My Brother Louis Measures Worms (4 page)

She leaned across me and said, “Louis stuck a bean up his nose and we had to take him to a doctor. They're still there. You'll just have to go ahead without her.” She started away and then turned back. “Louis is all
right
, you understand. It's just that—”

“He stuck a bean up his nose,” my father said. “I see. Thank you.”

The hymn over, Reverend Seagraves came down out of the pulpit to the baptismal font.

“Never stuck a bean up his nose before,” I heard my father mutter as he stepped out of the pew and started to follow Louisa May up the aisle. I was sorry for Mother, who was going to miss what I considered her big moment, but very proud of my father, who was going to stand beside Louisa May and assume responsibility for her baby before God and man and our entire congregation and a considerable number of total strangers.

I guess the same thought occurred to him, because he stopped three rows up, and then, after a moment's pause, came back and got me. “You come too, Mary Elizabeth,” he said “You can take your mother's place.”

Poor baby, to be represented by such a group. Only Louisa May seemed to be in full possession of herself. Reverend Seagraves was trying to sustain the shock of the unexpected size of his congregation, and to overlook the appearance of a distinctly minor child as a baptismal sponsor. I assumed that Louisa May would hand me the baby, according to the usual procedure, but instead she handed him to my father, who looked very much surprised and immediately handed him to Reverend Seagraves, who also looked surprised, because he already had his hands full. But I suppose he didn't like to hand him on to anyone else—especially not back to my father, who had almost dropped him the first time around.

Louisa May, however, remained perfectly serene, and at the appropriate moment pronounced the baby's name as if it were as common, say, as Charlie.

It was not, and all those who had hoped for revelation in the naming of this baby had their hopes dashed. Louisa May named her baby Hannibal—a name never connected with anybody or anything in our community. It was her one indirect concession to public opinion, for surely, all things being equal, she would have preferred a name more natural to the ear. But she offered neither explanation nor justification for the name, except to say that Alma thought there might once have been another Hannibal Fuller way back in the genealogy. Alma hadn't thought any such thing, but she liked the idea of it so much that she came to believe it was true, and from then on spent most of her time trying to track him down.

My father hurried us away right after church, and Louisa May let me hold Hannibal on the way home. He was soft and warm and sleepy and probably quite uncomfortable, smashed against my bony chest.

“Will you tell him someday that I'm his godmother?” I asked.

“Well, more like godsister, maybe,” Louisa May said. “Oh, yes, I'll surely tell him.”

“I'll take him to school when he's old enough,” I said, “and Sunday school. I'll watch out for him.”

“I count on you,” she said.

The excitement of the day, the weight of Hannibal upon me, the warmth of the sun through the window of the car, all made me as drowsy as the baby.

“Where did you get him from?” I asked.

Alma gasped. “Why, we went out one morning to fetch the milk . . .” she began.

“Not quite,” Louisa May said, and then to me, “The where and the how is a mystery. As for the why, just say I wanted him a whole lot, and was old enough to take good care of him.”

My mother was home from the doctor and waiting for us. “I took a taxicab,” she said. “There was no use going to the church so late. How did it go?”

“Well . . .” Father sat down heavily on the living-room sofa. “You can just about imagine . . . everybody and his uncle there in the church. I walked right past the Ferguson brothers. Saw Amos Ball a couple of pews over. Ed Wiggins . . .”

“Oh, well,” my mother said.

“Oh, well? Comes the big moment and who walks up the aisle with Louisa May and her baby? Me! By myself.”

“Well, people must have known . . .”

“What? That Louis stuck a bean up his nose? I doubt it. Besides, there were people there who don't know me from Adam's off ox—perfect strangers.” He took out his big white handkerchief and mopped his forehead. “Worst spot I ever was in. Then Louisa May gave me the baby and I didn't know what to do with him.”

“Why didn't you give him to me?” I asked, and Mother stared at me.

“Where were you?” she asked.

“I was there too. I went up with Daddy. I'm Hannibal's godsister.”

“Hannibal?”

“Hannibal,” my father repeated, and shrugged. “Well, she couldn't very well name him Frank, or George, or Bill.”

“She could have named him Fred,” I said, “for you.”

He mopped his head again. “I thought of that. Oh, yes, that occurred to me while we were standing up there.”

I was sent upstairs to change my Sunday dress and heard only a snatch of their conversation: “. . . have to tell her
something,
I think. Louisa May told her it was all a mystery. . . .” When I returned my father had gone out to look at the garden and Mother was sitting by the window, reading a church bulletin. She was holding it upside down.

