Читать книгу Little Man - George Herbert Sallans - Страница 7

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The first sensible memory to stay with George Battle fluttered out of the dawn of the century. It was the vision of his mother looking at him from the other side of a room that was full of seats with tall wooden backs. A fellow doesn't remember much at three, after all. Yet George had reason to remember this one, for he had the important idea that he had been traded to another woman who now held him on her lap.

"Your mama said I could take you home to live with me," said the woman with unreasonably good humour. But her smile never registered on George's mind. He scrambled up rebelliously on her lap and stared in a panic across the room at his mother for a denial of this preposterous trickery. He saw her face there, with other faces, but the rest were blurred, and only one face mattered.

It was a short and violent episode for George, and all the surrounding circumstances were for ever lost to him. Even the reunion a few moments later at the door of the little church departed in the mists of forgetfulness. Even family scenes a hundred times more weighty were dismissed from his baby mind as trifling beside this one blinding, volcanic thought that he had lost his mother.

How he got back to her, he never knew. Whether his sister Jean and his brother Harold even noticed it, he had no means of knowing, for neither could remember it in the years that followed. Nor, strange to say, could his father. But it stayed in George's mind as one of the inerasable pictures of his childhood. In all his after years, when he felt his instinctive dread of running out of things, he thought it might trace back to this one terrifying moment.

Thus do the jokes of children's years in passing leave their scars.

Slightly less vivid in George's mind was their ride in the family sleigh over the pitch holes that filled the road, and of standing, his hand in his sister's, in the snow with people all around him while they put something in the ground, out of George's sight. His father was there, too, and though it was very cold he had his head bare, and so did other men. Everybody cried quite a bit, except George. Not in the noisy, vocal way he believed crying should be done, but with handkerchiefs dabbing at their faces, and no sounds coming from them at all.

And then some women came and hugged George and smothered his face in their coats. A strange thing to do, but George put up with it as best he could.

His lithe memory jumped to the next vivid spot. Somehow they were home again; they all knelt down on the bare wooden floor, and Daddy was praying. George shuffled on his tender knees and tried to keep still. He put his face in his hands and shut his eyes so tight that little white specks showed in front of them.

At one place, when his Daddy had said, "Thy will be done—" his voice strangled and he stopped so long that George thought that was all, and started to get up. But he scrambled down again when his Daddy's voice resumed: "—on earth as it is in heaven."

When Daddy had said "Amen" they stood up, and George asked for Mama. Daddy said that Mama had gone to live with God. It was a mystery to George, for he had no idea what kind of a house God lived in. And so his mind gradually closed over the thought for the near years, until it should be needed again.

Then it seemed they had been on a long journey, and George and his brother Harold were in a little house with his Aunt Mary and his grandmother. There were woods all around them, and Aunt Mary had a big friendly brown dog called Toby. She also said he was a collie. Grandma, complicating matters, added that he was a mongrel. But a dog had to be one thing or the other with George, so Toby he stayed.

Life in the woods was an adventure. Where they had been they had known nothing bigger than an apple tree. Yet here was everything! Here were little paths leading into impenetrable jungle growth. Above them the oaks and maples towered far into the sky and made a hollow roar when the wind blew.

Vastly important was the big stump at the corner in the woods road which George used as a pulpit when he and Harold held church there. Memorable, too, were those shadows where they housed in their imagination many a bear and fierce lion and even an elephant.

There, through the long summer days, they played, and George in his fourth year filled out his strong body and his sturdy legs. His hair grew long and flaxen, and Harry and John Wilson, who owned the woods and the little house, and the adjoining farm where they lived as well, pretended they thought him a little girl. To a young man of four that could be serious, and it wore his patience down until one day Grandma made Harry set George up on a high stool and snip off the curls. George stepped down a maturer and wiser man.

He learned much about the Bible from Aunt Mary and Grandma. George liked best the story of Daniel in the lions' den, although he was hazy about the lions, and he gathered that the den was about the same as Harry's roothouse. George preferred playing the part of Daniel, who seemed a stout fellow. So in the seasons when there were no potatoes or turnips in the roothouse, he and Harold made it a den, and had Toby for a lion. Toby had practically no use for the rôle, especially the part that called for his incarceration in the roothouse. When the bad king, played by Harold, would march the fearless Daniel to the den, the odds were about ten to one that the fierce lion would be out of the den in a fraction of the time it took Daniel to get in.

Fall came, and Harold went off to school a half mile away, carrying his school bag stuffed with books and with sandwiches Aunt Mary made for him. It was then that George began in earnest to make use of the pulpit. The stump, about three feet high, faced a small clearing, and had a level, sawn top. He would purloin Grandma's Bible and hymn book, and take them out and lay them on top of the stump. He could just nicely see over. Then the choir would sing. Harold had appointed himself choir leader at their forest church, not so much because he wanted to lead the choir, as because that was the only job left. George was already preacher by prior right, since he had conceived the church, and even supplied the collection plate, a blackened pie plate which Aunt Mary could use no more. And after the choir would come the sermon.

"The Lord said on to Moses, go and see why the bush is burning. Moses went down and met a fierce lion and hitmotized him. (The word lost its appeal for George when he found it was "hypnotized.") Verily I say on to you, the lion was pretty scairt."

"The choir will now sing Jesus Lover of My Soul and Brother Billings will take up the awfring."