "The Whites, 'tis said, were privateers when England ruled the waves ..." was the way it started. And it went on to tell how the mirror was part of their loot when they sacked and scuttled some tall merchantman.
To corroborate this story we had another relic, a "treasure chest" of the same dark wood, iron-bound and strong, which was used as a hens' nest beneath the house. Annette and I crawled under the floor from time to time to see if we could find any treasure still in it. But all we ever found were eggs.
After Paw had taken off his overcoat and Maw had put his packages in the leanto kitchen he would sit before the fire, suck coffee through his beard and regale us with news from the outside—how Uncle Joe Cannon's control of Congress was about to be broken, what the Young Turks were up to, how T.R.'s trust-busting would boost farm prices and make us all rich again and how they had just found a rusted and bloody monkey wrench in Brown's well.
At last, tired and happy, with our mouths puckered from too many jawbreakers, we'd go back to bed. And we'd wake to a humdrum world which included school, collecting wood, milking our cow, riding Old Nell when she would let us and maybe going to an ice cream social at New Harmony, until it was time for Paw to make another epic trip to Martinsville.