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

noticed … Oh, there they were going to the left again! This time, in her

flurry, she made a mistake about which hand was which and pulled wildly

on the left line! The horses docilely walked off the road into a shallow

ditch, the wagon tilted … help! Why didn’t Uncle Henry help! Uncle Henry

continued intently figuring on the back of his envelope.

Elizabeth Ann, the perspiration starting out on her forehead, pulled on

the other line. The horses turned back up the little slope, the wheel

grated sickeningly against the wagonbox—she was SURE they would tip

over! But there! somehow there they were in the road, safe and sound,

with Uncle Henry adding up a column of figures. If he only knew, thought

the little girl, if he only KNEW the danger he had been in, and how he

had been saved … ! But she must think of some way to remember, for sure,

which her right hand was, and avoid that hideous mistake again.

And then suddenly something inside Elizabeth Ann’s head stirred and

moved. It came to her, like a clap, that she needn’t know which was

right or left at all. If she just pulled the way she wanted them to go—

the horses would never know whether it was the right or the left rein!

It is possible that what stirred inside her head at that moment was her

brain, waking up. She was nine years old, and she was in the third A

grade at school, but that was the first time she had ever had a whole

thought of her very own. At home, Aunt Frances had always known exactly

what she was doing, and had helped her over the hard places before she

even knew they were there; and at school her teachers had been carefully

trained to think faster than the scholars. Somebody had always been

explaining things to Elizabeth Ann so industriously that she had never

found out a single thing for herself before. This was a very small

discovery, but an original one. Elizabeth Ann was as excited about it as

a mother-bird over the first egg that hatches.

She forgot how afraid she was of Uncle Henry, and poured out to him her

discovery. “It’s not right or left that matters!” she ended

triumphantly; “it’s which way you want to go!” Uncle Henry looked at her

attentively as she talked, eyeing her sidewise over the top of one

spectacle-glass. When she finished—“Well, now, that’s so,” he admitted,

and returned to his arithmetic.

It was a short remark, shorter than any Elizabeth Ann had ever heard

before. Aunt Frances and her teachers always explained matters at

length. But it had a weighty, satisfying ring to it. The little girl

felt the importance of having her statement recognized. She turned back

to her driving.

The slow, heavy plow horses had stopped during her talk with Uncle

Henry. They stood as still now as though their feet had grown to the

road. Elizabeth Ann looked up at the old man for instructions. But he

was deep in his figures. She had been taught never to interrupt people,

so she sat still and waited for him to tell her what to do.

But, although they were driving in the midst of a winter thaw, it was a

pretty cold day, with an icy wind blowing down the back of her neck. The

early winter twilight was beginning to fall, and she felt rather empty.

She grew very tired of waiting, and remembered how the grocer’s boy at

home had started his horse. Then, summoning all her courage, with an

apprehensive glance at Uncle Henry’s arithmetical silence, she slapped

the reins up and down on the horses’ backs and made the best imitation

she could of the grocer’s boy’s cluck. The horses lifted their heads,

they leaned forward, they put one foot before the other … they were off!

The color rose hot on Elizabeth Ann’s happy face. If she had started a

big red automobile she would not have been prouder. For it was the first

thing she had ever done all herself … every bit … every smitch! She had

thought of it and she had done it. And it had worked!

Now for what seemed to her a long, long time she drove, drove so hard

she could think of nothing else. She guided the horses around stones,

she cheered them through freezing mud-puddles of melted snow, she kept

them in the anxiously exact middle of the road. She was quite astonished

when Uncle Henry put his pencil and paper away, took the reins from her

hands, and drove into a yard, on one side of which was a little low

white house and on the other a big red barn. He did not say a word, but

she guessed that this was Putney Farm.

Two women in gingham dresses and white aprons came out of the house. One

was old and one might be called young, just like Aunt Harriet and Aunt

Frances. But they looked very different from those aunts. The dark-haired one was very tall and strong-looking, and the white-haired one

was very rosy and fat. They both looked up at the little, thin, white-faced girl on the high seat, and smiled. “Well, Father, you got her, I

see,” said the brown-haired one. She stepped up to the wagon and held up

her arms to the child. “Come on, Betsy, and get some supper,” she said,

as though Elizabeth Ann had lived there all her life and had just driven

into town and back.

And that was the arrival of Elizabeth Ann at Putney Farm.

The brown-haired one took a long, strong step or two and swung her up on

the porch. “You take her in, Mother,” she said. “I’ll help Father

unhitch.”

The fat, rosy, white-haired one took Elizabeth Ann’s skinny, cold little

hand in her soft warm fat one, and led her along to the open kitchen

door. “I’m your Aunt Abigail,” she said. “Your mother’s aunt, you know.