“Come and sit down,” she said. “Your father told me you asked Louisa May where she got her baby. . . .” Poor Mother, she made hard work of the facts of life. By and large her remarks only served to confirm what Louisa May had said—it all sounded most mysterious, but more practical than finding babies under pumpkins, which had always seemed careless to me.

“Then Louisa May is bad?” I said when she was finished.

“Well, more misguided. Louisa May will have a hard time bringing up her little boy with no husband to help.” I could see the sense of that. Certainly, I thought, I would want a husband to do all the things my father did around the house, but I didn't think Louisa May felt that way about it.

“Louisa May never wanted to put up with a husband around the house,” I reminded my mother.

“Well,” she said, after thinking for a moment, “that comes of not knowing. Marriage isn't just a matter of putting up with a husband around the house. It's a kind of sharing of everything . . . good and bad, hard and easy. It's having someone who cares, to care about. It's ever so many things, and when Louisa May says she doesn't want to be married I expect she means it. But it's like saying you don't want any candy when you've never had any.”

Later that day Mother and I made a freezerful of peach ice cream and took it across the street, and we all took turns giving Hannibal his first taste of summer in a spoon. I watched Louisa May cuddle the baby, putting her cheek against the downy softness of his head, and I still thought it strange that my mother should feel sorry for Louisa May when Louisa May so plainly didn't feel the least bit sorry for herself. But if, as Mother had said, her contentment came of not knowing, I was glad she didn't know.

We started back across the street when it was beginning to get dark, and my father came to meet us. “I told you to call over,” he said. “That freezer's too heavy for you.”

“Oh, it's almost empty now,” Mother said.

“Still too heavy.” He took the freezer from her, pretending to stagger under its weight until Mother slapped him lightly on the arm. “Now you stop that,” she said, laughing. “Why, people will think you're drunk. Now, stop. I mean it. . . .Oh, you!”

I lagged behind to catch lightning bugs for Louis, but I could hear them laughing all the way into our house, and even after I had gone to bed.

Big Doings on the Fourth of July

M
y mother
—though a person of quiet ways and simple tastes, primarily interested in meat loaf recipes and January white sales—was prone to accidents of fate which landed her, time and again, in unusual, vaguely dangerous, or downright loony circumstances.

She was usually able to get herself out of whatever tangle she was in, but every now and then she had to call on my father, who said the same thing every time—“I'll bet this was your sister Mildred's idea”—which, very often, it was.

They were an odd pair, I always thought, to be associated at all, let alone as sisters, for they were as different as ducks and owls. They didn't even look alike—Mother was small and fair and conservative in matters of dress and makeup, while Aunt Mildred was a very tall and solid woman with dark hair and eyes—impossible to overlook, since her taste in clothes ran to gypsy colors and extravagant use of fringe and beads and trailing scarves.

Even Louis, who was only nine, thought that one or the other must have been adopted.

“Which one, Louis?” I asked him, but he said he didn't want to know because he liked them both.

“Now what does that mean?” my father said. “Does he think that in such a case you could only keep one—like puppies?” He shook his head. “Well, certainly Louis isn't adopted. He sounds just like your mother explaining why she went downtown on a bus to buy new curtains and came home in a taxicab with a vacuum cleaner.”

“I couldn't very well haul that big awkward thing home on the bus,” she had told him, as if that answered everything, which of course it didn't.

Pressed for further details, Mother said that she had, in fact, bought curtains at one store; subsequently found different, prettier, cheaper curtains at another store; returned the first curtains and bought a bedspread to match the second curtains. She then ran into Aunt Mildred (“Aha!” said my father) who was in hot pursuit of eiderdown pillows advertised on sale somewhere, though she couldn't remember where.

They joined forces, tried on some hats, stopped for lunch and then proceeded down Main Street, in and out of stores, looking for Aunt Mildred's sale pillows, which they never found.

Along the way, however, they were reminded of other homey needs and picked up what Mother called “a few things.” The vacuum cleaner came from the Baptist Church thrift shop, where Aunt Mildred made a purchase similar in terms of unwieldiness: a concrete birdbath for her Oriental garden, which was, strictly speaking, neither Oriental nor a garden, but a collection of ugly outdoor statuary and a stunted crab apple tree.

They then called not one, but two taxicabs, so Aunt Mildred could use one of them to take old Mrs. Tipton home from the thrift shop and see her safely in her house. Aunt Mildred also took all the soft goods they had accumulated—curtains, bedspread, assorted dish towels and cotton underwear and needlepoint yarn—while Mother conveyed the birdbath and the vacuum cleaner, stopping on the way home to leave the birdbath in Aunt Mildred's garden.

