Lives of Girls and Women Read Free Page A

floor during the night. A stew flew off the stove by itself, splattering the kitchen walls. Sandy woke up in the night to feel something like a goat butting him through the mattress, but when he looked there was nothing under the bed. His wife’s best nightgown was ripped from top to bottom and knotted in the cord of the window shade. In the evening, when they wanted to sit in peace and have a little talk, there was rapping on the wall, so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think. Finally the wife told Sandy she knew who was doing it. It was her dead husband, mad at her for getting married again. She recognized his way of rapping, those were his very knuckles. They tried ignoring him but it was no use. They decided to go off in the car for a little trip and see if that would discourage him. But he came right along. He rode on the top of the car. He pounded on the roof of the car with his fists and kicked it and banged and shook it so Sandy could hardly keep it on the road. Sandy’s nerves collapsed at last. He pulled off the road and told the woman to take the wheel, he was going to get out and walk or hitchhike home. He advised her to drive back to her own town and try to forget about him. She burst into crying but agreed it was the only thing to do.
    “But you don’t believe that, do you?” said my mother with cheerful energy. She began explaining how it was all coincidence, imagination, self-suggestion.
    Uncle Benny gave her a fierce pitying look.
    “You go and ask Sandy Stevenson. I seen the bruises, I seen them myself.”
    “What bruises?”
    “From where it was buttin’ him under the bed.”
    “Two thousand dollars in the bank,” mused my father, to keep this argument from going on. “Now there’s a woman. You ought to look around for a woman like that, Benny.”
    “That’s just what I’m going to do,” said Uncle Benny, falling into the same joking-serious tone, “one of these days when I get around to it.”
    “A woman like that might be a handy thing to have around.” “What I keep telling myself.”
    “Question is, a fat one or a thin one? Fat ones are bound to be good cooks but they might eat a lot. But then so do some of the skinny ones, hard to tell. Sometimes you get a big one who can more or less live off her fat, actually be a saving on the pocketbook. Make sure she has good teeth, either that or all out and a good set of false ones. Best if she has her appendix and her gall bladder out too.”
    “Talk as if you’re buying a cow,” said my mother. But she did not really mind; she had these unpredictable moments of indulgence, lost later on, when the very outlines of her body seemed to soften and her indifferent movements, lifting of the plates, had an easy supremacy. She was a fuller, fairer woman than she later became.
    “But she might fool you,” continued my father soberly. “Tell you her gall bladder and her appendix are out and they’re still in place. Better ask to see the scars.”
    Uncle Benny hiccoughed, went red, laughed almost silently, bending low over his plate.
    “Can you write?” said Uncle Benny to me, at his place, when I was reading on the porch and he was emptying tea leaves from a tin teapot; they dripped over the railing
    “How long’ve you been goin’ to school? What grade are you in?”
    “Grade Four when it starts again.”
    “Come in here.”
    He brought me to the kitchen table, cleared away an iron he was fixing and a saucepan with holes in the bottom, brought a new writing-pad, bottle of ink, a fountain pen. “Do me some practice writing here.”
    “What do you want me to write?”
    “I don’t care. I just want to see how you do it.”
    I wrote his name and address in full: Mr. Benjamin Thomas Poole, The Flats Road, Jubilee, Wawanash County, Ontario, Canada, North America, The Western Hemisphere, The World, The Solar System, The Universe . He read over my shoulder and said sharply, “Where is that in relation to Heaven? You haven’t got far