And that’s your Cousin Ann that lifted you down, and it was your Uncle

Henry that brought you out from town.” She shut the door and went on, “I

don’t know if your Aunt Harriet ever happened to tell you about us, and

so …”

Elizabeth Ann interrupted her hastily, the recollection of all Aunt

Harriet’s remarks vividly before her. “Oh yes, oh yes!” she said. “She

always talked about you. She talked about you a lot, she …” The little

girl stopped short and bit her lip.

If Aunt Abigail guessed from the expression on Elizabeth Ann’s face what

kind of talking Aunt Harriet’s had been, she showed it only by a

deepening of the wrinkles all around her eyes. She said, gravely: “Well,

that’s a good thing. You know all about us then.” She turned to the

stove and took out of the oven a pan of hot baked beans, very brown and

crispy on top (Elizabeth Ann detested beans), and said, over her

shoulder, “Take your things off, Betsy, and hang ‘em on that lowest hook

back of the door. That’s YOUR hook.”

The little girl fumbled forlornly with the fastenings of her cape and

the buttons of her coat. At home, Aunt Frances or Grace had always taken

off her wraps and put them away for her. When, very sorry for herself,

she turned away from the hook, Aunt Abigail said: “Now you must be cold.

Pull a chair right up here by the stove.” She was stepping around

quickly as she put supper on the table. The floor shook under her. She

was one of the fattest people Elizabeth Ann had ever seen. After living

with Aunt Frances and Aunt Harriet and Grace the little girl could

scarcely believe her eyes. She stared and stared.

Aunt Abigail seemed not to notice this. Indeed, she seemed for the

moment to have forgotten all about the newcomer. Elizabeth Ann sat on

the wooden chair, her feet hanging (she had been taught that it was not

manners to put her feet on the rungs), looking about her with miserable,

homesick eyes. What an ugly, low-ceilinged room, with only a couple of

horrid kerosene lamps for light; and they didn’t keep any girl,

evidently; and they were going to eat right in the kitchen like poor

people; and nobody spoke to her or looked at her or asked her how she

had “stood the trip”; and here she was, millions of miles away from Aunt

Frances, without anybody to take care of her. She began to feel the

tight place in her throat which, by thinking about hard, she could

always turn into tears, and presently her eyes began to water.

Aunt Abigail was not looking at her at all, but she now stopped short in

one of her rushes to the table, set down the butter-plate she was

carrying, and said “There!” as though she had forgotten something. She

stooped—it was perfectly amazing how spry she was—and pulled out from

under the stove a half-grown kitten, very sleepy, yawning and

stretching, and blinking its eyes. “There, Betsy!” said Aunt Abigail,

putting the little yellow and white ball into the child’s lap. “There is

one of old Whitey’s kittens that didn’t get given away last summer, and

she pesters the life out of me. I’ve got so much to do. When I heard you

were coming, I thought maybe you would take care of her for me. If you

want to, enough to bother to feed her and all, you can have her for your

own.”

Elizabeth Ann bent her thin face over the warm, furry, friendly little

animal. She could not speak. She had always wanted a kitten, but Aunt

Frances and Aunt Harriet and Grace had always been sure that cats

brought diphtheria and tonsilitis and all sorts of dreadful diseases to

delicate little girls. She was afraid to move for fear the little thing

would jump down and run away, but as she bent cautiously toward it the

necktie of her middy blouse fell forward and the kitten in the middle of

a yawn struck swiftly at it with a soft paw. Then, still too sleepy to

play, it turned its head and began to lick Elizabeth Ann’s hand with a

rough little tongue. Perhaps you can imagine how thrilled the little

girl was at this!

She held her hand perfectly still until the kitten stopped and began

suddenly washing its own face, and then she put her hands under it and

very awkwardly lifted it up, burying her face in the soft fur. The

kitten yawned again, and from the pink-lined mouth came a fresh, milky

breath. “Oh!” said Elizabeth Ann under her breath. “Oh, you DARLING!”

The kitten looked at her with bored, speculative eyes.

Elizabeth Ann looked up now at Aunt Abigail and said, “What is its name,

please?” But the old woman was busy turning over a griddle full of

pancakes and did not hear. On the train Elizabeth Ann had resolved not

to call these hateful relatives by the same name she had for dear Aunt

Frances, but she now forgot that resolution and said, again, “Oh, Aunt

Abigail, what is its name?”

Aunt Abigail faced her blankly. “Name?” she asked. “Whose … oh, the

kitten’s? Goodness, child, I stopped racking my brain for kitten names

sixty years ago. Name it yourself. It’s yours.”

Elizabeth Ann had already named it in her own mind, the name she had

always thought she WOULD call a kitten by, if she ever had one. It was

Eleanor, the prettiest name she knew.

Aunt Abigail pushed a pitcher toward her. “There’s the cat’s saucer