But he couldn’t get up any sap over his great-grandchildren. They were too distant a relation. He didn’t even take much notice of his grandchildren, once he had a look at them and they at him.
“This is Massey,” Sayward said. “And this is Chancey, the youngest. This is your Grandpap Luckett. Go up and shake hands with him.”
The two in their teens looked startled. This seedy and feeble old codger with shaggy white hair, ragged corduroy coat and britches worn to the rib couldn’t be their famous grandfather, the great hunter and pioneer they had heard so much about, the first white man in these parts and the founder of Americus! Why, he didn’t look like he could knock over a rabbit, let alone panther and bear. They went up to him reluctantly. But Worth was just as distant with them, dropping their hands like they were small fry out of the river, too scanty to bother with and had to be thrown back in. He went on talking to Sayward of where he had been and what he was doing the day he got the notion to come back and see his children before he was laid away for good.
For all the notice he gave, Chancey and Massey weren’t even there, but when Dezia came in from the seminary, a full grown young lady, dressed and polite like the gentry, Worth got up to retreat.
“Sit down, Pap,” Sayward urged him.
“No, I got to go,” he told her.
“Go where? You’re staying with us. We got plenty room.”
“No, I’d be in the way.”
“You wouldn’t any such thing,” Sayward protested. “You can have a room all by yourself. On the second floor so you don’t have to climb so much stairs.”
“I figured I ought to stay with Ginny,” he mumbled. “She has no young ones, you say. That might work out better. I’m not used to young ones rippin’ and tearin’ around.”
“They won’t bother you.”
“Oh, they’re all right, I expect,” Worth allowed. “But all I come for was to see you. Now I have to be going.”
“Well, you’re staying to supper anyways,” Sayward said sternly like it was all settled. “We can talk the rest over afterward.”
He threw a sidelong glance through the door to the sparkle of brass and china and claw-footed mahogany in the dining room.
“No, I got some things to do,” he persisted. “Will Beagle has a boat yard, you say?”
The girls and Chancey looked relieved, but Sayward stood there half provoked. She had lost patience with her own father. She hadn’t seen him for thirty-five years and now he was running off without his supper.
“Well, when are you coming back?” she asked.
“Oh, I’ll be back some time to see you. I expect to stay around.”
“Well, if there’s no stopping you, Chancey can run along and show you where Genny lives. I hope you tell her how you put me out by not staying.”
Chancey put his coat and cap back on, and Sayward went around to the front window to see them go. She hated her father going off like this, but if he wouldn’t do a thing, you couldn’t make him. She recollected how when her mother used to try, his eyes would get that sunken look, he’d pick up his rifle and that would be the last they’d see of him for a couple of days.
Seldom did Genny’s tongue run faster than next time she came over. Wasn’t Sayward struck in a heap when she saw that old man at the door? Who’d a thought their father still among the living! And the contrary old mule was still like always. He ate his supper with her and Will, but do you reckon he’d stay the night? No, he claimed he slept out all his life, and that wasn’t true because he used to sleep in the cabin, didn’t he? Anyway he asked Will if he didn’t have a place in the boat yard he could stay in, and when Will said he had a shanty the men used, Worth had to move right out. He wouldn’t even sleep a single night in one of her beds. What would people think, their father coming back like this and living out in an old boat yard shanty? They’d think he wasn’t good enough for his own daughters and that she and Sayward had turned him out.
“He run off from us young ones and let us raise ourselves,” Genny complained. “He stayed off thirty-five years. Now that we amount to a little something in this world, he comes back to disgrace us.”
“I wouldn’t say that, Genny,” Sayward said mildly.
“He came back ragged and dirty, didn’t he? He told who he was in front of the whole town. Why, he never used to look that bad in the woods with nobody to see him. I mind how he used to get you to shave him just to go over to Hough’s trading post in Shawaneetown.”
“We have to recollect he’s a mighty old man,” Sayward mentioned.
