Weeds in Bloom (3 page)

My first Greek philosopher pointed at my stone, nearby, where it still rested in the shallow shoreline water.

“Robert, it is within your grasp.”

S
HE LIVED UPROAD
.

Aunt Ida had resided in her tiny shack for near about all of her life. No amount of family persuasion could convince her to abandon the place. Or her independence.

From our farm it was most a mile. Uphill.

To visit her I had to hike a double-rutter, as Aunt Ida herself described it, two mules wide. It had been years since the last wagon had ventured up a mountain road fit only for hikers or goats. During the winter set, some of the loggers might use the trail to skid a few logs of rough spruce down to a sawyer, or to the pulp-and-paper mill.

Today I was using it.

As it was August, a winding furrow of fresh ferns had turned the bumpy strip between the wagon ruts a tall green. Amongst the ferns there were weeds,
and blue daisies taller than I was, even though my age was coming up eleven. The year was 1938.

It was hot.

Good weather for growing.

To my right, a stand of goldenrod was reaching for the sunshine, fingers extended, like a classroom of young children raising eager hands.

Climbing made the day seem hotter. One of the few summer boilers that stretched field corn, maddened dogs, and could rile up the women in the kitchens who were baking—or worse, canning.

As I hiked, my shirt had become a wash of uphill sweat because of the steep of the pitch. A bug was biting me. Using my free hand, I swatted at it, and possible missed. My other hand toted an unbleached muslin cloth, softer than a Sunday morning due to its countless surrenders to a sudsy brown bar of homemade lye soap in the command of Mama’s red knuckles. Inside the napkin rode a dozen baking-powder biscuits, still oven warm, and a small jar of mustard pickles that had been freckled with our homegrown dill.

Gifts for my great-great-aunt. Aunt Ida Peck was reputed to be one hundred and ten years old. Some claimed older.

Alive, but didn’t talk anymore.

She really didn’t have to. Because near to everyone in the county talked about her, told stories
about her adventures, and even whispered about some of her long-gone social activities. Rumor held that a century ago, in 1838, this particular Ida Peck had actual cocked back a musket hammer to full click and, without aiming or sighting along the barrel, shot, wounded, and killed a drunken half-crazed Saint Francis Indian by the name of Three Crows.

At the time, she was only nine.

Others said eight.

All I knew was this: that even now, in spite of Aunt Ida’s being well beyond a hundred, nobody ever considered molesting her with as much as a blink of bother. And that included the lowest types you could mention: tax assessors, revenue men, and judges. In her day, all of our Peck clan boasted, Aunt Ida knew how to still the very best whiskey out of sweet corn, water, and maple sugar. One swig would keep a lumberjack warm all winter, up until the middle of May.

A few tongues wagged, remembering a time in her life she’d served in a county jail. Not long, but long enough. A friendly sheriff slid open the bars to her cell and returned her to liberty. This was fair. Because Ida had been imprisoned over a very trivial matter. Nothing serious.

All she’d done was shoot a lawyer.

By that, she earned respect. Even the local
mountain clans, some of which were close to human (others less so)—the Yaws, the Swintons, the Korjacks—allowed that Aunt Ida held her ground. She also was known, and trusted, for holding her tongue whenever she’d been requested to patch up some unlucky buck’s gunshot wound. Or stitch a knife gash.

If your prize coonhound poked his fooly nose into a porcupine, Aunt Ida could easy the dog down to quiet and coax out every quill with a pair of pliers. Snip and pull.

She’d shot and skinned the last timber wolf to be spotted in northern Vermont and hung his hide on her front door.

Her only door.

Aunt Ida could needlepoint an entire Bible verse—“Jesus wept”—on a penny button, butcher a hog (tame or wild), dig up cure-all root (ginseng), and for people fixing to sink a well she could locate an underground vein of water by using a divining rod of laurel wood.

Some swore it was willow.

About half a century before I got spawned, General Ulysses S. Grant came hunting in Vermont. It was told to me that Grant personally visited her unpainted house and sipped her special remedy, sassafras tea, supposedly to ease the distress of short temper and long bottles.

There was, however, another reason for General Grant’s visit to Vermont: Ida Peck knew horses.

