Amanda by Anna Balmer Myers (read my book TXT) 📕

“Nothin’ ails us,” declared Phil. “We just feel like laughin’.”

“Ach,” said Aunt Rebecca, “this dumb laughin’ is all for nothin’. Anyhow, you better not laugh too much, for you got to cry as much as you laugh before you die.”

“Then I’ll have to cry oceans!” Amanda admitted. “There’ll be another Niagara Falls, right here in Lancaster County, I’m thinkin’.”

“Ach,” said Millie, “that’s just another of them old superstitions.”

“Yes,” Aunt Rebecca said solemnly, “nobody believes them no more. But it’s a lot of truth in ‘em just the same. I often took notice that as high as the spiders build their webs in August so high will the snow be that winter. Nowadays people don’t study the almanac or look for signs. Young ones is by far too smart. The farmers plant their seeds any time now, beans and peas in the Posey Woman sign and then they wonder why they get only flowers ‘stead of peas and beans. They take up red beets in the wrong sign and wonder why the beets cook up stringy. The women make sauerkraut in Gallas week and wonder why it’s bitter. I could tell them what’s the matter! There’s more to them old women’s signs than most people know. I never yet heard a dog cry at night that I didn’t hear of some one I know dyin’ soon after. I wouldn’t open an umbrella in the house for ten dollars—it’s bad luck—yes, you laugh,” she said accusingly to Philip. “But you got lots to learn yet. My goodness, when I think of all I learned since I was as old as you! Of all the new things in the world! I guess till you’re as old as I am there’ll be lots more.”

“Sure Mike,” said the boy, rather flippantly. “What’s all new since you was little?” he asked his aunt.

“Telephone, them talkin’ machines, sewin’ machines—anyhow, they were mighty scarce then—trolleys–-”

“Automobiles?”

“My goodness, yes! Them awful things! They scare the life out abody. I don’t go in none and I don’t want no automobile hearse to haul me, neither. I’d be afraid it’d run off.”

“Great horn spoon, Aunt Rebecca, but that would be a gay ride,” the boy said, while Amanda giggled and Uncle Amos winked to Millie, who made a hurried trip to the stove for coffee.

“Ach,” came the aunt’s rebuke. “You talk too much of that slang stuff. I guess I’ll take the next trolley home,” she said, unconscious of the merriment she had caused. “I’d like to help with the dishes, but I want to get home before it gets so late for me. Anyhow, Amanda is big enough to help. When I was big as her I cooked and baked and worked like a woman. Why, when I was just a little thing, Mom’d tell me to go in the front room and pick the snipples off the floor and I’d get down and do it. Nobody does that now, neither. They run a sweeper over the carpets and wear ‘em out.”

“But the floors are full of germs,” said Amanda.

“Cherms—what are them?”

“Why, dreadful things! I learned about them at school. They are little, crawly bugs with a lot of legs, and if you eat them or breathe them in you’ll get scarlet fever or diphtheria.”

“Ach, that’s too dumb!” Aunt Rebecca was unimpressed. “I don’t believe in no such things.” With that emphatic remark she stalked to the sitting-room for her bonnet. She met Phil coming out, his hands in his pockets. He paused in the doorway as Amanda and her mother joined the guest.

Aunt Rebecca lifted the black silk bonnet carefully from the little table and Amanda shifted nervously from one foot to the other. If only Aunt Rebecca wouldn’t hold the bonnet so the worm would fall to the floor! Then the woman gave the stiff headgear a dexterous turn and the squirming thing landed on her head.

“My goodness! My goodness!” she cried as something soft brushed her cheek. Intently inquisitive, she stooped and picked from the floor a fat, green, wriggling tobacco worm.

“One of them cherms, I guess, Amanda, ain’t?” she said as she looked keenly at the child.

Amanda blushed and was silent. Philip was unable to hide his guilt. “Now, when did tobacco worms learn to live in bonnets?” she asked the boy as she eyed him reproachfully.

Mrs. Reist looked hurt. Her gentle reproof, “Children, I’m ashamed of you!” cut deeper with Amanda than the scolding of Aunt Rebecca—“You’re a bad pair! Almost you spoiled me my good bonnet. If I’d squeezed that worm on my cap it would have ruined it! My goodness, you both need a good spankin’, that’s what. Too bad you ain’t got a pop to learn you!”

“It was only for fun, Aunt Rebecca,” said Amanda, truly ashamed. But Phil put his hand over his mouth to hide a grin.

“Fun—what for fun is that—to be so disrespectful to an old aunt? And you, Philip, ain’t one bit ashamed. Your mom just ought to make you hunt all the worms in the whole tobacco patch. My goodness, look at that clock! Next with this dumb foolin’ I’ll miss that trolley yet. I must hurry myself now.”

“I’m sorry, Aunt Rebecca,” Amanda said softly, eager to make peace with the woman, whom she knew to be kind, though a bit severe.

“Ach, I don’t hold no spite. But I think it’s high time you learn to behave. Such a big girl like you ought to help her brother be good, not learn him tricks. Boys go to the bad soon enough. I’m goin’ now,” she addressed Mrs. Reist, “and you let me know when you boil apple butter and I’ll come and help stir.”

“All right, Rebecca. I hope the children will behave and not cut up like to-day. You are always so ready to help us—I can’t understand why they did such a thing. I’m ashamed.”

“Ach, it’s all right, long as my bonnet ain’t spoiled. If that had happened then there’d be a different kind o’ bird pipin’.”

After she left Philip proceeded to do a Comanche Indian dance—in which Amanda joined by being pulled around the room by her dress skirt—in undisguised hilarity over the departure of their grim relative. Boys have little understanding of the older person who suppresses their animal energy and skylarking happiness.

“I ain’t had so much fun since Adam was a boy,” Philip admitted with pretended seriousness, while the family smiled at his drollness.