My Brother Louis Measures Worms Read online

  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

  My 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 th
ing 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.

  “Mildred!” Mother yelled. “Now listen to me! . . . We’re going to jump. Come on, those kids will catch us.”

  Many of the onlookers seemed to think that this was a legitimate comedy act and applauded, but my father stood frozen to the spot, for what he saw was Mother and Aunt Mildred—“No mistaking them,” he later said—jumping from their bicycle onto a hay wagon, while the bicycle itself crashed into the reviewing stand and died there, like a worn-out horse.

  I did not see their landing, only their leap, and I dropped my bicycle and ran ahead . . . while Louis, puffing and panting, out of breath and wobbly-legged, rose to the occasion as people often do in moments of crisis. He got on my bicycle and rode to the hay wagon, thus accomplishing out of fear what he couldn’t accomplish any other way.

  Nor were we the only astonished and terrified family members: We passed a woman being helped to a seat on the grass, while people assured her, “I’m sure they’re all right. I’m sure they aren’t hurt.” This woman looked pale and shaken . . . and vaguely familiar.

  It turned out to be Aunt Della, who had arrived, unbeknownst to anyone, just in time to watch the parade. She had spotted Mother—not very hard, in view of the circumstances—had seen her take off in what looked like a suicidal leap through space, and immediately concluded that, through a cruel twist of fate, her first visit would turn out to be funereal.

  That was also my thought, and I was relieved to find both Mother and Aunt Mildred safe and sound, though choking and sneezing from clouds of hay dust.

  Since the whole thing took place directly in front of the reviewing stand, there was some talk of giving first prize to this combination float and acrobatic stunt, but my father refused to make any such award, on the grounds that it would encourage the prize winners to further lunacy.