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Ann went to live with Clarence and Rebecca Smith on the Newtown Road, in Southfield, about a mile from Southfield Centre, and three miles from Eastham, of which it was a part. That was really out in the country. The house, as was the case with most houses in that part of the world, was white with green shutters. The front door which opened into a front hall and parlor seldom was used except for weddings and funerals. The side door, which opened directly into the dining room, shared popularity with the kitchen door, which was just off the woodshed and nearest to that establishment of fitted boards painted green, with a door on a latch, with a crescent carved over it and sunflowers growing beside it. When a member of the household was about to visit this spot, he, or she, said:

“I am going to call on the Widow Jones.”

Ann used to wonder if the Fred Joneses, who lived down in the hollow, were accustomed to say on similar occasions:

“I am going to call on the Widow Smith.”

But she never did learn about that.

There were four apple trees on the south side of the house. These apple trees all were Baldwins. On the north side of the house, however, was the real orchard, where were many varieties of apples, including Early Harvests and Golden Sweets, Red Astrakhans and Gravensteins which ripened early, and Northern Spies, Baldwins, Pound Royals, and Russets. A crabapple tree stood back of Mrs. Jones’s, to the west, and there also were peach, pear and plum trees on that side, which was referred to as “out back.”

To the northeast of the house was a big cherry tree which bore plump, black juicy fruit—Ox Hearts. Clarence used to shoot blackbirds out of that tree with his double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun. The blackbirds appreciated the superior quality of those cherries too.

Next to the kitchen on the extreme west of the house was the woodshed. Next to the woodshed was the chicken coop, in which were two score hens and a dozen or so chickens for the table. And next to the chicken coop was the red barn in which were kept a dozen cows. The milk house was just off the barn to the north, near the ice house.

The ice house was a rough timber structure, built over a square hole in the ground. Into this in the winter were dumped blocks of ice cut from Carter’s Pond. The ice was covered thick with sawdust. In the summer the blocks were dug out and cut to required size for the ice box in the house, or dumped whole into the brick pool in the milk house. As soon as the cows were milked the big cans were sunk under the water with the cakes of ice. It always was chilly in the milk house, even on the hottest days in July and August. And the milk from the cans was cold.

Clarence had a brown-and-white water spaniel with long ears and soft brown eyes. He called the dog Tack because immediately after he had brought him home as a puppy six years before, the little fellow had swallowed a tack.

Rebecca and Clarence attributed to Tack many human qualities. They not only spelled out words in front of Tack when they didn’t wish him to know what they were talking about but they even went to the trouble of spelling many words backward. For instance, Tack loved to go to Eastham because such trips usually included a visit to Bert Cooper, the butcher.

Bert’s shop was in the line of shops and buildings in the main street of which the Pease Block occupied more than its share of space. It was cool in Bert’s, with its sawdust floor, its meat hung in rows, or displayed on the counter, its scarred chopping block, its odor of animal flesh, and its many pieces of fly paper on which flies eternally were buzzing and struggling in death throes. It was a dog’s paradise.

Bert admired Tack and fed Tack hugely. Tack tolerated Bert, who, unlike the popular idea of what a butcher should be, was a blond, partly bald, with blue eyes peering through gold-framed spectacles, a clean-shaven face, a lean and sinewy torso covered by a loose white coat, and his wrists and forearms protected by straw gauntlets. Bert generally had a rag tied around one of his fingers. He had a penchant for cutting himself every so often with one of his razor sharp knives. On account of Tack’s delight in going to Eastham, and his despondency on being left at home, Clarence and Rebecca would spell Eastham and other suggestive words backward. Clarence would say, for instance:

“Oh, Rebecca. I’m going to e-v-i-r-d to m-a-h-t-s-a-E. Would you like to o-g?”

Clarence explained this system of spelling backward as follows. He said to Ann:

“We used to spell words straight ahead. But one day after we spelled out Eastham from front to back, with Tack listening with his eyes on me, his head cocked to one side and his tongue hanging out, we got to Eastham, and found Tack there waiting for us. He knows more’n most folks, Tack does.”

Ann went to live with Clarence and Rebecca, temporarily, immediately after her father died and was buried in a plain pine coffin, as had been his wife. Both families considered that spending unnecessary money on funerals was a sinful waste. Both the Smiths and the Steeles took deaths as calmly as they took meals, and with no more sartorial preparation. They wore their everyday clothes to the funeral, not worrying about the color, and it was a source of pride in both families that ministers weren’t allowed to utter eulogies on the departed. Gramma Smith said:

“If the one that died was worthless in life he didn’t become valuable by dyin’. If the one that died lived a useful life nothin’ any minister could say would make it any more useful. And there’s nothing more terrible and embarrassing than to sit at a funeral and hear a minister spend an hour praising a man that we all know was mean to his neighbors, poison to his family, and a blot on the landscape.”

