Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (recommended ebook reader TXT) 📕

“Oh, till it tastes right,” said Aunt Abigail, carelessly. “Fix it to

suit yourself, and I guess the rest of us will like it. Take that big

spoon to stir it with.”

Elizabeth Ann took off the lid and began stirring in sugar, a

teaspoonful at a time, but she soon saw that that made no impression.

She poured in a cupful, stirred it vigorously, and tasted it. Better,

but not quite enough. She put in a tablespoonful more and tasted it,

staring off into space under bended brows as she concentrated her

attention on the taste. It was quite a responsibility to prepare the

apple sauce for a family. It was ever so good, too. But maybe a LITTLE

more sugar. She put in a teaspoonful and decided it was just exactly

right!

“Done?” asked Aunt Abigail. “Take it off, then, and pour it out in that

big yellow bowl, and put it on the table in front of your place. You’ve

made it; you ought to serve it.”

“It isn’t done, is it?” asked Betsy. “That isn’t all you do to make

apple sauce!”

“What else could you do?” asked Aunt Abigail.

“Well … !” said Elizabeth Ann, very much surprised. “I didn’t know it

was so easy to cook!”

“Easiest thing in the world,” said Aunt Abigail gravely, with the merry

wrinkles around her merry old eyes all creased up with silent fun.

When Uncle Henry came in from the barn, with old Shep at his heels, and

Cousin Ann came down from upstairs, where her sewing-machine had been

humming like a big bee, they were both duly impressed when told that

Betsy had set the table and made the apple sauce. They pronounced it

very good apple sauce indeed, and each sent his saucer back to the

little girl for a second helping. She herself ate three saucerfuls. Her

own private opinion was that it was the very best apple sauce ever made.

After supper was over and the dishes washed and wiped, Betsy helping

with the putting-away, the four gathered around the big lamp on the

table with the red cover. Cousin Ann was making some buttonholes in the

shirt-waist she had constructed that afternoon, Aunt Abigail was darning

socks, and Uncle Henry was mending a piece of harness. Shep lay on the

couch and snored until he got so noisy they couldn’t stand it, and

Cousin Ann poked him in the ribs and he woke up snorting and gurgling

and looking around very sheepishly. Every time this happened it made

Betsy laugh. She held Eleanor, who didn’t snore at all, but made the

prettiest little tea-kettle-singing purr deep in her throat, and opened

and sheathed her needle-like claws in Betsy’s dress.

“Well, how’d you get on at school?” asked Uncle Henry.

“I’ve got your desk,” said Elizabeth Ann, looking at him curiously, at

his gray hair and wrinkled, weather-beaten face, and trying to think

what he must have looked like when he was a little boy like Ralph.

“So?” said Uncle Henry. “Well, let me tell you that’s a mighty good

desk! Did you notice the deep groove in the top of it?”

Betsy nodded. She had wondered what that was used for.

“Well, that was the lead-pencil desk in the old days. When they couldn’t

run down to the store to buy things, because there wasn’t any store to

run to, how do you suppose they got their lead-pencils!” Elizabeth Ann

shook her head, incapable even of a guess. She had never thought before

but that lead-pencils grew in glass show-cases in stores.

“Well, sir,” said Uncle Henry, “I’ll tell you. They took a piece off the

lump of lead they made their bullets of, melted it over the fire in the

hearth down at the schoolhouse till it would run like water, and poured

it in that groove. When it cooled off, there was a long streak of solid

lead, about as big as one of our lead-pencils nowadays. They’d break

that up in shorter lengths, and there you’d have your lead-pencils, made

while you wait. Oh, I tell you in the old days folks knew how to take

care of themselves more than now.”

“Why, weren’t there any stores?” asked Elizabeth Ann. She could not

imagine living without buying things at stores.

“Where’d they get the things to put in a store in those days?” asked

Uncle Henry, argumentatively. “Every single thing had to be lugged clear

from Albany or from Connecticut on horseback.”

“Why didn’t they use wagons?” asked Elizabeth Ann.

“You can’t run a wagon unless you’ve got a road to run it on, can you?”

asked Uncle Henry. “It was a long, long time before they had any roads.

It’s an awful chore to make roads in a new country all woods and hills

and swamps and rocks. You were lucky if there was a good path from your

house to the next settlement.”

“Now, Henry,” said Aunt Abigail, “do stop going on about old times long

enough to let Betsy answer the question you asked her. You haven’t given

her a chance to say how she got on at school.”

“Well, I’m AWFULLY mixed up!” said Betsy, complainingly. “I don’t know

what I am! I’m second-grade arithmetic and third-grade spelling and

seventh-grade reading and I don’t know what in writing or composition.

We didn’t have those.”

Nobody seemed to think this very remarkable, or even very interesting.

Uncle Henry, indeed, noted it only to say, “Seventh-grade reading!” He

turned to Aunt Abigail. “Oh, Mother, don’t you suppose she could read

aloud to us evenings?”

