University of Virginia Library

XVI
A Little girl and Her Grandmother

I am always sorry for children who have never known what it is to have a grandmother and a grandfather and an old mountain farm to visit, far away from everywhere. A little girl I once knew had all three. Her grandmother was the dearest grandmother I have ever seen. She was tall and stout, with a broad, comfortable lap, and her hands, as they stroked the little girl's head on her shoulder, were smooth and soft. The grandmother's eyes were blue and full of mischief and fun and love. When she laughed she shook all over so that nobody looking at her could help laughing too; even the little girl, who was naturally serious. The grandmother's checks were a soft pink, and her hair was black, faintly silvered. She wore it parted plain on week-days, but on Sundays it was crimped. On Sundays, too, she wore her black grenadine, but on other days her dress was blue gingham with a long white apron.

The grandmother lived on a farm so steep

that it seemed always to be sliding down the mountain into the valley below. At the back of the house were a few acres of cleared space, and then beyond this the stretches of mountain woods. From these woods you could hear the call of the whip-poor-wills in the evenings, and there were wildcats and bears there, too, perhaps, and rattlesnakes surely. The farm had been a wild sort of place until the grandmother took hold of it and tamed it. She had them build a line of white fence palings between the house and the grass-grown mountain road. She would have the porch trimmed with clematis, and they had to build her a grape arbor, too, and swing a hammock under it. Above the whitewashed fence a row of sunflowers nodded, and within was a line of sweet-peas. In front of the house were two long flower-beds, bordered with mignonette. In one was heliotrope, in the other flowering red geraniums. There were other flower-beds, too, wherever the grandmother could find a place for them, and in one was a tall plant of lemon verbena. The grandmother was always plucking a leaf of this and crushing it, and then clapping her fragrant hand over the little girl's nose. Such fun they had with the flowers, snipping and weeding and watering, their two gossipy sunbonnets close together! Whatever the grandmother was doing, the little girl was always at her heels, except when she was tagging after her grandfather.

All through her childhood the little girl used to make long visits at the farm. She was a queer little girl, not at all happy. Her grandmother said she was "high-strung," but her mother and the little girl herself called it just plain "naughty." At any rate, she was always losing her temper, and then crying for hours over the sin of it. She worried over everything that happened by day, and she was afraid of everything that might happen by night, and was always flying from her bed in terror of the dark. At last, when the little girl's cheeks would grow so thin, and her eyes so big and anxious that her mother was at her wits' end what to do with her, she would say to the father: "We must send Margie down to mother."

Now the little girl's father, who was a minister, had very little money, and the grandmother had less, but somehow they would do without things and do without things until they got the little girl safely off to the old farm, where she grew so brown and fat and jolly that her mother hardly knew her.

The first of these visits was when Margie

was so little that she would have been a baby if there had n't been another baby at home. She remembers only one happening of that visit—riding high on the hay wagon, she and her grandmother, while her grandfather drove the mules. Margie thinks now that perhaps her grandmother did not enjoy that ride, for hay is hot and prickly, but whatever the little girl wanted to do, that the grandmother did. Another incident of that first visit her grandmother used to tell the little girl afterwards. The little girl always wanted to help her grandfather in all his work, and often she was much in the way. Sometimes when there was hoeing that must be done, the grandfather would try to slip away unnoticed; then that tease of a grandmother would point out to the little girl how the grandfather's overalls were just disappearing around the corner of the house, and the little girl would snatch up her sunbonnet and her fire shovel, and run after, crying: "Wait for me, grandpa!" Then she would stand in the furrow right in front of him and pound away with her shovel, so hot and earnest that the grandfather had nothing to do but stand and laugh at her, and down in the doorway the grandmother, watching them, laughed, too, because she was teasing the grandfather and pleasing the little girl.

Another visit came the summer when Margie was seven. Her father was going to Convocation, and so could take her with him and drop her off at the grandmother's station. Margie wore a big sailor hat and a brand-new sailor suit. She was so excited all the way that she did not talk at all, and would not touch her lunch. At last, peering out of the window, she saw the old spring wagon and her grandfather holding the reins and her grandmother waiting on the platform. Her grandmother lifted her up in her arms, doll and satchel and lunch-box and all, and carried her over to the wagon: at home Margie was much too old to be lifted and carried. Seated between her grandparents, while her grandmother held her hat and the mountain wind blew through her curls and her trunk bumped along at the back, all Margie's worries fell away from her—she forgot she was a sinful child, she ceased to think that the babies were doomed to drown in the river, that her mother would be stricken by dread disease and die, that her father would be run over in crossing the railroad track; and as for springing from her bed in fear, that night and all the rest she slept so soundly that she never woke at all.