“There, now,” she said, at the end of this lengthy account. “Is that so terrible?”

“No,” my father said, “but it's silly—you and Mildred running all over town in buses and taxicabs, loaded down with packages. Why didn't you take my car?”

“I don't like to drive,” Mother said. “You know that.”

“Why didn't Mildred drive?”

“Why, I don't know. It isn't as if we
planned
to go shopping. We just happened to meet.”

Actually, Mother
did
know, but didn't like to say, that Aunt Mildred's car was in the repair shop again.

In matters of transportation, as in all other ways, they were exactly opposite. Mother hated driving cars, but when called upon to do so, she performed with caution and common sense. Aunt Mildred, on the other hand, loved to drive anywhere, anytime, with such zest and zip and freewheeling independence that she could be said to be unsafe at any speed.

It was for this reason (and others) that my father took a dim view of Aunt Mildred's plan to dress herself and Mother up in old-fashioned costumes and ride a tandem bicycle in the Fourth of July parade, for which, as chairman of the town committee, he was responsible.

Aunt Mildred said that Louis and I could dress up too, and ride our own bicycles beside or behind them, and we would all be a charming addition to the parade.

“I can't ride a bicycle,” Louis said. This was unusual in a small town where everybody rode bicycles—but then, Louis was unusual. My mother once said that she believed Louis was born forty years old, and he did indeed have an air of solemn deliberation better suited to an adult. This kept him out of a lot of trouble—by the time he'd considered all the pros and cons of sneaking into some movie we weren't allowed to see, the movie was half over—but it also cramped his style, I thought, in matters of simple enjoyment, like riding a bicycle.

He'd considered the pros and cons of this, tried it in a dogged, down-to-business way, fallen off harder and quicker and more often than seemed reasonable to him, reconsidered and said he'd rather walk.

“Can't ride a bicycle!” Aunt Mildred said. “Why, it's the easiest thing in the world. . . . You know how a newborn baby will swim if you throw it into the water? Well, it's the very same thing—it's instinct.”

I didn't think it was the same thing at all and neither did Louis, and my father said it would be a cold day in August before he threw any newborn baby into the water, just on Mildred's say-so.

He also continued to grumble about the proposed bicycle act—probably because he saw too much similarity between Aunt Mildred on a tandem bicycle and Aunt Mildred in a car, both being vehicles and subject to collision—but there wasn't much he could do about it, because there were signs all over town urging people to
Join the Celebration! Sign up for the Big Parade!
—and they were his signs.

“Mildred's just trying to help,” Mother said. “Isn't that what you said you wanted—more people in the parade?”

“Yes, but not Mildred! I want Charlie Baker at the bank, and Floyd Gemperline at the Select Dairy—
business
people, to show some spirit and spend some money and enter some floats, so we'll have something to judge besides the V.F.W. and the Ladies' Hospital Auxiliary.”

“Then you should have said so,” Mother told him.

“I doubt that Mildred even has a tandem bicycle—and what makes you think she knows how to ride one?”

“Oh, of course she does; she was a very athletic girl,” Mother said; but in fact she wasn't at all sure of this, and was somewhat lukewarm about her own role in the whole thing. Unlike Aunt Mildred, Mother was uncomfortable about any kind of public display—choosing always to dish up the dessert rather than introduce the speaker—and didn't really want to put on a lot of old petticoats and a floppy hat and ride down Main Street in a parade.

Furthermore, she had, at different times and in an offhand way, invited various relatives to a picnic supper on the evening of the Fourth; and since Mother was one of a large family this had gotten out of hand. She had mentioned some of the arrangements to my father—“Carl and Ava are coming over after the parade”; “I told Linnea and Walt to stop by for some fried chicken”—but she had not spelled out for him the exact dimensions of the guest list, which, when she added it all up, came to forty-seven people.

She had even invited my father's only sister, Della, to come from Zanesville, a hundred and fifty miles away—but she didn't tell him that, either; because Della, though always invited to festive occasions, never came—too far to go, she always said, and too hard to get there.

My father both understood and approved of this attitude. He was fond of Della, he said, and she was fond of him; but their family affection didn't require them to see each other every fifteen minutes, like most of Mother's relatives.

All in all, the Fourth of July looked like a complicated day, and Mother wasn't sure she wanted to begin it on a bicycle.

Louis, however, had no doubts at all. At my urging, he made one last determined effort to ride my bicycle the length of the driveway, landed five times in the forsythia bush and said, once again, that he would rather walk.

