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Ben Fewclothes and perhaps because he needed a new one, he took the name. He and Aunt Ellie had a farm in the big bottom over there—about thirty acres or so, bordering on a slue. It was good land, and they made a pretty self-sufficient thing of it, the way all the farming people did then, or tried to. I called them Uncle Ben and Aunt Ellie. You might be thinking by now that I had a lot of aunts and uncles, but that was just the courtesy of those days; children were not allowed to go around first-naming older people.
    Uncle Ben would come over occasionally, but not often. He didn’t fish much, at least not in the river, and didn’t own a boat. But Aunt Ellie was a regular customer at the store, and whenever she came over she and Aunt Cordie would sit down together and visit and talk a while. Aunt Ellie conducted herself very consciously as a lady—was precise and careful always in her manners and her speech. Every Saturday morning she would come down the dug steps in the bank with a basket of eggs, a bucket of cream, and sometimes two or three old hens with their legs tied. Without much raising her voice, she would call out, “Mister Dagget! Mister Dagget!” And Uncle Othy would go in the boat and set her over the river to do her weekly dealing. After I got big enough, one of my favorite duties was to go along to help.
    When we got to the far side, I would step up into the bow of the johnboat, and while Uncle Othy held the boat steady against the bank I would help Aunt Ellie to step in and situate herself and her bucket and basket and whatever else she had brought. She would always say, “Well! Thank you, honey!” And then I would go back to my seat in the stern,
and Uncle Othy would row us across. When we got to the landing on our side, I would go forward and help Aunt Ellie get ashore. And she would say again, “Well! Thank you, honey!”
    We were bringing Aunt Ellie across one fine Saturday morning in June. The river was as still almost as glass; it was quiet all around, except for Uncle Arch Thripple who was up on his hillside plowing tobacco with old Dick. Uncle Arch was ripping as usual:
    â€œGet up, Dick! Haw! Haw! Whoa! Get over haw ! Get up! Gee , Dick, damn you to hell! Whooooa! Haw! Get up, Dick!”
    And Aunt Ellie, perhaps unable to resist, looking neither at Uncle Othy nor at me but speaking in her precise way as if to the swallows flying over the water, said, “Seem like Mistah Thripple having trouble with his Dick this mo ning!”
    I caught it—I was old enough by then—and was about to laugh, but Uncle Othy looked quickly at me and said, “Sh!”
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    From start to finish, I was pretty much Aunt Cordie’s boy. When she spoke of me to other people, she always called me “my boy,” tenderly and proudly, for I was her helper. She was on in years and somewhat slowed, but she was seldom idle. We went steadily from one thing to another, from can see to can’t see, and then on by lamplight, and I helped her with everything: keeping up the fires, maintaining the lamps, cooking, cleaning fish, dressing poultry, washing the dishes, washing the clothes, cleaning the house, working in the garden, putting up food for winter. Aunt Cordie was good company and always kind, but she saw to it that I did my work right. The best part of my education, and surely the most useful part, came from her.
    When Aunt Cordie didn’t need me, I would go down and hang about in the store and listen to the talk. For there was always talk. “More talk than business,” Uncle Othy would say. But perhaps he liked the talk as well as the business; at least he always took part, and he was seldom alone. Sometimes he would let me help a little in the store, or would recruit me for some farming job that required more than two hands. But Uncle Othy was persnickety in his ways and hard to please; I liked better to work with Aunt Cordie.

    I was Jonah Crow in