American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, American
She has got eighteen or twenty children, Widder Watson has, runnin'
around them woods. Them woods is jist plumb full of her children. You
wouldn't dare for to try to shoot a rabbit anywhere near them woods for
fear of hittin' one.
And all them children has got the most beautiful and peculiar names,
that Widder Watson got out of these here drug-store almanacs. She's been
a great reader all her life, Widder Watson has, but all her readin' has
been done in these here almanacs. You know how many different kinds
of almanacs there always are layin' around drug-stores, I guess. Well,
every two or three months Widder Watson goes to town and gets a new
bale of them almanacs and then she sets and reads 'em. She goes to
drug-stores in towns as far as twelve or fifteen miles away to keep
herself supplied.
She never cared much for readin' novels and story papers, she tells me.
What she wants is somethin' that has got some true information in it,
about the way the sun rises, and the tides in the oceans she has never
saw, and when the eclipses is going to be, and different kinds of
diseases new and old, and receipts for preserves and true stories about
how this or that wonderful remedy come to be discovered. Mebby it was
discovered by the Injuns in this country, or mebby it was discovered
by them there Egyptians in the old country away back in King Pharaoh's
time, and mebby she's got some of the same sort of yarbs and plants
right there in her own woods. Well, Widder Watson, she likes that kind
o' readin', and she knows all about the Seven Wonders of the World, and
all the organs and ornaments inside the human carcass, and the kind o'
pains they are likely to have and all about what will happen to you if
the stars says this or that and how long the Mississippi River is and a
lot of them old-time prophecies of signs and marvels what is to come to
pass yet. You know about what the readin' is in them almanacs, mebby.
Widder Watson, she has got a natural likin' for fine words, jist the
same as some has got a gift for hand-paintin' or playin' music or
recitin' pieces of poetry or anything like that. And so it was quite
natural, when her kids come along, she names 'em after the names in her
favourite readin' matter. And she gets so she thinks more of the names
of them kids than of nearly anything else. I ain't sayin' she thinks
more of the names than she does of the kids, but she likes the names
right next to the kids. Every time she had a baby she used to sit and
think for weeks and weeks, so she tells me, for to get a good name for
that baby, and select and select and select out of them almanacs.
Her oldest girl, that everybody calls Zody, is named Zodiac by rights.
And then there's Carty, whose real name is Cartilege, and Anthy, whose
full name is Anthrax, and so on. There's Peruna and Epidermis and
Epidemic and Pisces.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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