Arrived at the farmhouse, the grandmother

would open Margie's trunk and take out all the little garments and think them the prettiest ever seen, because the little girl's mother had made them every stitch. From the little dresses the grandmother would select the very oldest, and then lock all the others away again. Down at the village store she would buy some coarse brown and white stockings, costing ten cents a pair. From a corner behind the sewing-machine she would bring out the sunbonnet she had stitched for Margie in the winter. It was blue check and had pasteboard slats that came out when it was washed. Thus equipped, the little girl might run free of the farm. She helped to feed the calves and the chickens and the pigs; she wiped the dishes for Minnie, the little Dutch maid, in order that Minnie might be sooner ready to play in the haymow with her in the long sultry afternoons through which the locusts shrilled; she went huckleberrying with her grandfather, pushing far into the mountain woods, always treading warily because of the rattlers, and coming home with a face smirched with purple under the sunbonnet; she took long drives with her grandfather along strange, still mountain roads. With him, too, she tried milking: the cow-bells tinkled through the dusk of the long shed, and the air was fragrant with the hay and the steaming milk-pails, and the little girl tried with all her might, but usually she only succeeded in sending a fine stream into her grandfather's eye. On indoor days Margie would draw her little red rocker up beside her grandmother's knee and listen to stories. The stories were all about mysterious and unknown relatives, Cousin Letty This and Uncle Josiah That and Aunt Tirzah Something Else. Much of it the little girl did not understand at all, yet somehow she liked listening to stories, snuggled against her grandmother's knee, better than anything else in the long, blithe days, and the little girl felt sleepy very early here on the farm—she that was such a sleepless midget at home.

After supper, while the light was still clear, her grandmother would undress her and put on her nightgown: then, when her hair was combed and her teeth brushed and her prayers said, she would wrap the little girl in the gray blanket shawl, and carry her out to the big rocking-chair on the front porch. There the grandmother would croon old songs while the little girl's head drowsed against her shoulder, and the summer twilight stole upon them. Sometimes the call of a whip-poor-will would sound out from the woods, or the roosting turkeys in the apple trees across the

road would rustle and flap their wings, and sometimes the white moon would come gliding up the sky, seen dreamily through the clematis bloom.

As the little girl grew older she could not go to the farm so often, partly because she took a full-fare ticket now, and partly because her mother needed her at home but always, when she did go, she and her grandmother had the same old good times together, and Margie was still happier there on the old mountain farm than anywhere else in the world. She seemed to love her grandmother better now that she was old enough to think about her more. The grandmother had some funny ways. For one thing she would never sit in a straight chair at table, but always in a rocker. She would eat a little, and then sit back and rock a little, and sometimes, since meals at the farm were leisurely and chatty, she would fall asleep while she rocked, but she would never admit that she had napped a minute, not she. Try as you might, you could never get the grandmother a present that she would keep. She loved dainty things, but the prettier the gift, the more she would fall to thinking how much it would please some one else, and so presently away it went. If the giver chanced to find her out, she would hang her

head and look much ashamed of herself, but all the time her eyes would be roguish. All the family teased her and she teased them. She would have walked miles for the sake of a good joke on any one of them, but her fun was always tender. One dearly loved joke she played every year. In October, when the mountains were wonderful in the blue autumn weather and the tang of burning leaves was in the air, a little family of Margie's cousins used to come out from their town house to the old farm for chestnuts. For days before they came the grandmother and Minnie would gather every chestnut and put away the treasure in a big bag. On the morning of the children's coming, the grandmother was always to be found scattering the hoarded chestnuts in great handfuls everywhere. Later in the day, when the children were shouting over the windfall, she would shake a threatening finger at the grandfather and Minnie if they dared to chuckle.

After a while the little girl was quite grown up and had gone to college, where she had acquired a bad habit of studying herself sick. Once again her mother in desperation sent her to her grandmother. At the station the grandparents had the spring wagon waiting with a cot bed; they laid the little girl on it and

walked alongside up the mountain. That morning the grandmother and Minnie had been over all that mile of mountain road and had picked off every stone, so that the little girl might feel no jarring. Margie thought that the back of her head would never stop aching, but her grandmother nursed her and fed her and rubbed her, and wrapped her up warm and put her out in the sunshine; she told her that she must forget what the doctors had said, and that the mountain air would cure her, and so after a while it did.

But there came a last visit. They found that for two years the grandmother had been ill with a terrible disease, but she had kept it a secret as long as she could. They sent her little girl to her for the last time. The grandmother would always stop moaning when Margie came near, and sometimes she would rouse herself enough to sit up and tell her stories. She, liked to lie in the hammock and have Margie swing her gently, and she would often send her down to the ferny spring for a fresh drink of water. She liked to take it from the old cocoanut drinking-cup, and almost always as she handed this back to Margie she would say, "Have you ever tasted such good water as this?" and always she was pleased when Margie answered, "No."

One day Margie had to go away to her teaching. Her grandmother got up from her couch and walked to the front door to bid her good-bye. They said very little, and they did not cry at all, only as Margie looked back from the turn of the road at the little farmhouse and the valley and the circling mountains, at all the place she loved best in all the world, she knew that she should never wish to see it again.

So the little girl's visits to her grandmother came to an end, like a beautiful book read through. But though it is never the same as the first time, one may read a book over again. The little girl has been grown up for a long time, but sometimes when she is tired and worried and frightened she turns back the pages of her memory. She is sitting on her grandmother's lap on the porch in the summer twilight. Her grandmother is singing to her, and the great moon is rising behind the clematis.