Aunt Abigail and Cousin Ann both laid down their sewing to laugh! “Yes,

yes, Father, and play checkers with you too, like as not!” They

explained to Betsy: “Your Uncle Henry is just daft on being read aloud

to when he’s got something to do in the evening, and when he hasn’t he’s

as fidgety as a broody hen if he can’t play checkers. Ann hates checkers

and I haven’t got the time, often.”

“Oh, I LOVE to play checkers!” said Betsy.

“Well, NOW …” said Uncle Henry, rising instantly and dropping his half-mended harness on the table. “Let’s have a game.”

“Oh, Father!” said Cousin Ann, in the tone she used for Shep. “How about

that piece of breeching! You know that’s not safe. Why don’t you finish

that up first?”

Uncle Henry sat down again, looking as Shep did when Cousin Ann told him

to get up on the couch, and took up his needle and awl.

“But I could read something aloud,” said Betsy, feeling very sorry for

him. “At least I think I could. I never did, except at school.”

“What shall we have, Mother?” asked Uncle Henry eagerly.

“Oh, I don’t know. What have we got in this bookcase?” said Aunt

Abigail. “It’s pretty cold to go into the parlor to the other one.” She

leaned forward, ran her fat fore-finger over the worn old volumes, and

took out a battered, blue-covered book. “Scott?”

“Gosh, yes!” said Uncle Henry, his eyes shining. “The staggit eve!”

At least that was the way it sounded to Betsy, but when she took the

book and looked where Aunt Abigail pointed she read it correctly, though

in a timid, uncertain voice. She was very proud to think she could

please a grown-up so much as she was evidently pleasing Uncle Henry, but

the idea of reading aloud for people to hear, not for a teacher to

correct, was unheard-of.

The Stag at eve had drunk his fill

Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill,

she began, and it was as though she had stepped into a boat and was

swept off by a strong current. She did not know what all the words

meant, and she could not pronounce a good many of the names, but nobody

interrupted to correct her, and she read on and on, steadied by the

strongly-marked rhythm, drawn forward swiftly from one clanging,

sonorous rhyme to another. Uncle Henry nodded his head in time to the

rise and fall of her voice and now and then stopped his work to look at

her with bright, eager, old eyes. He knew some of the places by heart

evidently, for once in a while his voice would join the little girl’s

for a couplet or two. They chanted together thus:

A moment listened to the cry

That thickened as the chase drew nigh,

Then, as the headmost foes appeared,

With one brave bound, the copse he cleared.

At the last line Uncle Henry flung his arm out wide, and the child felt

as though the deer had made his great leap there, before her eyes.

“I’ve seen ‘em jump just like that,” broke in Uncle Henry. “A two-three-hundred-pound stag go up over a four-foot fence just like a piece of

thistledown in the wind.”

“Uncle Henry,” asked Elizabeth Ann, “what is a copse?”

“I don’t know,” said Uncle Henry indifferently. “Something in the woods,

must be. Underbrush most likely. You can always tell words you don’t

know by the sense of the whole thing. Go on.”

And stretching forward, free and far,

The child’s voice took up the chant again. She read faster and faster as

it got more exciting. Uncle Henry joined in on

For, jaded now and spent with toil,

Embossed with foam and dark with soil,

While every gasp with sobs he drew,

The laboring stag strained full in view.

The little girl’s heart beat fast. She fled along through the next

lines, stumbling desperately over the hard words but seeing the headlong

chase through them clearly as through tree-trunks in a forest. Uncle

Henry broke in in a triumphant shout:

The wily quarry shunned the shock

And TURNED him from the opposing rock;

Then dashing down a darksome glen,

Soon lost to hound and hunter’s ken,

In the deep Trossach’s wildest nook

His solitary refuge took.

“Oh MY!” cried Elizabeth Ann, laying down the book. “He got away, didn’t

he? I was so afraid he wouldn’t!”

“I can just hear those dogs yelping, can’t you?” said Uncle Henry.

Yelled on the view the opening pack.

“Sometimes you hear ‘em that way up on the slope of Hemlock Mountain

back of us, when they get to running a deer.”

“What say we have some pop-corn!” suggested Aunt Abigail. “Betsy, don’t

you want to pop us some?”

“I never DID,” said the little girl, but in a less doubtful tone than

she had ever used with that phrase so familiar to her. A dim notion was

growing up in her mind that the fact that she had never done a thing was

no proof that she couldn’t.

“I’ll show you,” said Uncle Henry. He reached down a couple of ears from

a big yellow cluster hanging on the wall, and he and Betsy shelled them

into the popper, popped it full of snowy kernels, buttered it, salted

it, and took it back to the table.

It was just as she was eating her first ambrosial mouthful that the door

opened and a fur-capped head was thrust in. A man’s voice said:

“Evenin’, folks. No, I can’t stay. I was down at the village just now,

and thought I’d ask for any mail down our way.” He tossed a newspaper

and a letter on the table and was gone.

The letter was addressed to Elizabeth Ann and it was from Aunt Frances.

She read it to herself while Uncle Henry read the newspaper. Aunt

Frances wrote that she had been perfectly horrified to learn that Cousin

Molly had not kept Elizabeth Ann with her,