Growing Up Read Online Free PDF Page B

1730.
    Why a settlement rose there in the first place is a mystery. The village sat a third of a mile back from the only paved road in the territory, and the sole waterway was a creek so shallow I could wade across it and barely get my feet wet. To get in from the main highway, travelers had to wind through thick stands of brush along a dirt road that could swallow an automobile all the way to the axles in the mud season. When it finally arrived at Morrisonville, this road forked. One branch ambled toward my Uncle Irvey’s house, then lurched to avoid hitting the creek and disappeared into a briar patch. The other branch ran smack through the middle of town as though intending to become a real road, but it lost heart after it passed my grandmother’s house and meandered off in a lackadaisical path toward the mountain.
    This was the same road that ran past the Arlington School to Sam Reever’s bootleggery. It came to rest smack against the mountain two miles west of Morrisonville. My great-grandfather Daniel Baker used to live in a log house back there. He was a gunsmith who turned to tailoring after the declining need for full-time gun-makers made the craft unprofitable. Born shortly after the War of 1812, he could still walk five miles carrying a sack of cornmeal when he was eighty years old, and he lived to see the arrival of the twentieth century.
    His son George moved down to Morrisonville around 1880 and went into blacksmithing. George was short and on the slender side, not the towering, heavily muscled stereotype of the blacksmith celebrated in Longfellow’s poem. His devotion to Christian worship was remarkable. He required a minimum of two church services each Sunday to keep his soul in sound repair, and after partaking of the Gospel at morning and afternoon servings he often set out across the fields for a third helping atdusk if he heard of a church with lamps lit for nocturnal psalming.
    Shortly before moving into Morrisonville, he had married Ida Rebecca Brown, the daughter of a local farmer. Ida Rebecca was only nineteen at her marriage, but she took to power as naturally as George took to toil. George built his blacksmith shop hard by the stone-and-log house in which Ida Rebecca ruled, and there he pursued a life of piety, toil, and procreation.
    He was as vigorous at procreation as he was at churchgoing. In the first year of their marriage, Ida Rebecca produced a son. In the next ten years she produced nine more, including twin boys. In 1897, after an uncommonly long pause of more than four years, an eleventh son was born. He was to become my father. They named him Benjamin.
    The line didn’t stop there, though. Two years later there was, at last, a daughter; and five years after her, a twelfth son. Thirteen children was not a record for the neighborhood, nor even very remarkable. One family close by produced children in such volume that the parents ran out of names and began giving them numbers. One of their sons, whom I particularly envied for his heroic biceps, was named Eleven.
    How big my father’s family might have become eventually is hard to say, for Grandfather George suffered a stroke in 1907 and died at home, at the still fruitful age of fifty-two. There was a family mystery about his dying words. These, according to Ida Rebecca, were “into midget and out of midget.” At least they sounded like “into midget and out of midget,” though Ida Rebecca never knew if this was exactly what he was trying to say or, if it was, what he meant by it. Nor did she ask him. He belonged to the Order of Red Men, one of those lodge brotherhoods common at the turn of the century which cherished secret handshakes and mumbo-jumbo passwords. Ida Rebecca hesitated to ask him what he meant by “into midget and out of midget” for fear she might be delving improperly into the sacred mysteries of the lodge.
    In the eighteen years between Grandfather George’s death and my arrival in Morrisonville, Ida Rebecca