“Course I do,” said Diadema, diving to the bottom of the dish-pan. “I’ve
got my start now, and don’t you say a word for a minute. The two roses
grow out of one stalk; they’ll be Lovey and me, though I’m consid’able
more like a potato blossom. The stalk’s got to be green, and here is the
very green silk mother walked bride in, and Lovey and I had roundabouts
of it afterwards. She had the chicken-pox when we was about four years
old, and one of the first things I can remember is climbing up and
looking over mother’s footboard at Lovey, all speckled. Mother had let
her slip on her new green roundabout over her nightgown, just to pacify
her, and there she set playing with the kitten Reuben Granger had brought
her. He was only ten years old then, but he’d begun courting Lovice.
The Grangers’ farm joined ours. They had eleven children, and mother and
father had thirteen, and we was always playing together. Mother used to
tell a funny story about that. We were all little young ones and looked
pretty much alike, so she didn’t take much notice of us in the daytime
when we was running out ’n’ in; but at night, when the turn-up bedstead
in the kitchen was taken down and the trundle-beds were full, she used to
count us over, to see if we were all there. One night, when she’d counted
thirteen and set down to her sewing, father come in and asked if Moses
was all right, for one of the neighbors had seen him playing side of the
river about supper-time. Mother knew she’d counted us straight, but she
went round with a candle to make sure. Now, Mr. Granger had a head as
red as a sumac bush; and when she carried the candle close to the beds
to take another tally, there was thirteen children, sure enough, but
if there wa’n’t a red-headed Granger right in amongst our boys in the
turn-up bedstead! While father set out on a hunt for our Moses, mother
yanked the sleepy little red-headed Granger out o’ the middle and took
him home, and father found Moses asleep on a pile of shavings under the
joiner’s bench.
“They don’t have such families nowadays. One time when measles went all
over the village, they never came to us, and Jabe Slocum said there
wa’n’t enough measles to go through the Dennett family, so they didn’t
start in on ’em. There, I ain’t going to finish the stalk; I’m going
to draw in a little here and there all over the rug, while I’m in the
sperit of plannin’ it, and then it will be plain work of matching colors
and filling out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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