My father, pleased by the response to his signs—nine floats, two high school bands, a drum and bugle corps, and a team of horses from the local Grange Association—was too involved with the logistics of the parade to notice that Louis was a little black and blue, or that Mother was frying chicken and peeling potatoes from morning till night. But he did notice when she showed up at the dinner table wearing a pair of voluminous ladies' bloomers.

“Mildred got them somewhere,” Mother said, “and I just feel so foolish that I thought I'd wear them around and try to get used to them. She said they'd be more practical than long skirts.”

My father was so surprised and impressed by this display of good sense in Aunt Mildred that he changed his tune, and said the bicycle would probably be a nice touch.

“I'll put you in right behind the drum and bugle corps,” he said, “so no one will miss you.”

The tandem bicycle which Aunt Mildred produced on the morning of the Fourth did not in fact belong to her, just as my father had predicted. It belonged to old Mrs. Tipton, who had put it out in the trash and was dismayed to find it still there on the day Aunt Mildred took her home from the thrift shop.

“Oh, they didn't take it!” she had said. “Now what will I do with the old thing?”—and of course Aunt Mildred had known just what to do with it.

“I had it tuned up,” she told us, “at the repair shop where I always take my car.”

“But that's an auto body shop,” Mother said, eyeing the bicycle with justifiable suspicion.

“That's what they said,” Aunt Mildred agreed, “and they didn't really want to do it; but with all the business I give them they couldn't very well say no.”

She was dressed, as were we all, in a motley assortment of attic discards: petticoats, automobile dusters, ladies' shirtwaists of a bygone day . . . and hats as big around as turkey platters, but nowhere near as solid. Mother's hat was especially limp, falling down around her ears and almost to her chin, while Aunt Mildred's hat looked like a wedding cake; roses and feather birds and yards of trailing tulle.

Louis had suffered himself to be decked out like Buster Brown, in knickers and a straw boater, just as if everything was going according to plan. He reasoned that there would be no time, at the last minute, for Aunt Mildred to commandeer a bicycle, put him on it and throw him into the water, and he was right.

“You ride right in close behind us, Mary Elizabeth,” Aunt Mildred told me. “We don't want to be strung out all along the street if we can help it. It's just a shame about you, Louis. You wouldn't want to climb up here with your mother and me?”

Louis said no, but if we didn't go too fast he would try to keep up with us on foot.

“Oh, we won't go fast,” Aunt Mildred said. “You don't go fast in a parade. Grace, are you going to get on?”

“Where?” Mother said, holding up the front of her hat and hitching at her bloomers.

“Doesn't matter—front or back.”

“Whoever's in front has to steer,” I said.

“Well, you'd better do that, Mildred.” Mother straddled the bicycle. “I'll pedal.”

“You both have to pedal,” I said. Louis and I looked at each other, aware now of what we should probably have known all along—that neither one of them knew how to ride the thing, and, even more surprising, neither one of them seemed concerned about it.

When asked about this later, Mother said she based her confidence on pictures she had seen of people riding such a bicycle—smiling, unruffled, hardly exerting themselves at all—and she concluded that two people on a bicycle produced great stability, no matter who the two people were. Of course, she realized almost at once that she was wrong about this.

Parade or no parade, Mother and Aunt Mildred had to go fast because that was the only way they could stay upright . . . and I had to go fast to keep up with them, as they swooped back and forth across Main Street, narrowly avoiding things and people, pedaling furiously or not at all, and never in unison.

Aunt Mildred seemed to be steering, after a fashion, with all her customary abandon; and Mother—resigned, as she later said, to six months in a body cast—was simply hanging on for dear life, unable to see much because of her hat.

Of course the rear rank of the drum and bugle corps was aware of all this, and though they continued to bugle and drum, they also tried to step up the pace of the march—torn, I suppose, between a desire to maintain order and a desire to stay clear of this runaway bicycle and its hapless operators.

In the meantime, my father, assured that all the floats and bands and marching units had started on time and in position, had gone on to the reviewing stand, where he had been much complimented on the organization and variety of the parade so far.

“Just fine, Fred,” the mayor had told him. “Any surprises coming up?”

At that moment the police chief stood up and pointed down the street. “Something going on down there,” he said. “That band's all over the place.”

“That band”—the drum and bugle corps—was indeed all over the place, and for good reason. Aunt Mildred, increasingly hampered by the collapse of her hat—roses and birds were dangling from all sides of it, and she was nearly strangled by loose tulle—had suddenly yelled, “Look out . . . we're coming through!”

As the musicians scattered, my mother saw ahead the team of horses from the Grange Association. It was almost the only thing she had seen so far, and it was certainly the most hopeful, for the horses were hauling a low flatbed trailer carpeted with hay, in which sat three or four teenagers.