She could walk up to a strange gelding or mare, hold its head, smell its breath, study its eyes and teeth, and then determine if the particular animal was sound or sorry. Closing her eyes, she’d discover a spavin with a few gentle rubs of a hand. General Grant wanted Aunt Ida to help select mounts for the United States Cavalry.

She refused the job, stating that the Civil War had been one awesome mistake, Lincoln’s disaster, and little good would ever result from it.

In her time, Aunt Ida never wed herself a husband. Yet she raised eleven children. Three of those children happened to have been her own, born from her body. Several others were stray Pecks, and the remainder had been hatched by shirky and uncaring neighbors. To my mother’s knowing, there were forty-three people who claimed her as an aunt, eleven as a mother, and at least fivescore who counted her as a friend. She could drip a pure crab-apple jelly as easily as she’d manufacture her own brand of black gunpowder using hearth charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter. From a few bird feathers Ida could tie trout flies (wet or dry), all of which she could cast and hook a keeper.

Ida Peck knew how to clog-dance, sing over a hundred hymns from memory, recite her own
poetry, and quote from almost every chapter in the Scriptures, Old Testament or New.

She could neither read nor write.

But she’d fashion a banjo drumhead from the stretched hide of an ordinary house cat. Needless to say, if the cat was already a dead goner.

So, enough of my bragging.

On with the story.

Before I left our house for uproad that August day, Mama had reminded me that my Aunt Ida Peck was the family matriarch, an ancient who warranted my very best company manners. She was also the oldest living Peck in all of Vermont, my mother told me while she added a lick or two of pomade to sweeten my hair and mask my farm-boy fragrance.

Ready to pay call, I arrived.

The old woman was barefoot. With her eyes closed and mouth open, she rested in her rocker chair on the almost grassless dirt by her door. Her complexion was paler than a flour sack.

“Aunt Ida,” I called softly.

It took repeating.

Opening her eyes, she stared at a summer sky, then finally looked my way, as though questioning who I was. Foe or friend? A lad of ten winters or General Ulysses S. Grant?

“It’s me,” I told her. “Robert. My father is Haven
Peck, the third son of my grandfather Newton Peck.” I paused for a breath. “You are my great-great-aunt.”

Slowly her mouth closed, and for one forever-to-be-cherished moment, the flag blue returned to her eyes, studying me, possible wondering whether I’d ever measure up to manhood, to being a Peck and her kin.

I stayed for over an hour, listening to bluebirds and reading her a poem I’d composed. It was the last time I saw her alive.

I’m now over seventy. So sixty years later, I am still asking myself if I am worthy enough to call her … my Aunt Ida.

B
ARNEY
D
ISKIN WAS A
J
EW
.

Everybody in the entire town knew it, so there wasn’t any hope for Mr. Diskin to fib, claiming he wasn’t when he righteous was.

“Give him credit,” Papa said. “He ain’t ashamed of it.”

“No,” said Mama. “He walks with his head up high, just as though he was a normal everyday Vermonter.”

“A mite uppity,” said my Aunt Carrie, “seeing as he’s nothing more than a junk dealer.”

Even before my weaning (or shortly thereafter), I had been informed that old Barney Diskin was Jewish, though beyond my toddling years I had little or no idea exactly what a Jew really was. Nor did I bother a fig. No sleep lost. Jews, in the northern mountains of Vermont, were about as prevalent
as laughter in church, or folding money in a collection plate.

In our town there was only one.

Mr. Barney Diskin.

Nobody seemed to care ample much. Several of the members of the Election Board swore up and down that Mr. Diskin always voted straight Republican, even as far back as Theodore Roosevelt. Such historical authenticity was good enough for an Ivory-soap percentage of the local citizenry. It proved, beyond any doubt, that Barney Diskin was maybe a Jew, but definitely not one of those city types who appeared every summer along with the gnats.

Besides, he wasn’t a dang renter. Or a tourist. Mr. Diskin owned his land in fee simple absolute.

In Vermont, land is solid. Therefore, whenever folks possessed it and paid the taxes that fell due, this was prima facie evidence that they were burghers who rightly commanded Green Mountain State
turf
, resolute as the statue of the granite sentry that collected pigeon drop on our village square.

We all, somehow, grew to be as proud of our only Jew as we were of our only statue.