After Elihu was buried, it was learned that there was five hundred and sixty dollars in the Eastham National Bank, and twelve hundred dollars in the Eastham Institution for Savings, and a mortgage of $2,500 on the Elm Street place, which was valued at $7,500. This all was left to Ann.

Aunt Emma Mabie lived in the town of Bennington. Aunt Emma was a widow, rather careful about money. She had a pension because her late husband had been a veteran of the Civil War, and she did dressmaking. Ann didn’t especially care to live with her.

Aunt Lydia Graves, in Old Orchard, younger of the two Smith sisters, closely resembled Ann’s mother, except that she might have been adjudged even more comely had it not been for the fretful expression of her face and the slightly nagging quality in her voice.

Aunt Lydia and her short, stocky, rather silent, druggist husband, Richard, lived in a big yellow house with their three children, Richard, Jr., twenty, who was going to Amherst; Davis, sixteen, who was planning to go to Yale, and Marion, twelve, still in High School. Aunt Lydia was famous as a housekeeper. Her home was immaculate. She didn’t allow her husband or her sons to smoke in it, because the tobacco fumes stayed in the curtains and drapes and the ashes messed up the floors. In fact, she insisted on the males using the back door most of the time, and for several years while the boys were young made them remove their shoes before they entered the house.

“You wouldn’t like that, would you?” Dr. Benham asked, when he and Ann discussed the situation.

Ann’s only blood uncle, her mother’s brother, A. Howard Smith, lived in Westchester County and commuted to New York, where he had become more than merely well-to-do in the real estate business. The A. Howard Smiths, A. Howard and his wife, Elizabeth Newton Donellan Smith, had eight children, who all spoke with English accents, posted when they rode horseback, played golf, tennis and whist. Howard’s first initial concealed the name Adonijah. Dr. Benham said of this branch of the family:

“As I see it, Annie, you wouldn’t want to be an extra wheel on the cart anywhere. You’d have to be living on your uncle. He’s rich and can afford it, but maybe you can’t. Clarence and Rebecca have known you ever since you were hardly as big as a good-sized peanut. They haven’t any children of their own, and they love you. They want you. You can pay your way in affection and a little work around with them. Anyhow, it won’t do any harm to try, if you feel like it. What do you think?”

“I’d rather live with Uncle Clarence and Aunt Rebecca than anybody,” Ann said.

Clarence looked up from his rose bushes and saw Dr. Benham in his buggy, heading toward Southfield Centre. Clarence straightened up and called:

“Hey, Doc.”

Dr. Benham said:

“Whoa, Sam.”

Sam stopped, craned his neck and looked at the doctor, and then settled himself comfortably with his off-front leg bent at the knee.

The doctor wrapped the reins around his never-used whip, put his right foot, encased in a Congress Boot with elastic sides, on the right front wheel of the buggy, and removed a half-burned Connecticut cigar from the tobacco-stained area of white mustache and Vandyke, and spat into the dust. He said:

“Nice day, Clarence.”

Clarence, in collarless shirt, unpressed trousers supported by red and blue galluses, closed the gate of the white picket fence behind him and reached up a big brown hand, which the doctor shook warmly.

“A weather-breeder, though,” Clarence said. “Ain’t a cloud in the sky.”

The doctor nodded and said:

“Wouldn’t be surprised if we had a lot of rain inside of twenty-four hours.”

Sam moved his front feet forward and his hind feet backward, and released a stream of water, which spattered when it hit the dust. Clarence moved quickly away. Dr. Benham grinned.

“Catch ye, Clarence?” he asked. “Sam’s kidneys don’t seem to hold quite so well now as they did when he was younger.”

Clarence lighted one of the doctor’s cigars with a sulphur match. He took two short puffs and one long one, and spat. He said:

“I wanted to talk to you about Annie, Doc.”

“I just passed her back by Si Brockaway’s,” the doctor said. “She didn’t look very sick to me.”

Clarence grinned and knocked ashes from his cigar. Then his face became solemn and his voice lowered. He said:

“I walks into the kitchen last Saturday night and there’s Annie takin’ a bath in the washtub. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather, Doc. She ain’t a little girl any more. She’s a woman. She’s got the prettiest breasts you ever seen—plump as a partridge.”