“He’s not too old to have a woman,” Genny flared. “Barney Grice told Will he knew Pap down in Memphis last fall but he didn’t know he was any relation to us. Barney said Pap had a woman they called Old Profanity. They lived together on the water front. Barney doesn’t know if she’s along up with him here or not. But, Saird,” Genny’s voice rose, “I won’t stand for her if she is! The minute he fetches her to the boat yard, he’s got to get out.”
“Well, that’s his business, and I’m not a going to fret about it,” Sayward soothed her. “All we can do for him now is see he gets some decent clothes.”
“And then he’ll never wear them,” Genny said bitterly. “Anything you give him he’ll hoard up like a squirrel; lock it up in the old chest Will gave him.”
“Well, let’s give him a chance before we jump on him. Most likely he’ll do the right thing. If he won’t, we’ll have to rig up ways to get around him. For instance, if he won’t come up to eat at my place, I’ll have to send him something down to his shanty. Supper would suit me best. That’s when we have our heavy meal now on account of Portius not getting home much at noon. Then I’ll have one of the children free to send it down with. But I don’t want you complaining it looks like you don’t have enough to feed him.”
That’s the way it was settled. Sayward herself went down to see him whenever she could. It hurt something deep inside of her to come from her fine big house and see her father living in this poor shanty. The door was so low she had to duck her head coming in, his bed a bunk against one side. No more than two could sit in here at one time unless they sat on the bunk.
“Why won’t you stay with us in the house, Pap?” she’d asked him, but he never would.
One time he told her, “Right where your place stands, I shot the deer with the blue horn. Do you mind that ole blue horn? It had a mess of points. Oh, that was a handsome spot them days. I kin see it yit with the big butts and creepers the way God Almighty made it. Why, it was so thick around ’ar, that buck never seed me. And now all slashed off and gone to rack and ruin. I kain’t look at it. Only thing left is the river, and that don’t look like itself with the woods killed off and not near the water coming down that used to.”
She had to keep after Chancey. He hated to carry the supper basket. He and Massey hated still worse when their school mates asked, “Is your grandfather still living down at the boat yard?” But the older girls said, “Thank God the old man isn’t in the house now that Aunt Cornelia is coming.” Seldom if ever was it “Grandfather” or “Grandpap.” No, it was, “the octogenarian” or “the ancestor” or “the old man of the Western Waters” or “Mama’s old Indian fighter and painter-tracker.” Portius was the one who put them up to it, especially now that his fine blue stocking sister was coming from the Bay State to visit them in Ohio.
The first time Sayward laid eyes on her, she had to admit to wonder how she and her would get along. Portius had looked for his sister by boat. That way she couldn’t have got to Americus before June. But one day late in May, Sayward and Dezia were house-cleaning when they saw the stage stop in the square. Almost never would the driver go out of his way, but this time he drew up right in front of their house, and Sayward knew it must be for a good reason even before Ned Hanshaw got down from his seat and set a pile of traps on the sidewalk. Then he opened the coach door and a lady stepped down.
Could that be Portius’s sister? Sayward thought. She had a
lways reckoned Cornelia Wheeler like Mrs. Morrison, tall and sweeping, with a handsome face and gracious manner. Now this was a short plain woman more like Aunt Unity and with a face like the pope’s. Her bonnet looked plain and old style enough, her hair drawn down severely on either side. Yet the stern way she held herself, the costly look of her ribbed taffeta and the respectful way Ned Hanshaw treated her told you that this was a great lady and one more to reckon with than Mrs. Morrison. Dezia fled upstairs to change her dress, but Sayward went right out as she was in her red dusting turban. You couldn’t keep Portius’s sister waiting in the street with her traps and everybody in the stage and square a watching.
“I’m Saird. I reckon you’re Cornelia,” she said and gave the white fingers in the black mit a stout shake.
“You are Portius’s wife?” His sister’s eyes went over her distant as Bay State Mountain, but Sayward wouldn’t explain that they hadn’t looked for her yet, and that’s why she wasn’t better dressed.
“Come right in. I’ll fetch your traps,” she said. “Portius will be real surprised when he comes home and finds you’re here.”