Solid was solid.

Prouder, in fact, of Mr. Diskin. For good reason. Our granite Minute Man never coughed up even a mill of tax loot. Barney Diskin did. So Vermonters,
being as they customarily were (tighter than a bull’s butt in fly time), long ago concluded that Mr. Diskin was a Republican, a paid-up citizen in good standing, and a worthy neighbor.

Even though nobody in New England ever took such a bold step as to throw something away, every town needed a junk depository. And, therefore, a junk dealer.

If you couldn’t lug (schlep) your junky stuff to Barney’s Junk, his wagon would, eventual, come to you to collect it in person … and help you pile it aboard.

There was talk.

Not about Mr. Barney Diskin.

But concerning his mule.

Veronica, everybody in town had observed, was skinny. This, for some strange reason, caused tongues to wag. Gossipers insisted that Veronica’s lean condition was due to her lack of proper nourishment—in turn, a result of the indisputable fact that Mr. Barney Diskin was too much of a skinflint to afford her ample hay or oatage.

Mr. Diskin was criticized even by Miss Maudie Rickford, whose canary had died of malnutrition.

People who knew nothing of hay, oats, or even sorghum expressed their opinions of what they now considered to be a proper mule’s diet. Had
faithful old Veronica been owned by a Yankee (or even an Irisher or a Eye-talian), little or no concern would have seeped through the clapboards and into the ether of local public opinion.

But dear Veronica, it seemed, was hardly an ordinary mule.

She became … “that Jew’s mule.”

Families who had starved, beaten, and neglected their livestock for no less than seven generations were up in arms. A local S.P.C.A. was formed. A Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Three people (two of whom were beyond the sprightly age of eighty) attended the first meeting.

Both of the octogenarians, who presumed that the assembly didn’t revolve around mule treatment but hoped it was about embroidery, fell asleep before the call to order. Nonetheless, their mere presence was computed to mean that all locals were socially aware of the eroding standards of animal husbandry now rampantly raging in our otherwise pro-bees/birds/beasties community.

It was almost as if someone had neglected Rin Tin Tin or Lassie.

A local veterinarian, however, stemmed a tidal wave of hysteria by conducting a complete examination of Veronica and concluding that (like people) some mules are chunky. Others are rails.
And there was absolutely no justification for either a citizen’s arrest or a search and seizure.

Mr. Diskin’s next-door neighbor, Miss Elspeth Hardigan, testified that for years she had observed her friend Barney tending and grooming and curry-combing his mule. No animal since the elephants of Hannibal had received such devoted benevolence, according to Miss Hardigan’s deposition.

The local S.P.C.A. then disbanded. Two of its three members had passed away. Their sudden demise wasn’t at all due to Mr. Diskin’s innocence, but rather to the unexpected levy of membership dues.

Veronica, the town decided, just happened to be a skinny mule, one of the eccentricities of nature, an accepted phenomenon.

Through it all, Veronica, though she had been the nucleus of attention, remained impervious to the publicity and maintained her usual I-don’t-give-a-haw nonchalance, in which she had established more than a modicum of equity.

Soup Vinson (his righteous name was Luther Wesley Vinson; he was over a year my senior and also my next-farm neighbor) and I called regularly at Mr. Diskin’s place.

Our calls were not social.

They were business.

Hearing from several of the more mature entrepreneurs
—those in the sixth grade—that a kid could collect tinfoil and sell it, we became instant collectors.

And bankers.

Our bank was burglarproof, consisting of a rusty tomato can, a cylindrical vault that had earlier been used for fishing worms. Without as much as a wash or rinse, Soup and I completed its conversion from a holder of warm bait to one of cold cash.

After several false starts (the most useless being when we mistook lead foil for tinfoil), our shining ball began slowly to grow, nourished mainly by inner sleeves of chewing gum.

Then we hit the jackpot.

Dolores Baginski’s Beauty Salon.

Braving its odor, a fragrance far worse than the dump’s or that of the alley behind Filput’s Fish, we rummaged through the trash cans at the beauty parlor in search of that treasure of all treasures, a discarded Kinky-Perm curler wrap. This prize, our expertise informed us, wasn’t lead. This shiny stuff was what Mr. Diskin would buy—the real McCoy, a metallic mother lode.