Dr. Benham nodded. Sam took a step forward. Clarence’s foot slipped from the rear wheel hub on which he had been resting it. The doctor shouted:

“Whoa, Sam.”

Sam looked around, with an expression as near a grin as any horse might achieve. Clarence drew a big jackknife from his pocket, opened the big blade, and began delicately to test its point on the hard rubber tires of the buggy. The doctor crossed his legs, right leg over left, holding his right shin, partly covered by a garterless white sock, with both hands.

“Annie’s been menstruating for two months, Clarence,” he said.

“Well, I swan!” Clarence exclaimed.

The doctor lighted a fresh cigar on the butt of the one he had been smoking, tossing the butt into the road.

“She’s a beautiful little thing,” the doctor said.

Clarence puffed hard on his cigar, held it up and looked closely at it, and threw it away. The doctor produced a fresh one and offered it to Clarence. Clarence waved it away. He said:

“No thankee, Doc. I guess I’ll have a chew.”

He dug a plug of black tobacco from his trousers, cut off a chunk with his knife, and popped it into his mouth. He put his right hand on the seat rail and rocked the buggy gently, spat, and said:

“I was never one that put much stock in the theory that artists and doctors only regarded the female of the species as one of them bug chasers looks at a butterfly in a glass case. You know, only in a scientific spirit, so to speak.”

Dr. Benham blew smoke from his stogy and grinned.

“You aren’t so far wrong, Clarence,” he agreed. “Artists and doctors are males first, and artists and doctors second.”

“And that goes for uncles by adoption,” Clarence said.

He rocked the buggy again, gazing into Dr. Benham’s tired, kindly eyes.

“I’m not one of them degenerates, I hope,” Clarence continued, “but seeing that little girl standing there in the washtub with the soap suds on her made me think that if she ain’t a woman already she’ll be one quicker’n Jack Robinson.”

The doctor raised his broad-brimmed yellow soft straw hat and rubbed the bald spot on the top of his head, puffed his cigar and said: “You’re a good man, Clarence. I’ve practised medicine for more than fifty years, and human nature and the sex question is a heap more of a puzzle to me now than it was when I was a young man. I’ve had women come to see me that have been married for years and still were virgins. I’ve treated little girls that were too young to be married that weren’t virgins. The only thing about the sex question that makes me rejoice is that I don’t have to worry about it any more personally.”

“This perticalar sex question has got me stumped, Doc. Ann is only fourteen, but she’s big for her age, and something has got to be done about her. She ought to be told some things, and I was thinking you was the one to do it.”

Dr. Benham nodded his head thoughtfully, grinned, and said:

“It’s too bad Rebecca wouldn’t do it.”

Clarence spat again, and said:

“You know Rebecca, Doc. She’s one of them old-fashioned Puritans. I never seen her undressed in my life. An arm or a leg is a limb to her. And sex is something that’s done but isn’t discussed. She thought kissing made babies up till the time we was married.”

The doctor scowled and spat, and said:

“I know her.”

“She’s a good woman,” Clarence hastened to say. “She’s the salt of the earth. There ain’t anything she wouldn’t do for a body. But she’s sot in her ways. Why, Doc, once on a cold night I broke wind in bed, and she would hardly speak to me for a week. I’m supposed to get up and go out to the backhouse same as if I was answering a call of nature.”

“Some women are like that,” the doctor agreed. “And some ain’t so fussy.”

Clarence grinned and said:

“So I’ve heerd tell.”

The doctor knocked off ashes from his cigar against the iron tire of the rear wheel and put the cigar back in his mouth. He always champed the end, and the cigar was pretty wet and well chewed. He gathered up the reins and said:

“I’ll be glad to have a talk with Ann, Clarence. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she knew a lot already. She always struck me as pretty smart.”

“Oh, she’s smart all right, and she knows where babies come from—seen calves and kittens born—but I always figured a nice talk to a young one like that, sensible like you could do it, with no scary stuff but just hoss sense, might be good for a young one that seems to be so full of sap. I’d say she might be just the opposite of Rebecca in some respects, Doc.”

The doctor nodded again, chirruping to Sam.

“She has all the ear-marks,” he admitted as Sam began to move. “Get up there,” he said to Sam. “Good day, Clarence.”

The doctor crammed his broad-brimmed hat down further over his head. Sam broke into a trot, his hoofs and the spinning, shining wheels leaving a trail of golden dust which settled across the weeds and grass and goldenrod and asters which lined the road under the rustling maples.