Hidden In Plain Sight

Old Foster used to say the reason some women married men they entirely should not was because nature tried to even up all round. Very likely that's it, but it's a rocky scheme for the Little Results. When my mother married my father, it was the wonder of the neighborhood. I don't fully understand it to this day, as many things as I've seen.

She was a beautiful, tall, kind, proud woman, who walked as if she owned the world and loved it; from her I get my French blood. Was there a dog got his foot run over? Here he comes for mother, hollering and whimpering, showing her the paw and telling her all about it, sure she'd understand. And she did. 'Twixt her and the brutes was some kind of sympathy that did away with need of words. Doggy'd look at her with eyebrows up and wigwag with his tail, "Left hind leg very painful. Fix it, but touch lightly, if you please."

Father was a gaunt, big man, black and pale; stormy night to her sunshine. A good man, estimated by what he didn't do (which is a queer way to figure goodness), but a powerful discourager on the active side. He believed in Hell first, last, and all the time; I think he felt some scornful toward the Almighty for such a weak and frivolous institution as Heaven. How much of this was due to his own nature, and how much to the crowd he traveled with, I don't know. He had to have it in him to go with them; still, I like to think they led him off. Left to mother's influence, he'd have been a different man-more as I remembered him when I was a little chap. This "church" of his was down on everything that had a touch of color, a pleasant sound, or a laugh in it: all such was wickedness. I remember how I got whaled for kissing Mattie. A boy that wouldn't kiss Mattie if she'd let him should have been trimmed to a peak. However, I got whaled for anything and everything. In this he was supported by his fellow church-members, most of 'em high-cheek-boned men with feverish eyes, like himself. "Take heed to the word, Brother Saunders," they'd say: "'Spare the rod and spoil the child.'" So father'd refuse to spare the rod, and he'd spoil me for the time being, anyhow.

They weren't all men of that stamp, though. You can't get a crowd of fools to hold together unless there's a rascal to lead them. Anker was the boss of the business-and a proper coyote he was. A little man, him; long-nosed and slit-eyed; whispered, mostly, from behind his hand. He had it in for me, most particular. First place, I nicknamed him "Canker" and it stuck; next place, one day me and Tom, Mattie's brother, being then about sixteen apiece, come up from swimming and stopped at Anker's patch to pull a turnip. While we sat there, cutting off slices and enjoying it, never thinking of having harmed the man, Anker slides out to us, so quiet we couldn't hear him till he was right there, and calls us a pair of reprobates and thieves. I never liked the sound of that word "thief." He got the turnip. He'd have got worse, too, but Tom slung the sleeve of his shirt around my neck and choked me down.

The turnip sent him to grass. As he got up, smiling with half his mouth, and wiping turnip off his manly brow, "You'll regret this, young man," says he; "some day you'll be sorry for this."

Poor Tom had his hands full holding me. "Well, you'd better run along," says he; "for if this shirt gives way, you'll regret it to-day."

Anker was a man to give advice, generally. When he cast an eye on me, foaming and r'aring, he concluded he'd take the same, for once, and ambled out of that.

He kept his word, though. He made me regret it. You'd hardly believe a man near fifty years old would hold a grudge against a sixteen-year-old boy hard enough to lie about him on every occasion, and poison the boy's father's mind, would you? That's the facts. He stirred the old man up by things he "really didn't like to tell, you know, but felt it his painful duty"-and so forth. Yes, sir; he made me regret it plenty. You might say he broke our home up. And so, if ever I meet that gentleman in the hereafter, above or below, him and me is going to have some kind of a scuffle-but shucks! There's no use getting excited over it at my age. The good Lord's attended to his case all right, without any help from me.

In all kinds of little things mother and father were separated by miles. Take the case of old Eli Perkins, the tin-peddler, for instance. Mother used to love to buy things from Eli, to hear him bargain and squirm, trying his best to give you a wrong steer, without lying right out. "Well, now, Mis' Saunders," he'd say, "I ain't sayin' myself thet thet pan is solerd tin; I'm on'y repeatin' of what I bin tolt. I du' know es it be solerd tin; mebbe not. In thet case, of course, it ain't wuth nineteen cents, es I was sayin', but about, about ... well, well, now! I'll tell you what I'll do, ma'am. I'll say fourteen cents and a few of them Baldwins to take the taste out 'n my mouth-can't do no fairer than thet now, kin I? Yassam-well, nuthin' more to-day? Thankee, ma'am." And Eli'd drive off, leaving mother and me highly entertained. But father'd scowl when his eye fell on Eli. It seems that the poor old cuss was a child of the devil, because he would take Chief Okochohoggammee's Celebrated Snaggerroot Indian Bitters for some trouble Eli felt drawing toward him and tried to meet in time. When Eli got an overdose of the chief's medicine he had one song. Then you heard him warble:

"Retur-n-n-n-i-n' from mar-r-r-ket,

Thebutterneggsallsold,

And-will you be so kind, young man,

And tie 'em up for ME?

Yaas I will, yaas I will, w'en we git UPon the hill.

And we joggled erlong tergether singin'

TOORAL-I-YOODLE-I-AAAAAAAAAAAAY!!"

Well, sir, to hear it, and to see Eli, with his head bent back near to break off, his old billy-goat whisker wagging to the tune, was to obtain a pleasant memory. The way that "TOORAL-I-YOODLE-I-AY" come out used to start old Dandy Jim, the horse, on a dead run.

Another offspring of the same split-hoof parent was Bobby Scott, the one-legged sailorman that used to whittle boats for us boys when he was sober, and go home from the tavern Saturday nights at the queerest gait you ever saw, playing his accordion and scattering pennies to the kids. I always liked any kind of music; pennies didn't come my way so often-how were you going to make me believe Old Bob was a wicked sinner? I didn't, nor that Eli was neither. I thought a heap of both of 'em.

But railroading was what gave me the first wrench from the home tree. It happened one evening I wandered over the hills to the end of the little jerk-line that ran our way, and watched the hostler put the engine in the shed for the night. It was a small tea-pot of an engine that one of our Western 'Guls could smear all over the track and never know there'd been an accident, but, man! she looked big to me. And the hostler! Well, I classed him with the lad that hooked half-dollars out of the air at the Sunday-school show, and took a rabbit out of Judge Smalley's hat. But the hostler was a still more wonderful man. I tried to figure if he'd ever speak to me, and what I should do if he did. Every time I got the chores done early, I skipped it over to the railroad, till finally the hostler he sees a long-legged boy eating him with his eyes, and he says:

"Hello, bub!"

I scuffed my feet and said, "Good morning."

The hostler spit careful over the top of the switch and says, with one eye shut, "Like a ride?"

Well!!

Howsomever, it seemed manners to me to refuse all pleasant propositions, so I said "no" and prepared to slide away. But he was a wise man.

"Better come down to the shed," he says. So I climbed aboard with no more talk.