She spoke friendly like sisters-in-law should, but already she felt that Cornelia Wheeler looked down on her. Sayward thought she wouldn’t mind too much. The only thing Portius’s sister better not look down on was her children, for they had Wheeler blood a flowing in their veins the same as their Aunt Cornelia. Not so much perhaps, but enough to let them stand up and be counted, they having the Wheeler name besides.
She needn’t have fretted. When Dezia came down, all dressed up, her Aunt Cornelia gave her plenty of notice.
“So this is Dezia of whom I’ve heard so much!” she said in her genteel Bay State voice and held her cheek to be kissed, which she hadn’t to Sayward. Her keen blue Yankee eyes surveyed the girl. “Did your father ever tell you that you look like your Grandmother Wheeler, child? In everything I may say but your hair. Your Grandmother Wheeler used to brush her hair ten to fifteen minutes every morning and evening. She was a very resourceful and determined woman. She was determined to have beautiful hair, and she did.”
That, Sayward found later, was her sister-in-law to a T. She turned her sharp Yankee eyes on every young Wheeler that came around, reminded them who they were and started to make them over right away. No matter if they were half Luckett and part Indian and lived way out West here in Ohio, they had to measure up to their family back in the Bay State. She told Massey at once that her name was not Massey but Me’cy, that there had been a Me’cy Hopewell who converted the Indian heathen a hundred and fifty years ago and that no young lady of thirteen or fourteen with Me’cy Hopewell’s name and her blood in her veins would tear into the house like a young savage or a western tornado.
Now Chancey had to straighten his shoulders and turn his toes out.
“You favor your great-grandfather, John Elliot,” she told him. “He had a brilliant mind. I often heard my mother say he was one of the most fearless speakers in Massachusetts. He would have made his mark if his country hadn’t lost him at Bunker Hill.”
Oh, Huldah called her Lady Washington behind her back, and Libby dubbed her The Old Family Tree.
“Your mother tells me your husband is a young physician,” she said to Libby. “I want you to bring him over. I’m sure he would be interested to know that your father’s cousin Henry Wheeler was one of the most skilled and beloved medical practitioners in New England.”
Sooth’s eyes watered with pleasure when she heard that she got her musical talent from Sarah Elliot who once sang for President and Mrs. John Adams, which was much better than from Aunt Genny out here in Ohio. And no matter how little Resolve cared that he looked like his great uncle, General Ezra Norris, he was glad to have a general in his family to set up against Fay’s papa. Mrs. Morrison and the girls looked up to Aunt Cornelia, and listened impressed to her stories about the Norris houses, the Elliot brains and the Hopewell silver. Now the Wheeler silver wasn’t so much, but no family ever did so much for the town of Quinham near Boston as the Wheelers.
Aunt Cornelia stayed for a month and, even though she hardly raised her hands to do a tap, Sayward wouldn’t have minded having her all summer. She was better than a watch dog on the children. If Massey or Chancey did something outside they shouldn’t, she’d tap sharply on the window pane with her finger ring, and when they came in, they better speak the king’s English, or she’d set them straight.
“It’s chest,” she would say sternly. “Don’t let me hear you say chist again. And it’s not banch. It’s not shumac or sassafrac, or pepmint or leevah. Now say them with me. Bench! Sumach! Sassafras! Peppehmint! Leveh! And it’s not camphire. It’s c-a-m-p-h-o-r, camphaw!”
Sayward felt beholden to her for that and for telling them about their father’s side of the house. Why, till it was over she her own self knew more about Portius’s folks than her own. She could tell her grandchildren that hadn’t been born yet about Halbert, the queer old Wheeler coachman who claimed that one of his horses died coming down the Quinham hill but he held him up with the lines till he got to the bottom; about Rover, the big black Elliot dog their great-grandfather liked so much that he had its hide tanned when it died and used it as a rug on the floor; and about their great granduncle or cousin Norris who wore silver shillings for coat buttons and eleven penny bits for buttons on his waistcoat and breeches. Oh, most everything Cornelia told about Portius’s folks was good. It could be lively or racy or amusing, but it ever made out the Wheelers and Elliots ladies and gentlemen of high degree.
