Eloquent Silence Read Online Free PDF Page A

truth, although some were a little more reckless than this and liked certain people in spite of their lack of worldly goods.
    Thus, when the time came for the two eldest siblings to be off on the road to life, the household consisted of Tootsie, the younger girl, Barbara and three younger sons, Phillip, Douglas and Neil. Old Jerry was a man of considerable wisdom who knew what was what and how to run his family more or less by remote control, absenting himself from the farm if and when he felt the urge to go courting, which he often did.
    In those pre-mobile telephone days, there was only a telephone party line with five farms connected to a country exchange in Mrs. McGregor’s kitchen at Aubunny, several miles over the paddocks from the von Hildebrand acres. All that good lady had to do was to pick up her accouterment and listen in to whoever was discussing whatever on the party line. She could then inform others of the latest juicy gossip or not, according to her whim.
    Thus Mrs. McGregor knew what was going on in the district and in the von Hildebrand family home almost before the inhabitants did themselves and certainly before their neighbors knew. Had she so wished, she could have informed Old Jerry’s children as to his movements, knowing as she did what time he was expecting to fly to the arms of his paramour by courtesy of his old clapped-out Ford, circa 1950.
    The father, Old Jerry, the man of the house, was missing for most of the time, gone a-hunting in his round, steel-rimmed glasses with his white hair circling his head like a halo, leaving a bald acreage on top. He was either playing golf, courting a seamstress from the dry cleaner’s in Cedarwood, or bending his elbow at the Perishing Plains Hotel, some miles distant from the farm.
    When he came home late at night, (which he may or may not deign to do), he may be bearing a case of fruit or a box of assorted soda. Maybe he could be seen lumping a side of beef for the girls to freeze the next morning if it was still fit for human consumption or cut up for the cattle dogs, if it was rather rank. Maybe he might have a live piglet or lamb trussed up in the boot of the Ford ready for the boys to slaughter after breakfast.
    No one ever knew what to expect from Old Jerry. He was full of surprises. One day he brought home a batch of tiny kittens that hadn’t even opened their eyes. Tootsie was ropeable, knowing they would have to be fed with an eyedropper around the clock, but Old Jerry told her that they would be good for catching mice in the barn when they got a little older. Tootsie found that she could never forgive her father for this imposition on her time and energy and carried a grudge for years.
    Or perhaps the father would arrive empty handed and the family would have to wait until he was good and ready for a day’s marketing. This event could not usually be depended upon happening until late afternoon after he had slept off the previous night’s activities. Then they could wait for the smaller children to arrive off the school bus once he had a cup of tea and a plateful of bacon and eggs. On arriving in town he could allow his offspring to have a meal at the Mount Mee cafe, ‘The Dewdrop Inn,’ while he spent an hour or two or three with his paramour.
    But he was a good father in his own way, (or so he told them all), so preoccupied with his own life that he barely raised his voice to his brood, affectionate in an off-hand manner and never physically violent towards any of them. He would have been highly offended had any of the neighbors or the late Josie’s extended family, the Gessop Brothers Limited, for whom he ran the share farm, thought he was neglecting his youngsters in any way.
    It was a case of hitting home base, roaring something indistinct to all in general, seeing that the family wanted for nothing in the line of essentials and then being off for the rest of the day and perhaps the night. When he came home in a state of exhaustion or