The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) Read Online Free PDF Page A

and such, he was taking his surgical bag.
    This appeared to put my mother out more than anything up to date.
    “Whatever for?” she said. “You can practice medicine right here in Louisville.”
    “I’m a doctor,” he replied with dignity. “I owe it to the Oath of Hippocrates to be prepared for any emergency.”
    The way it turned out, he was right, as he often was at the most unlikely times. Toward dusk our gear was assembled, and with the fading of the warm spring sun the spirits in our household sank a notch, too. I went out in the back yard to say goodbye to Sam, because they were going to take him to a farmer to keep, as soon as we were safely gone. It was cooler this evening, and Aunt Kitty had brought Mary in from the pen the minute the sunshine left. So I untied Sam and put him in the pen instead, and gave him two lumps of sugar, along with a chew of tobacco, which he enjoyed as much as some people do, though he was obliged to swallow the juice, being without any means to spit. I had tried to teach himmany’s the time, but somehow he never got the hang of it, and my father remarked that I might as well throw it up as a bad job, because a goat’s instincts, together with his machinery, were all for moving edibles in exactly the opposite direction.
    Going back to the house, I heard Aunt Kitty call, “You, boy,” and I stopped to see what she wanted, under the big crooked oak where I had my treehouse.
    “You fixin to go journeying, ain’t that so?”
    I replied that we were off to California to seek gold but that she mustn’t say so to anybody before we had left, not even to Man, who was her son that my mother had freed and worked across town in a foundry.
    “I talkin’ to
you
, you hear me?”
    “Yes, ma’am. I hear you.”
    “I gazed in the boiling pot—see some real bad things.”
    She had this black iron pot, with bleached catfish and chicken bones in the bottom, and she could tell the future from the way the bones jumped around and arranged themselves.
    “We’ll get rich in California,” I said. “I’ll buy you a nice present to bring back.”
    In the corners of her wrinkled-up eyes two large tears formed and rolled down slowly, then dried up for want of support.
    “You lookin’ at Aunt Kitty for the very last time on this yearth.”
    If I had felt unsettled before, I was miserable now, and I swallowed hard to keep from crying and throwing my arms around her skinny waist, as I had done dozens of times in crises.
    “Day you study to come back, I be in the ground, long gone to my good home.”
    I snuffled, half angrily, and said it wasn’t so, and then she held out her hand with something shiny in the palm. It was a buckeye, polished like old mahogany, with several marks burned in blackly by a poker or other iron tool. In the top there was fastened an eyelet and screw, and through this, for wearing round the neck, passed a fine-mesh chain.
    “Conjure man give me this charm, say you to keep it close by, and shine it to your cheek if need be.”
    I knew what a buckeye was, of course, but I didn’t realize they were useful for charms. Aunt Kitty had cures for nearly anything you could name, and when I was bad cut by a sickle, she stopped the bleeding with cobwebs and soot. When my father came home, he said it would have stopped anyhow, but I reckoned that was just professional jealousy.
    “It’s pretty,” I said. “What’s it do, Aunty?”
    “Time to find out when sperets come.”
    “But how do I know they’re coming?
When
do they come?”
    “Sperets work they mischief in the dreadful night.”
    “Well,” I said, “I’m usually asleep in the night. I don’t hardly wake up at all in the nighttime.”
    “Conjure man say this charm good for bears and such; you rub it, come a bear—hear?”
    “All right, Aunty, and if it doesn’t take hold, I’ll just go ahead and use the rifle.”
    “I’ll use a broom on
you
, give me any more sass.”
    She was the thinnest-skinned darky