Now why did her father have to come the very last afternoon Cornelia was here, and make the Lucketts look like fly-up-the-cricks? Why, all spring and early summer he wouldn’t stir his stumps to Sayward’s for a meal or visit. He claimed his joints plagued him. Even Genny herself stayed away during Cornelia’s visit save when specially invited, and then she sat shut-mouthed and uneasy, not wanting to make any slips that would lower her and Sayward’s side of the house in front of Portius’s fine sister. One more day and Cornelia would have been gone back to her Bay State. Then didn’t Worth have to come and show himself, looking like an old bushnipple.
It was pretty well along in the afternoon. Cornelia had been across the square in the court house to see her brother sit on the bench in his robes and hear her nephew plead the case of a farmer ejected from a place that had been sold. When court adjourned, Portius came straight home, it being Cornelia’s last afternoon. Resolve dropped in, too. They got in a warm and lively argument, and Sayward felt it was good as court sitting there in the library a listening. In another minute, she told herself, she’d have to start supper and get Worth’s basket ready. But first she’d listen to Cornelia telling Resolve right out she didn’t think much of him taking the case of a man who had no honest right to stay on a place.
“That’s what all the clever and smart lawyers do,” she said, “take the side against an ejectment because sympathy is on their side. I should think a Wheeler would take the side of justice sometimes. This time the poor and ragged was clearly in the wrong.”
Just then somebody rapped on the back door, and Massey ran to answer it. Looking up, when Massey returned to the hall Sayward could see her startled face. Sayward rose and when she got to the kitchen, there was Worth in britches like a pair of feed bags. He had on no coat, only an open buckskin vest with the hair on it and under that an old red flannel shirt. White stubble covered his chin and cheeks, yellowed with tobacco juice around the mouth.
“Do you want to come in the library, pappy?” she asked quiet and steady as she could.
“I don’t care,” he said, meaning he would.
Sayward might be bamfoozled a little but not beat out. She hadn’t lived fifty-five years without learning that the old can be mighty shrewd and knowing sometimes, and contrary as a mule. Whatever you don’t expect them to do, they are liable to turn up a doing. Just the same, your father is your father, and the more helpless and childish he is, the more he needs your he
lp as you needed his when you were little and helpless.
Resolve’s face was a picture when she brought Worth in the library with his hat on. Chancey went out one door as his grandpappy came in the other.
“I want to make you acquainted with Portius’s sister,” Sayward spoke, raising her voice a little so he would surely hear. “Cornelia, this is my father. Will you take a chair, pappy, and rest yourself?”
“I’ll have to go directly. But I’ll sit down for a lick,” he agreed like he was doing Sayward a favor. His bright old eyes ran from one to another, to everybody save Portius’s sister, and by that Sayward knew he was well aware that she was there, and that’s why he came, to get a look at the visitor before she went back home to the Bay State.
Portius leaned back in his chair and the devil was in his eyes. You could tell he was going to enjoy this, and Sayward didn’t thank him for it.
“You see before you the original pioneer of Shawanee county, Cornelia,” he said in his deep court voice. “Mr. Luckett’s the first settler and founder of Americus.”
His sister sat there on her comfortable chair, not knowing what to make of this ancient “critter” crouching on the edge of a straight chair, his hat pushed back on his head, as a concession to etiquette. Oh, Sayward could have lifted off that hat before letting him in, but hardly would he have forgiven the indignity, and less would she have forgiven herself for trying to make him something he wasn’t. What went on now behind Cornelia’s stout prim face, Sayward could not tell save that she was company in her sister-in-law’s house, and no matter what he looked like, she would be civil to her sister-in-law’s father.
“Americus must be very grateful to you, Mr. Luckett,” she pronounced.
“What fer?” Worth asked suspiciously, looking at her direct for almost the first time.
“Judge Wheeler just told us. For founding such a growing city in a new land.”
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