VIRGINIA, 1857—The two children, Randall and Emily, slept with Auntie Bee. Young Randall, about eight or nine, was a wild unruly child, truly a rambunctious pest.
I have never seen one boy get into so much mischief and deviltry. He was the only one who ever dared to run in Bee’s garden. You’d see him tearing through her flower beds like hound after a rabbit. Everybody knew Auntie Bee’s rules—look all you want but do not touch.
After Randall whipped through her garden on one of his mad chases, he always left behind a trail of crushed flowers. Auntie Bee would call him over and I thought now, for sure, he would receive a good hard wallop. She would listen to him explain that he was only trying to catch a field mouse for a pet or a gopher so she could cook it for dinner. And Bee, bless her heart, would always melt like warm soft pudding. Flashing one of her wide Auntie Bee smiles, she would bend down and kiss the top of his head.
The one time Bee did lose patience with Randall, it was severe. Early one morning, everybody was getting ready to leave for the day. Bee was cleaning the floor and she looked under a pile of straw and found a box.
She picked it up cautiously and opened the lid. She let out a sudden shriek and dropped the box. Suddenly, we had all kinds of tiny creatures slithering and hopping all over the cabin. We were overrun by spiders, beetles, worms, lady bugs, frogs, lizards and one very long snake.
Oh, man, was she steamed! “You get these varmints out of here,” she hollered. Next thing we knew, she got hold of her broomstick and was smacking poor Randall on his head.
And she wasn’t the only one angry. Everybody was yelling and cursing that poor boy as they ran out the door. You never saw people clear out of a place so quickly. I stayed behind with Mose and we got down on our hands and knees hunting down every last one of those crawly little things. We managed to collect them all and get them back in the box.
Randall watched the fuss, wide-eyed and bewildered. He could not understand why everyone was mad at him. Why didn’t they like his harmless little creatures?
Mose seemed to understand. “Why don’t you bury your friends outside,” he said, patting the boy on the head. “You can dig them up any time you want.”
That boy was headed for trouble. He wasn’t old enough to send out to the field with the men but I thought they should hurry up and put him to work just to keep him busy.
Emily, his baby sister, was a little bit of a thing, four, maybe five. She never did talk much. I don’t think I ever heard her say a word. But she was a smiling, happy girl. You would always hear her giggling, cooing and humming. That little girl was filled with the innocent joys of childhood, too young to know anything about her state in life. She had no idea of the hardships waiting for her.
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If you want to purchase the book, you can order it directly from the publisher:
www.synergebooks.com or on my website:
www.wingsfirstflight.com
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Sunday, February 12th 2012 at 12:28PM
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